N.D.Williams’ Books

Digital publishing may have come at just the right time for Guyanese living in metropolitan cities. It offers one solution to the problem of what to do with all those stored-up village memories, those blissful “growing up” years in rural deprivation. Self-publishing allows migrants to cherish (or unburden) much psychic baggage as they put down roots elsewhere. The stuff of nostalgia could turn quickly into writer’s fodder.

So far the few digital books to appear seem products of leisure, rather than creative, activity. While other migrants – nose to the grindstone, the due date – are busy adapting old habits to new hardships, the writers appear conflicted about “home” but sufficiently solvent to “look back” across oceans.

They respond to surges of grey, diasporic sentiment, and an “alien” unease with new residency. “Journey” works as an appealing metaphor. The books they produce do not ask to be bundled with that body of work developed by overseas authors long ago, Naipaul & Lamming, or Mittelholzer & Wilson Harris, authors for whom writing became a vocation, and who by “looking back” gave us transformative ideas about the structures and behaviours they observed.

It takes craft, endurance & luck to hammer out a work of fiction, get it to publishers, get it past the publisher’s preferences, past editorial scrutiny. Self-published authors go around that filtration system. They worry less about style, “the reader” or issues outside self centres. You’ll find their digital products not on bookshelves, but by searching the worldwide web.

One example your search engine might unearth is A Journey of Promise (2006). The central character’s “journey” starts in a rural village called Promise; then moves on to “the rural suburbs of Guyana to urban city life in Georgetown , and thereon to London .” Born in London , author Holly Nurse “spent much of her childhood in Guyana ”, and graduated with a degree in English from the University of Surrey

The curious thing about A Journey of Promise is the bright confidence with which the author fabricates character and place. Part memory, part invention, with bloglike scraps tossed in, the book contains few real traces, or identifiable features of Guyana .

Earlier migrant authors burdened with issues of colonialism and identity could not escape the imperative to name places, to identify on the world map new landscapes beyond the canefields – places fertile with images, people and a language of significant human survival.

A Journey of Promise responds to different imperatives. With a click of the mouse, and using digital software that won’t question purpose or motive, Holly Nurse, who writes like a really nice person, creates an illusory world in which unpleasant issues in the past are erased.

In her imagination Guyana is the subject of sparkling rehabilitation. There is Promise, “a sleepy rural village” about 100 kilometres from the city, the All Seasons Church run by the Reverend Bruce, an annual Summer Fair, the High Dam Hospital; and a big white house with big iron gates and fierce Dobermans, where the country’s eligible bachelor, Troy Richman, lives.

The story is set in the 70s, but there’s just one reference to that decade’s hard times when the central character, Gillian Honey, visits the Coop Shop in the city. She observes fatigue on the faces of a crowd that has waited three hours for the delivery truck. But Gillian Honey’s family knows the Shop supervisor; they manage to secure sacks of rice without fatigue.

Gillian Honey, it should be mentioned, is a child of privilege and cross-cultural circumstance. “My dad was an English soldier…Mother was a hybrid, Caucasian, African and Native American.” These outsider origins leave Honey more concerned with departure requirements than “arrival” rituals; with personal, not group, development. “At age 17 years”, she tells us, “I learnt to ignore society’s polarized opinions.”

You start wondering: were there ever such extraordinary folk? did anyone really learn to ignore those bipolar years of disorder? ignore “Burnham”, the social misery of socialism, the deep ethnic wounds? What coastal village sheltered such self-absorbed lives? 

The book depicts no scenes of identity worry or tormented relationships. Far from the Sargasso seas of creole existence elsewhere, there is only the plainness of life along Guyana ’s coast. The story line is slender and unfolds at a “sleepy rural village” pace. Young narrator starts journey from her village, receives a “proper” education, survives a few romantic entanglements; goes to London, finds an English friend, trains as a nurse; then comes home to a reception reserved for achieving returnees. There is a happy ending – the narrator gets married and drives off with the groom in a Bentley to their new home on Mansion Hill.

In Guyana Gillian Honey displays an interest in our flora and fauna, in magpies and rhododendrons but not much else. In England she can’t help but notice how differently the English observe the Easter and Christmas seasons. Otherwise, she goes about her business, each day getting up, off to work, coming home. No disturbing street encounters, few pleasures (no sex, no thinking about sex); just this earmuffed, self-contained ordinariness of being.

Content to glide like this, Gillian Honey gives away very little of her inner life. Her personality may have sprung from what some regard as quintessential to the Guyanese persona: the active concealment or evasion of dark truths; a capacity for mythical thinking.

