Continuities & Missed Links
Never such faith again; never such innocence.
- Derek Walcott (from Homage to Gregorias)
Theyre passing away, those lean old men and women born in the 1920s & 1930s. Many still alive are probably shuttered in silence and horror at what has come to pass since the colonial days. Their simple faith in things like mercurochrome, winning the English Football Pools one day, life-supporting foods like yam and bhagi has been supplanted by sadness at the depravity of armed criminals these days; at the (psychological) barricades separating old African villages from old Indian villages; turning once places of pleasant boyhood memories into encampments of resentment and fear.
Public ignorance or indifference is whats distressing. The thought that these men and women have taken to their grave bodies of lived experience, the building blocks of their setbacks and success, which could be forever lost in those forests of history thickening with amnesia(as Derek Walcott puts it). But someone always rises to pay homage (as Walcott did in, for instance, The Bounty: paying homage to those gritty true souls of his birthplace, St Lucia.).
Take, for instance, the tribute by David Granger (Stabroek News, Feb 02, 2003) on Harry Hinds, whom he described as one of the founding fathers of the Guyana Defence Force. Grangers words go beyond mere tribute to an illustrious military career. There is beneath the admiration and respect a friends urgent wish to remind a crime-distracted nation of the debt we owe to men like Harry Hinds. (It set me thinking of Harrys father, Basil Hinds, whose passion for jazz music and the radio programme Just Jazz in the 60s opened my adolescent interest in that musical form.)
Others have scrambled to fill the void in public memory: Stanley Greaves in his tribute to the drummer Art Broomes (Stabroek News); letters to the Editor honouring the poet, Mahadai Das. And always the compulsion to set down for public record important fragments of experience that would otherwise just disappear, with no more to be said. These letters create ripples of understanding inside anyone whose life came even marginally in contact with the departed souls.
Like the letter sent to Stabroek News by a Victor J. Fitt: about his grandfather, Manoel Cypriani da Silva, who came from Madeira in the early 1900s: opened a small shop, bought property, built a school, a church, a culvert; engineered a project using empty boiler tubes from the sugar estates; did all this with hard labor, pragmatism, the university of commonsense.
And through each testimony, the same binding seam: these were men and women who must have looked out on their colonial inheritance and wondered what they could do with it. These were citizens with little interest in ethnic movements going back. Individuals whod found a profession or calling and wished to live like people anywhere, performing ordinary tasks with extraordinary passion and skill; confident in their homegrown ways, their heads filled not with Culture nor doctrines of envy & group entitlement, but ideas for reinventing themselves from scratch, for building new prosperities with the mud and mortar, the backbone and brain of their colonial circumstance.
Less distinguished, but just as heroic, were the efforts of so many self-made folk not blessed or cursed with much formal education; misled too often by ruling elites, ideologues and charlatans in shiny robes. The men liked their rum, betrayed their women and had fierce opinions on everything from Test cricket to American foreign policy. (Some became characters with names that still enchant village memory: Cato and Mary Bruk Iron). Not quite free of dissoluteness, prejudice, deceit, they were tough, ordinary folk who found something in society worth living for even as they struggled to escape its limitations.
My uncle, Tommy Greene, was one of them. For years he played the saxophone with the house band at the Palm Court. Jazz and popular music was his passion. He loved listening to Sonny Rollins. Back in the 60s he was certain an authentic Guyanese sound was emerging. I started listening to the bands of the day practicing in bottom houses, playing at nightclubs, singing on the radio. The Tradewinds, Johnny Braff, Sammy Baksh. Our music innovators, you might say, turning aside from imported models; searching within the heart of the nation for fresh arrangements of melody, rhythm, sentiment; finding a sound that bore little affinity to Jamaicas reggae or T/dad kaiso. Something different, indigenous to Guyana, was indeed emerging back then. Only folk with souls anchored in their native soil would have heard and recognised it.
