N.D.Williams' Books

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".

 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.

“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.