But, you might ask, why fuss over fiction of the flimsiest imagining, whose author makes no claim to literary seriousness? Completing her “journey” might be this author’s effort to cleanse her memory of harmful plaque, removing whatever threatens her equilibrium with the past. Readers may not recognize the Guyana Holly Nurse shares through publication; but a (self-published) book like A Journey of Promise could be enough to keep any diasporic resident “going” these days in cold, immigrant-hostile cities, trains to catch, old scratchy lives to remaster.

Self-publishing offers possibilities & rewards beyond that sense of accomplishment, doing things “my way”. Near the end of this narrative you might pause to consider, if only this digital writer had looked harder at the world around (and worked harder on sentences like, “Tiny lumps of clouds sailed over the silvery globe, escaping into oblivion.”) A Journey of Promise might have been a more thoughtful, engaging book.

In other words, had Holly Nurse, with a layer of irony, placed trust in the value of a weightless “not-belonging”, her character’s journey might have opened up deeper interiors of innocence and ravaged souls, providing bifocal insights & understanding for the folk who lived through Guyana of the 70s, beaten and embittered as never before; fearing so much back then, wanting to belong there so bad.

Book Reviewed: A Journey of Promise: Holly Nurse: iUniverse Inc. New York , 2006, 107 pgs.

Coming after publications of poetry and a novel, High House and Radio (1991) is a collection of Rooplall Monar’s short stories. If the back cover is a reliable guide readers are invited to follow the lives of characters who once occupied cramped living quarters on a Sugar Estate, and who now live independently in their own individual houses. These issues of upmoving transition might not have been the author’s intention, and the stories don’t quite succeed that way.

The stories come draped in the satins of Guyanese Indianness, and on that level they might intrigue those pursuers of groups and constituencies, the pollsters and formula-ready academics who like framing what we think about the plight of our favourite collectives. But collectives (ethnic or religious) are ice cages for the human spirit. You expect our writers to chip away at them so that individual fates might be freed, and minds be made open again to multiple points of view.

Monar’s fiction has encouraged snappy comparisons with writers working a similar literary terrain, Sam Selvon (in Ways of Sunlight, 1957) or V. S Naipaul (in Miguel Street, 1959). Those older writers brought to bear incisive scrutiny and humour on a mosaic of desperate living. After his remarkable achievement with Janjhat (1989), Monar in this collection creates a world that showcases the Indianness of his Indians. The stories, which are delivered with a stage performer’s excitement, don’t probe deeper than that; nor do they expand our understanding much beyond surface perceptions.

His Indian folk occupy a self-contained village on the coast (Annandale). They no longer work for the sugar estate, but lack of education has severely handicapped their life prospects. The old estate worker solidarities have started to crumble; anxieties and divisions develop sharper edge. “Over me dead body, no Hindu blood in me family“, a Muslim father shouts at his daughter who’s thinking of getting married. “Greed and selfishness invade people spirit“, another character says in a bitter-jokey rum shop mood.

Monar has set his own limits for these stories - intense creole talk and amusing vignettes that release ripples of laughter and recognition. Characters often get drunk and feel emboldened to perform reckless acts. Village tricksters use their wits to survive. And humour is at the level of the unemployed man whose day to day problems are compounded at night by his unhelpful wife whose bulky body and thick thighs make bedroom intimacy strenuous if not completely satisfying work.

On occasion black creoles from an adjacent village (Buxton) cross boundary lines: a woman, unhappy with her black obeahman, searching for a Hindu spiritman. Then there are “thiefing black people” who raid backyards for poultry; and idle black youth whose crude sexual comments as Indian girls walk by raise tension & alarm.

Tension swells into aggression as when politically generated violence sweeps across the land. A few stories (“Election Fever”) look at the volatile situations especially during Election time when Indians became random targets. Though Monar doesn’t write with an activist’s eye for Indian victims, the stories shed light on an underlying predicament. People may feel securely entrenched in their village culture, but that communal self-sufficiency sometimes half-blinds them to the world around. Hiding true selves behind masks of benign passivity, they are often naively surprised when violence bursts into their homes.  

Monar’s prose - “And don’t talk, them coolie people beetee yapping while one-two coolie women beating they chest dab dab: ‘O Bhagwan, is real murderation.’” - lies like thick-thick paragrass on every page. A character in this collection, in an effort to motivate the author, must have whispered in his ear, “Man, write if yuh writing”; and Monar with great exuberance proceeded to do that. Sometimes he appears to be flaunting his easy way with creole words. At other moments the narrator’s voice wears you down with its revved-up monotalk.

