These Feminine Hands: Maymie DeMena Aiken and the Task of Jamaican Citizenship

• In Event: Citizens, Denizens and Exiles: Diasporic Subjects, Race and the State in Jamaica, Cuba and Britain

Abstract

In 1936, Maymie DeMena Aiken, former Officer in Charge of the American Field of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, became a naturalized Jamaican citizen. She relinquished her Nicaraguan citizenship, earned by birth, her Spanish Passport received as a result of her father’s ancestry and the conveniences of her life in New York City as a resident of the burgeoning streets of Harlem to take residence in an up and coming neighborhood in St. Andrew, Kingston Jamaica. Madame Aiken, as she became known joined the several civic organizations, ran for political office and helped foster social welfare changes on the island. She became a forerunner in the Jamaican independence movement and viewed herself not as an alien citizen, but as the creator of the land of her own re-birth.

This paper will examine the life of Madame Aiken upon her arrival in her adopted home of Jamaica as the wife of political activist Percival Aiken and former UNIA stalwart. Her political activism helped launch the career of one of the first women to win political office in Jamaica; helped break colorism barriers that were entrenched in the island’s culture and yet she remains one of the least celebrated of Jamaica’s pioneers.

Author

• Natanya Duncan, Lehigh University