Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences (2005) comes with much biographical baggage attached. It is a collection of short stories, but before you delve into the first the author sets you up with a Preface and a three-part Introduction. The book was conceived as a set of stories purportedly written by a group of real-life sixth form students – eleven stories, eleven writers – as penalty for acts of vandalism they once committed. There are portraits of the writers (as students in the 60s) and an update of their lives (as adults in the 90s).

The stories are set in Guyana, “a country which most of [the students] abandoned”, and the group committed the act of vandalism “at a sports club of the Imperial Bank on Friday 9^th July, just over a month after Independence”.

For readers who still live in Guyana, or who might be planning to abandon the country, the concept might prove more intriguing than the stories. Students at our prestige schools could consider this project (minus the vandalism) as part of their farewell rituals: strong sixth form male (or female) bonding, departure for institutions abroad, journal-keeping or blogs that record their progress around the world; and eventually stories sent back home “celebrating” their sixth form idealism, their failed or fulfilled adult lives.

The story tellers of this book are all old boys (and a few girls) of the old St Stanislaus College and the idea might have worked as a template to explore that venerable institution once run by Jesuit priests, the attitudes and assumptions built into the “education” they provided for the sons of the faithful and well-to-do. But McWatt slips away from this challenge to the imagination; his half-and-half stories offer few insights into why “abandonment” of Guyana became so abruptly the only choice for that student generation.

If you’re a Saints old boy (before the school admitted girls) the real-life and fictional names and references might stir some nostalgia. The pertinent question here is: do the stories, as works of fiction, stand on their own? Would a reader born in Lagos or Mumbai – and living now in Leeds, England, or Kingston, Jamaica – pick up this book and be informed? amused? disturbed?

All told, there are rewarding moments, in part because many of the stories deal with ghosts, disappearances and bacoos. (Which would seem predictable for young Guyanese students in the 60s abandoning the old country in a hurry, but in any event) McWatt writes with a priestly devotion that keeps you sufficiently engaged.

 His prose has the strolling decorum of old school Roy Heath; and a few of the stories remind you of Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute: the controlled pacing, the delineation of quaint characters, familiar but strange settings; though there’s a hint of high-toned propriety which might be McWatt’s own signature or perch.

“Alma Fordyce and The Bakoo” is set in a Georgetown Bar & Restaurant and is a droll tale about a naked bacoo in a glass jar whose penis suddenly comes alive to the astonishment of a spinster, Alma Fordyce. In “Uncle Umberto’s Slippers“, the footwear made out of old Firestone tyres disappears after the old man’s death. When they turn up again it seemed as if “in two and half years someone – or something – had put ten thousand miles” on their soles.

 “Two Boys Named Basil” is about mixed-race lads whose lives “seem to have been curiously and profoundly interrelated”. On a school trip climbing the Baracara Falls one Basil disappears leaving the other Basil torn with guilt; forty years later his face reappears Zelig-like in the background of a Guyanese tourist brochure picture.

If some of these mysterious goings-on remind you of Wilson Harris, the connection is not incidental. McWatt’s Guyana is by and large Harris’ metaphysical terrain; his settings are the Pomeroon, the Mazaruni, Kaiteur; characters experience “involuntary shudders” and “realize in a flash what they had known intuitively all along”. And “Afternoon without Tears” – a strong “tribute” to Guyana’s mythmaking genius – is so delightfully accessible, you could be forgiven for suspecting the writer is a Wilson Harris doppelganger.

This collection of stories might unwittingly give our literary tourists the impression there’s a constant flood of shape-shifting phenomena, as unfathomable as Harris’ prose, rushing back down our rivers from the Interior and breaking through seawalls of reason in Georgetown and on the coast. It’s reassuring to know that bacoo stories from Guyana are as common as UFO stories from North America or gravedigger stories from Nigeria. 

A startling inclusion at the end of one story, “The Tyranny of Influence”, are photos of four oil paintings by an Italian painter, Antonello Da Messina. The story is about a Guyanese painter. He stands before a blank canvas; he turns and sees a 15^th century painting in the background of which is a muddy stream of bleached skulls; he leans closer and is drawn inside the painting; he starts walking through the stream and finds himself mysteriously in Guyana’s Interior, wading through a shallow river and stepping over skulls strewn among the boulders.

For the Guyanese reader this is a clever start to an intriguing idea; the story carries you along on some Sci Fi intraterrestrial journey; but the streaming prose rarely rises above “cleverness”, and the glossy prints of the Antonello da Messina paintings stick out like postcards of jarring irrelevance sent back home by a self-confessed “lost” soul.

Several stories deal with sexual awakening. (One ’sex scene’ is set in the Pakaraimas; at the end of it the two former classmates, now grown men, discuss what did or didn’t happen.) The stories set in Georgetown take their time arousing and sustaining interest. McWatt’s prose draws on an ornate, well-stocked vocabulary, and you’re reminded he’s currently a professor in the English Department at UWI: “Liliana had been for years his only source of carnal pleasure…He had arranged her monthly stipend fourteen years ago…In recent years their assignations had diminished to a sad routine…Liliana glanced down at the limp flag of his withered penis, slumped disconsolately against the inner thigh of his left leg.” (“A Lovesong for Miss Lillian“). Saints Old boys from the 50s and 60s might find all this highly gripping stuff.