You sense the need for editorial trimming and control so that the language hews to the task of delineating character, providing insight. A worldwide Indian reader, drawn to the book’s Indianness, must slow down and tread gingerly through a word field like this: “But gat luck, she nah gat none big brodda in the house, else he mighta fat-eye she, cause nowadays, you cyan trust some buddy an sissy never mind them come-out pon one mumma-belly.”

So much of any book’s success depends on the cast of invented characters. Monar has called up folk from his own village experience; but Danky, Mule, Bansi, Bungu, Naimoon & Shairool don’t stay on in the imagination after you’ve closed the book. They behave in hilariously recognizable ways, arguing & cussing, scheming & daring, beating tassa drums & cooking mutton curry; and on drunken occasions they dish out “one proper cut-rass” to their wives.

(Back in the days, if you remember, the women screamed “Murda, murda, O Gawd, dis man gon kill me“, and eavesdropping neighbors minding their own business often shrugged as if a village woman screaming “murda” was nothing to get excited about.)

Still, when you consider, for instance, the Naipaul inventions (in Miguel Street) - Hat, Titus Hoyt, Bhakcu and Eddoes - Monar’s village folk sound as if they’d walked straight off a punt trench dam onto the author’s page. Which is saying, there is more to the process of character creation and the short story form than just rushing narrative and creole intensity.

In the Booker sugar estate days of the 60s (where these stories are set) when folk creativity helped stoke anticolonial fires, fiction like this gave cause for awards and celebration (In this collection one story is dedicated to our pioneer folklorist Wordsworth Mac Andrew). Monar’s fiction may have emerged too late for Guyana Prize awards, though his work received a special Judges’ Prize in 1987. And Janjhat will be valued as his remarkable breakthrough Guyanese novel.

But new territory is already laid out and waiting for Monar’s attention. Up from the estate canefields more of his Indians have moved through the villages to new uneasy residence in the city, where they dispense political patronage and must “look outward”, share residential space and intermingle with non-Indian creoles and strangers. Life for many in the city (depending on the rains, the visa hunt) feels saturated with sullen & resentful arse-catching. Add to that political skullduggery, abrasive public manners and flourishing careers in banditry & river piracy and there’s enough raw life to engage any writer’s ingenuity.

Edgar Mittelholzer and Jan Carew once worked like porknockers in similar areas of human scramble & depredation. They’ve left us enduring literary models.

Too besides, screams of “Murda, murda” in the city and surrounding villages these days are like “Businessman Shot Dead” headlines, matters for our nation to be gravely concerned about.

Imagine, then, literary forays into narco-crime fiction, or political-murder mysteries; or melodramas filled with the creole anguish of desperate G/town housewives. In this day and age, if serious literary fiction seems unwanted or must stay locked up overseas in institutions of higher reading, a second tier of well-crafted books could keep us pleasurably engaged. Writers with Monar’s storytelling talent would appear to have their work cut out for them.

Book Reviewed: High House and Radio: Rooplall Monar:  Peepal Tree Press, England, 1991, 176 pgs. (w.w)

“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.

First posted May 06, 2003 on Guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com

“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.                                                                                      

First posted Oct. 18, 2003 on GuyanaCaribbeanpolitics.com

“Is a hard life, ain’t it?”  Stevenson nodded. “But a man

 must follow his duty,” da Silva pontificated, “wherever

 it lead him, whether to something small or big… he must

 be whatever he got to be – unknown soldier or servant

 or saint.”

               – from Heartland, Wilson Harris

 The Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez recently published his autobiography Living To Tell The Tale.  In an extract from the book, reproduced in the UK Guardian, he writes of a band of brothers, a group of journalists with whom he spent a memorable night in the city of Barranquilla. “We had so many things in common,” Garcia Marquez says. “We were marked and disliked in certain quarters because of our independence, our irresistible vocations, a creative determination that elbowed its way forward, and a timidity that each one resolved in his own way.”  That evening spent in Barranquilla – “in the paradise of its brothels” – would instill in the young journalist a passion for literature and point the way to his fabulous future as a writer.

The Caribbean has had its groups of artists, most famously those writers who sailed for England on the Windrush in the 1950s – George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Edgar Mittelholzer. They would meet and encourage each other, elbowing their way forward through London’s cold streets; each man following his duty, holding fast to his appointed work. A focal point for their talents was the BBC program Caribbean Voices whose leading light Henry Swanzy would encourage contributions from Vidia Naipaul and Andrew Salkey among others.

 (Curiously there was no C/bean band of sisters back then. Jean Rhys, the most celebrated writer of that period, must have beaten a lonely path from the Caribbean to Europe. She might have been comforted (or unmoved) by the mushrooms of feminist scholarship decades later; women groups offering the support of theory and sympathetic interpretations of her fiction.)

