Letticia Cosbert Miller

 It was my twelfth birthday. Silk cornflower blue pants with just a slight flare, a matching sleeveless blouse with lace detail, fastened by tiny matching silk upholstered buttons. Awkward as ever, I gently tug at my left ear and hold a smile towards the chocolate frosted yellow cake, my name embroidered in magenta sugar.  

A Guyanese birthday party is, I suppose, not unlike many other birthday parties. Cake, candles, happy birthday (the Stevie Wonder version), chow mein, cookup, curry chicken; Heineken, Newports, designated drivers. Some time between the cake and the end of the night, my dad quietly waved me over. I perched on his lap as he handed me a small box, poorly wrapped, its contents rattling. Beaming, I tore it open to reveal two tiny gold rings. One with a ruby (my birthstone), and another with tiny geometric etchings. My dad flashed a smile, his capped gold tooth glinting against his dark skin. 

Away those rings went, in a ballerina jewelry box, the kind that winds up and plays a song, a gift from my mother. I nestled them between my clustered grape earrings, an engraved bracelet nameplate from my first communion, and little studs I received shortly after my birth. Growing up, it was clear to me that gold was more than just adornment, that its symbolic value was greater than its unyielding sparkle, pliable atoms, and primordiality. I knew that each piece of gold gifted to me was made especially for me, that it exchanged a number of hands before arriving upon my earlobes, collarbone, spindly adolescent fingers. That this piece of metal marked me in the world as part of a community, even 4,000 miles removed from its origin.

I used to think my attraction to gold was egoistic, an exercise in vanity, a capitalist pursuance of beauty. I would take one look at a tray of gold pieces and become inexplicably enraptured, justifying my need to add yet another ring or bracelet to my collection. Any mention or glimpse of pieces since misplaced reopens old wounds. My father said that deja vu was a memory from a past life. What if the lure began with his mother stockpiling gold during the Cheddi Jagan and Ford Burnam conflict? What if her ancestors were among the Medieval Malians making their way to Mecca alongside the famed Mansa Musa? What if our relationship to gold is cellular, drafted 4,000 million years ago in the Greenstone belt, when Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and Guyana were linked by a sequence of rocks, speckled with nameless metals and artichoke hued minerals?

And what of the Orphic Gold tablets, delicate pieces of gold foil inscribed with instructions to traverse the underworld, tucked into graves throughout the ancient Greece and Rome? Or the Shabbat prayers etched onto gold leaf parchment of a Siddur? Or the ornate gold text against the indigo dyed pages of the celebrated Blue Qur’an? Sacred words embalmed in gold, rituals embedded in precious metal, a little girl’s fingers spangled with gold on her birthday. Precious and rare and beloved, value is not found in the gold, but the communion between us.

This essay was commissioned by the Aga Khan Museum in support of Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa, an exhibition addressing the scope of Saharan trade and the shared history of West Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe from the eighth to sixteenth centuries. Caravans of Gold is currently on view at the Aga Khan Museum, and will travel to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.