But what, you wonder, might sixth form students at St Stanislaus College 2005, holding fast to dreams on shaky stilts, take away after reading McWatt’s Suspended Sentences? They might be struck by the lyrical intensity of these sentences near the end of the book: “Over the years the country lurches from one calendrical totem of independent nationhood to another – celebrations of emancipation, Mashramani, the hallowed raising of the flag in memory of that first independence midnight – as we continue to bite each other like bugs in a stinking bed where for years, no warmblooded body of hope has come to lie…” (“The Celebration”). Plenty disheartening news and calendrical “omen” there to take any young reader’s breath away. Not much by way of lessons from the past for a new post-Independence order. More like the old school ‘plague on both your [political] houses’; then flight and abandonment.

Given our churning ethnic anxieties and our ever-shifting economic sands Suspended Sentences is not by any means the book about Guyana you simply must read. Nevertheless, there’s a darkly handsome cover, with a collage of Guyanese images; and the blemish-free typeset of Peepal Tree Press makes for a pleasant way to pass a Sunday afternoon, say, on a Berbice verandah or at an Essequibo hideaway. Any place where sound systems cannot reach you.

Impatient readers, still stuck with or pledged to Guyana, are best advised to bypass the Saints ol’ boys scaffolding. In short, if you prefer your reading pleasure straight, cut to the bacoo!

Book Reviewed:

Suspended Sentences: Mark Mc Watt: Peepal Tree Press,

England (2005)

 First posted March 24, 2000 on GuyanaCaribbeanpolitics.com                                                                                

Fabula Rasais Brian Chan’s second volume of poems. His first book, Thief With Leaf, won the Guyana prize in 1989. This collection is subtitled ‘a book’ and consists of 140 poems, some of them so short they strike the reader as apostrophes, “sketches of essences” as Chan puts it; or wallet snapshots of moods or domestic scenes as in To A Wife which begins: “Your obsession with your duty makes/you customs officer/to my love: I have nothing /to declare of it to you”.

The temptation is to flip through the snaps but that would be a mistake. Chan’s poems demand double takes or careful reading, for his tightly packed images have important things to say about the Guyana that is his homeland and the Canada that is his adopted home.

Guyanese, for instance, riven by racial suspicion, stirring and tasting the stew of majority/minority politics, might be intrigued by his Notions of a Nation, a poem that proffers 10 possible shapes. Here’s one definition of a nation:

                           A space other than the room we

                           Are sitting in, talking about the

                           Other we will never be but are.

And another:

                        A problem somehow to be solved

                          By our Achieving a Consensus

                          Then turning back to our unsolved lives

The poems are suffused with the notion that our differences are illusory. Transplanted to new Guiana worlds, enslaved and indentured, Africans and Indians are in essence kindred souls if only we would reach down and pull out of our entrails the corrosive myths and fears that set us apart. Chan’s poems are therefore dreams he would have us ‘read’ then awake from and recognise our interconnectedness. Nothing new about this, as readers of Wilson Harris might attest. The assertion will not find resonance with merchants of ethnic pride eager to sell us their readings of history, their war cries of cultural uniqueness. 

Some might point to Chan’s own ethnicity and smirk at the calibrated distance that lets him pick on absurdities, or stay away from disenchanted crowds burning tyres in the streets. Still, you can sense some of Martin Carter’s stoicism and anguish in his tight lines. Some of the poems come off as neat solipsistic tricks; so bent on not taking sides, they seem to offer only a sour turning inward. What they do reflect is impatience with what Chan sees as the same old jockeying for ethnic pride of place in a land of displaced peoples.

Surprisingly when he turns inward he shows us no individual fires of his own. The poem Desire suggests that even if one sheds group identity in Guyana personal ambition in Guyana might prove just as futile. Desire, he writes, “fuels itself/burning itself to ash/whose embers wait for the wind”.

You get the sense, though, that survival for this poet requires the freedom of the imagination to disengage from the gridlock of tensions and facile choices and join the world. Some of the titles and dedications offer clues to the alternative world Chan feels he must inhabit if his poetry is to thrive, not shrivel. It’s a world peopled with the jazz musicians Monk, Mingus, Sonny Stitt, as well as Sym-Ra Bhatti, Bernardo Bertolucci, friends in Europe, and “Medieval monks and other Modern men”. On the surface, cosmopolitan tastes.

It is tempting, then, to label his poems as self-insulated, escapist laments; easy to declare: he didn’t stick around like Martin Carter. But the poems are fuelled by a sense of Chan not having left home at all. He may be domiciled in Canada but as he reminds readers in his first collection of poems: “Chan, too much/of Guyana, is no longer ‘Guyanese’/though still in p.j.’s/long after teatime”.

If he must speak directly to ethnic conscripts anywhere getting ready to go to the polls or to the barricades he forgoes the dissolving metaphors, the dovetailing tendency of his lines for trajectories of clear statement. This from Vulgar Row might be his cautionary challenge to the comrades he never left behind:

                       Rather than devour each other to two tails

                         Like two whips, stand on opposite sides of a wall

                         And shout together

Book Reviewed:

Fabula Rasa:  Brian Chan: Peepal Tree Books, England(1994)

“Never such faith again; never such innocence.”

                                - Derek Walcott (from “Homage to Gregorias”)

 They’re 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.

A recent editorial (in Stabroek News) lamented the passing of famed souls – Peter D’Aguiar, Joseph Pollydore, Dr Balwant Singh – and wished for a handful of writers less bent on brilliant careers, with the dedication and resource to shape their lives into biographies or videos for our schools, for public education; building up some sort of national archive of human narrative; the retrospective glance encouraging introspection, then fresh visions of what anyone could achieve.

Public ignorance or indifference is what’s 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”. Granger’s words go beyond mere tribute to “an illustrious military career”. There is beneath the admiration and respect a friend’s urgent wish to remind a crime-distracted nation of the debt we owe to men like Harry Hinds. (It set me thinking of Harry’s 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 who’d 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 Jamaica’s 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.