 Artists groups like these, without political, separatist or tribal agendas, are free-forming, with a fierce commitment to art, literature, (“New World”) intellectual growth, human development. They come and go with the times; they respond to a spiritual vacuum in any society; the dearth of ideas; the impoverishment of the imagination.

 In the 1940s AJ Seymour in founding Kyk-Over-Al was responding to a need to provide a forum or haven for “the ablest minds in the country”. It attracted and nurtured the talents of Martin Carter, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew. Their role as writers was pretty much prescribed by the anti-colonial struggle: disabusing the psyche of self-devaluing habits, clearing the ground for national ownership, nurturing love, curiosity and faith in our landscape. (Some of this ground-clearing continues today in the writings of Ian McDonald.)

 A little-known post-Independence group did emerge in Guyana, a generation of writers and artists that sustained each other in the rancorous 70s and has gone on to make its mark in the world. Victor Davson, Brian Chan, Janice Lowe, Terence Roberts, John Agard formed the nucleus of that group. What bound them together was a preoccupation with the future of a newly Independent Guyana. Their work was experimental, not nostalgic, engaged with the contemporary, not history-bound. This generation inherited the energy and vision of Seymour, Burrowes, Harris, Denis and Aubrey Williams, Carew; it was acutely aware of its predecessors’ ground-clearing work.  

 Much of their time was spent in viewing, reading or discussing their work. Seymour was considered determined but bowtie-stodgy; Aubrey Williams astonishing for his use of Amerindian motifs; Mittelholzer had written, in My Bones and My Flute, the scariest piece of Guyanese horror fiction to date. They were all revered, argued over and loved.

 The Guyana of the 70s – that period marked by “a crossfire of relationships”, when life hinged so much on Party favor or disfavour – exerted fierce pressure on their integrity as artists. Somehow the group held together, pursuing in poems and paintings their imaginings of Guyana as it might be in the future. There was great interest in the all-encompassing political vision of Walter Rodney, and dismay at the institutions of repressive government that emerged at the time. Anxious minds questioned whether national unity could be forged or forced using a model borrowed from Cuba. The socialist Government of the day, it seemed, was attempting just that.

 Unlike Garcia Marquez whose support for Fidel’s revolution remains undiminished, individual artists felt there was a need here, first, for a careful shoring up of our nation’s fragile foundations. Above all a climate of creative and intellectual freedom; a ceasefire of relationships after the flag-lowering, flag-raising ceremonies; sensitivity to the prejudices and fears native to all of us at that turning point in history. Just as one respects the tides and undercurrents as one navigates the mighty Essequibo, one had to be patient with new power, respect the flow and flowering of diverse being in the nation.

 Two writers who served as spiritual icons for the group were Wilson Harris and Martin Carter. Harris’ fiction towered over the cultural landscape. His slim novels came rapidly one after the other in the 60s – Palace of the Peacock, Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour, The Secret Ladder. They offered density, substrata of meanings; they urged readers to turn their backs on coastal hubris, plunge into their interiors; they laid bare the state of Guyana’s “complex hunger” and warned that the chasm between race and race, man and woman could not be easily subsumed in the debased language of Party politics.

 Harris’ work became the centre of reference. The assertion of the narrator in Palace – “Somebody must demonstrate the unity of being.” – was like a mantra for young artists. His uncanny way of yoking words and images somehow sparked fresh illuminations. Back then you felt lost in the prose but somehow understood what he was saying. He too was clearing new ground. 

 Despite the prisonlike hardships of the 70s, poems and paintings from the group seemed determined to search for ideas of human development, to open a conduit of creative thought between Guyana and the world. Always forward and outward looking, firmly rooted in the tradition of Seymour, Carter and Harris, keenly aware of the work of other fine artists like Stanley Greaves, Ron Savoury and Donald Locke, this group never jettisoned its vocation.

 There were evenings of intense talk which revealed their separate preoccupations, quirks of passions: Roberts would argue that Faulkner was the greatest writer America ever produced, and how he’d come across the border-crossing prose of a new writer, Cormac McCarthy. Chan who loved the jazz piano was in those days absorbed in the fiction of the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar (he would ask us, in between cigarettes and XM, to consider the viewpoint of Oliviera in Hopscotch: “…an awful lot of people would set themselves up in a supposed unity of person which was nothing but a linguistic unity and a premature sclerosis of character.”)  And there was Agard’s fascination with the African motifs in the work of Berbice sculptor Philip Moore, his unifying theory of “Godmanliness”.

  The problems of Guyana’s “complex hunger” remain. These days proposals for social development are as plentiful as channa:  ethnic separatism, power sharing, racial quotas; “models of aloof security”; cultural inbreeding, ancestral dressing. Other manifestations of “superstitious unreasonableness”. Backtrack, law breaking, rasta.  

 Artist groups grow old, grow weary of watching out for each other’s souls; bonds that once sustained eventually sever. Individual experience, temperament, “the panic of associations” prompt ruptures and permanent disagreements. That artist group of the 70s, like its Caribbean forerunners on the SS Windrush in the 50s, moved away from Guyana. Though not as prolific as the first wave of writers (perhaps not as “duty” driven) it has achieved some measure of success and recognition: books of poems or novels have found publishers; extraordinary paintings are now on display in homes and galleries around the world.

 John Agard (who did not return home) has established a reputation as a poet-performer and children’s writer in England. Victor Davson is co-founder of Aljira, A Center For Contemporary Art, in New Jersey. (An exhibition of his paintings and drawings now in Allenton, Pennsylvania, titled “Bad Cow Comin’”, draws significantly on his experience growing up in Guyana)

 Meanwhile one hears of new artist groups in Guyana (like “The Janus Young Writers Guild”, founded in the late 90s) which continue to define and defend the values that would keep us all human, civil and productive; grappling too, one imagines, with the old twinned colonial memory (Jagan-Burnham).  

 And hanging by a spider’s thread to that mysterious longing that runs like a river through the ground-clearing work of the Seymours and Rodneys and Harrises back to our native ancestors; to that spirit you hear in the living voices of our school children when they sing with bright innocence “My Guyana, Eldorado”.

Vincent Roth: A Life in Guyana: Vols 1 & 2

For the general readerthe remarks on the back cover of the 1^st volume of these books moreor less sums up the extraordinary life of its subject: “As an eighteen year old Vincent Roth arrived in British Guiana in 1907to join his father, who was a Government Medical Officer and Magistrate. By thetime he left for Barbadosin 1964, Roth had spent thirty years in the interior working as asurveyor and magistrate until blackwater fever nearly killed him. Thereafter hecontributed immensely to the development of Guyana as a journalist, naturalist, historian,rebuilder of the national museum and founder of the zoo in the BotanicalGardens.”

Having read that, and with expanded awareness, it would be nice to stop by the museum, visit the zoo in the Botanical Gardens, ponder the decrepit state of once proudly kept habitats (consider, too, how with the dismantling of colonial hegemony “horticulture” has gone the way of discarded practices, rules and rituals; in its place habits of neglect and degradation of public spaces, and our interminable preoccupation with showcase “Culture” as the panacea for ethnic identity issues); then ask yourself: do I really need to know more about this remarkable man from the British Guiana days?

 If you’re a journalist, or spare-time naturalist, historian or just a builder you might be drawn; but a word of caution. Both volumes – culled, it appears, by the editor from a staggering twelve volumes! – total 600+ pages. It makes for grindingly slow reading, the way you had to sit or stretch out as the R.H. Carr thread its way upriver from Georgetown to Linden, the water muddy brown, the bush always green. In Roth’s case the language feels at times superannuated, the journey often tedious.

 A bookstore browser in G/town opening Volume 1 at random might come across this: “Dad and I settled down to our new life in Marlborough. We would get up and do our club exercises and practice our step dancing. I would then continue with my German and shorthand and after read a chapter or two of Telemarque or Im Thurm’s Among the Indians of Guiana. I would then spend the rest of the day butterfly or insect hunting.”      (Vol 1: p. 81)

 Not fully persuaded, flip the pages and there is this: “Another of the farmers in the Coolie Quarter of the ArukaRiverwas Abdul Ghani. He was a Sikh and the mastermind of all East Indians in the area. He used to lend money to the other East Indians and close down on them when they could not meet their indebtedness. As a result he gradually acquired several tracts of land all over the Aruka district. He also went by the name of Phagoo and once told me how this came about. Phagoo was his shipmate’s name on the voyage from India, but he died shortly after his arrival in the Colony. Ghani boasted that although he had come to the Colony as an indentured labourer to a sugar estate, he had never done one day’s work in the cane fields, having absconded as soon as he arrived and got away to the North West where he took Phagoo’s name”. (Vol 1: p.185)

 (At this point I for one would consider purchasing Volume 1, intrigued with the story of Phagoo, hoping to find more narrative about runaways like Phagoo, already conceiving a film titled A House for Mr. Phagoo, about an indentured labourer’s godfatherlike rise from dhoti to riches in colonial Guiana.)

 Further on you come across this: “During the morning, the distant beating of drums was heard as the masqueraders went about the village, arriving at the Government Compound at about ten o’clock. They consisted of a group of some dozen and a half Negroes, dressed in gaudy yellow and red costumes of every description, prancing and dancing about, and followed by a party of interested but naked Caribs.” (Vol 1: p. 238)

 The first volume is not all about runaway East Indians and prancing Negroes. In fact much of its 300+ pages consists of passages like this: “Back in Bartica I met J.N. Humphreys, my predecessor at Christianburg and Arakaka, who was now accountant at the Penal Settlement and Bartica Magistrates’ Clerk. He invited me over to the Settlement and after Court we went with Walter King, the Magistrate and Superintendent, in his launch. King asked Humphreys to bring me along to tea later on. Humphreys took me to the Public Officers quarters, the finest in the Colony, most luxuriously furnished, with even a billiard table.” (Vol 1: p. 303)

 Names of people long gone but embedded in our national memory – Van Sluytman, McTurk, Fiedtkou, Phang, Griffiths, Drepaul, Correia, Christiani, Van Sertima (“a dear old fussy Dutch lady”), Prem Das (“an East Indian catechist”), The Zulu (“an enormous African lady who washed and did other favours”) – places in the Interior that might have changed little, locals not all as fascinating as Phagoo, they fill-to-overflow the pages of Roth’s journals. Turn a page and Roth is meeting someone new, setting off somewhere in terra incognita; or retiring at night under a mosquito net to update his observations.

 If our homegrown naturalists, historians or land surveyors can stay the course, they will be asked to view our colonial landscape through an outsider’s eyes (being patient with Roth’s old, old-millennium words for Africans and Indians). The arid, bush-clearing prose, the careful delineation of features, accuracy of dates, measurements, time of departure, place of embarkation, race of inhabitants – page after page of all this “seeing” could be at times mind-numbing.

 But Roth offers ‘data’ that with the appropriate analytical skills might add to our understanding of the early rock formations of our nationhood, the predilections and capacities developed in Guyanese through colonial necessity. Wherever they settled and worked, off the sugar plantations or in the gold fields, they were tough, resilient folk, alert to opportunity after emancipation. Roth’s observations on language, superstition, the management of our land resources, his perspective on how our colonial society worked might prove of more than passing interest to academics as might his references to polygamy among the Carib Indians, his comments on black/white race relations in the 1920s, Indian/African relations in the 1930s and descriptions of Bartica in its boomtown days.

 Young Roth himself in this first volume comes across as a benign colonial administrator, different in some ways – he shows great interest in local customs – carrying out his duties as Warden or land surveyor without fear or favour; driven less by a sense of ‘imperial’ mission; a man of curiosity and ideas for improving life in a strange country. Much like your genial VSO from England today. He felt quite at home among the governing elite (he was secretary of the Overseas Club) dressing up “in the garb of civilization” for formal dinners; at the same time he was ready to get frisky with the natives if the occasion presented itself.

 In Chapter XI Roth is in the Wape area of the Cuyuni. He’s drawn to the sound of merriment at a dance hall where Carib Indians are dipping into huge jars of liquor and dancing in the moonlight to the sounds of fiddlers and drums. He joins them and follows them conga line fashion to another camp to continue the fete, the diarist in his head recording every shadow and movement even as he samples the liquor and dances until his knees hurt.

 (For the reader still curious about what happened to that irrepressible runaway Sikh, Phagoo, when Roth meets up with him again Phagoo is getting married for the second time. His new bride is a Nurse Menezes. “Ghani proudly showed me the wedding ring which he carried about wrapped up in a piece of tissue paper in his trouser pocket. He had to do this, he said, for fear lest his East Indian concubine who was still in the house, should get hold of it and throw it in the river.” Vol 1. p. 248)

 Volume I (1889-1923) has most of young Roth’s discovery and mapping of Guiana’s topography. It also details his first encounters with swarms of marabuntas, labba pepperpot, the healing powers of the piaiman, the Arawak language; and close encounters with tuberculosis and the land camoodi. If there were any rumblings of discontent among the colonized during that period Roth didn’t make note of them.

 Volume 2 (1923-1935) begins on a reflective note. Roth admits to a little ‘cynicism’ about his journal keeping; he continues anyway for like his father he has an eye on future publication. All is not smooth traveling. There are grumblings among the colonials. While Roth is out in the gold fields arbitrating land issues and enforcing laws that address the distractions to pork knockers and porkknockery caused by ‘ladies of easy virtue’, back in Georgetown members of the Legislative Council raise questions about his competence as an itinerant magistrate and dispute some of his judgments. He finds an ally in the then Governor Sir Edward Denham who is impressed with Roth’s work and invites him to Government House.

 Otherwise it’s more of the same: metronomic accounts of trips – to the Courantyne, the North West, Bartica-Potaro, Kaieteur, back to the North West – camps struck in the forest, snakes killed on the trail, land surveyed, rivers crossed, reunions with family, snapshots of passing scenes (“Presently we approached a small group of East Indian women, who, to my horror, were in the act of removing their skirts preparatory to crossing the trench. Fortunately they saw me in time to stop their disrobing until I had passed. Glancing back a minute later I saw them waist deep in the middle of the trench heading for the opposite bank.” Vol. 2: p. 221)

 The writing is more anecdotal and interspersed with amusing ‘yarns’. Roth, still the tireless, well-intentioned administrator, has lost some of the Overseas Club exclusivity of the 1^st volume. He is thoroughly familiar now with the landscape and its racially diverse inhabitants. He meets other famous expatriates, like Dr Giglioli. The inventory of names swells (though as yet there’s no mention of Cheddi Jagan or Forbes Burnham). And like many well-appointed Guyanese back then wanting to leave the country but relocate not too far, when his moment of decision came he chose Barbados.

 Rarely do we get a sense of what Guyanese thought and felt about their transplanted existence, so systematically does Roth set about performing his duties, imposing order on unacceptable situations, taking measurement, filing his official report, then heading back to the steamer at the stelling or the bateau on the river for the next trip. (You wonder, though: after so many years of intrepid travel the length and breadth of Guiana, wasn’t there one epiphanic moment, one intense encounter that changed Roth’s perspective on life a little, if not forever? So much, it seems, remained silently contained inside him.)

 Editor Michael Bennett has included an appendix as well as sketches Roth made of ‘shapely’ Guyanese women and mountains (he has an exotic eye for colour and contour). While these volumes will no doubt find their place on library shelves, they aren’t likely to move the reader to pick up and travel anywhere in the Interior if only to see if what was once there is still there. For that you need the incandescent fiction of Wilson Harris.

 For all we know Harris the land surveyor might have crossed paths with Roth in many of these regions. Harris mixed his memories with dreams & imagination to construct highly original works of fiction using image-enriched though uncompromisingly difficult prose (making it hard, therefore, for readers outside academe to raise questions about what he’s saying in his novels). The mixed-race descendants of Phagoo, if they haven’t backtracked to NY city, might probably be found in a community of brooding souls somewhere by the rivers of Heartland or Tumatumari.

 Roth the outsider (re)built our museum and left a faithful record in linear prose of what he saw as he travelled. One can’t help but admire the absorbed way he strikes a balance between his administrative duties and his journal writing, keeping it up through all those years. His books were written, Roth said, “for the possible interest and amusement of surviving friends” and there are times – blocks of pages, whole chapters – when the Guyanese reader might feel distinctly the outsider: written about, though not necessarily intended as Roth’s readers.

 (A footnote: Roth’s last encounter with the aforementioned Phagoo is recorded thus: “The last place I visited was the storeroom where the storeroom’s convict assistant turned out to be my old acquaintance, Abdul Ghani, once a prosperous shopkeeper and coffee grower on the ArukaRiver. He earned his sentence for stealing a sheep. This was I believe, his third term in prison for stealing.” (Vol 1: p. 304) Roth offers no clues to the sudden loss of fortune of ‘his old acquaintance’. As was his wont he states the plain facts and moves on. What really happened to Phagoo, his mysterious rise and fall from prosperity as he struggled to reinvent himself, is left to the Guyanese imagination.)

 Books Reviewed:
Vincent Roth: A Life in Guyana: Volume 1: A Young Man’s Journey, 1889 – 1923:  ed Michael Bennett (Peepal Tree Press, England, 2003)

 Vincent Roth: A Life in Guyana: Volume 2: The Later Years, 1923 – 35: ed Michael Bennett (Peepal Tree Press, England, 2003)

He lived for a time in Antigua before moving to the USA where he lives in New York. His works, from the short stories of The Crying of Rainbirds (1992), the novel, The Silence of Islands (1994), the two novellas ‘My Planet of Ras’ and ‘What Happening There, Prash’ in Prash and Ras (1997), to the short stories in Julie Mango (2003), all published by Peepal Tree, explore both an island and a diasporic experience.

 Last Pioneer:Emanuel “Sonny” Chan-A-Sue (1912-2004)

 “Emanuel Alphonsus Chan-A-Sue, MS,businessman of Mabaruma settlement, died on 18 December, aged 91.”  (StabroekNews, 1/9/05)

 The newspaper article (writtensomewhat perfunctorily, but these are different, cynical times in our flood-stressedcity) goes on to reveal facts I had only dimly understood about the man:

 He was “the grandson of one of the Chinese families who, along with a motleycrowd of African, Indian and European fortune seekers, swarmed into the newdistrict already inhabited by the indigenous Arawak, Carib and Warrau.”

“These newcomers pioneered farming, logging, mining, balata-bleeding and trading. In their wake came the police, priests (mainly of the Roman Catholic Church) and officials of the central government.”

 “Most of his long life was spent in Mabaruma where, by age 16, he was fully involved in working in the family business, rarely traveling to Georgetownand never leaving the country. From his enterprising parents, Emanuel junior inherited a thriving general store and a flourishing farm.”

 “A practical man, he qualified in electrical engineering through correspondence courses and built a wind-charger to generate power.”

 “He never displayed an overt interest in partisan politics or divulged his personal views. In fact, he allowed his shop front to be used as the settlement’s neutral “speakers’ corner” from which activists of all parties could campaign…He never sat on committees and councils, nor held public office, nor funded community organizations.”

 “He passed his evenings entertaining officials, residents and visitors who, most likely, were his best customers. Using his own funds, he built something of a social centre where movies were shown, dances were held and games played.”

 Along with a young English VSO, I was one of those “visitors” he once entertained. (This was back in the 60s when despite fratricidal spasms Guyanese were by and large generous, honest folk.) We sat in his unvarnished living room, it was after a wonderful dinner, and we talked about the ways of the world. We might have been visitors from a distant continent bringing him news about amusing people, amazing events. When he listened he had (what Harris in The Whole Armour describes as) “Chinese eyes, emotionless in expression”; when he spoke his voice was sharp and curious.

 I showed up at one of his organized “dances”. The crowd was largely Amerindian. They stood backs to the wall silent and serious-faced, ready to dance but only if someone stepped up and asked. The girls danced stiffly and barely smiled if you said something you considered funny. The music might have been smuggled across the border from Venezuela, fast-paced merengues driven by rich horns and accordion; and in between American Country love songs.

 I have a faint recollection of one of those “partisan political” meetings outside Mr. Chan-A-Sue’s store front: people on the river bank listening with folded arms, or sitting (not many) in corials as in cars at a drive-in cinema and slipping away in the dark when the speakers became tiresome.

 In the mornings you’d wake up on Mabaruma Hill and wonder: what bird makes those sounds? how do the tides decide they’ve had enough one way and must return? Then the buzz from Mr. Chan-A-Sue’s sawmill reminded you there was work to be done. I don’t recall ever seeing him actively supervising. (You could think of him as the antithesis to Fenwick, the conflicted taskmaster of a querulous Canje river crew in Harris’ The Secret Ladder,) His workers knew what he wanted done; they trusted and believed in him. They were Amerindian and might have been Arawak, Carib or Warrau, I couldn’t tell. They had to be some of the friendliest folk I’d ever met. One of them invited me to his home and introduced his wife and children. I learned how to hunt crabs when the tide was low.

 One Saturday night with not much to do we bought beers from Mr. Chan-A-Sue’s store and got drunk. The Amerindians sang songs and laughed. I sang songs and vomited.

 My visits to the Northwest District took place during the month of August. It was good to get away from “the sweaty Guyanacoast”. You had to take a T&HD steamer which left round about 1 pm, sometimes hours later. The first trip I thought would have been as uneventful and smooth as crossing the Demerara. By 4 o’clock the waters were choppy. By nightfall my stomach was roiling.

 I prayed the steamer captain knew what he was doing. We had steamed out into the Atlantic, and we were supposed to reach some point (the Waini) then make a turn and head for Morawhanna. We traveled all night. I found it impossible to sleep. The Amerindians hitched up their hammocks and settled in for the ride. I found a spot on the open deck and stretched out, staring up at a star filled sky, fighting back seasickness, ocean spume speckling my face. I might have dozed off just before dawn.

 Nothing beats coming into Morawhanna at the end of the journey: the steamer’s horn announcing its arrival, the morning light golden after long dark hours at sea; the river placid, the forest soft green and overhanging, and the faces at the stelling staring as if they’d been waiting all night, all week for the steamer with its fresh store supplies and its sea-tossed souls and were now relieved to see everyone. The return trip to Georgetown wasn’t half as exciting.

 I didn’t have many conversations with Mr. Chan-A-Sue. He was a busy man, with businesses to run. I was a “visitor” in search of some Waini-point turn, some significant change in my life. I would sit on the jetty outside his store and watch the river tides and the river traffic; I’d wave back to complete strangers in corials, go swimming at high tide; go for long walks in the forest and wonder at the unseen birds, patterns of sunlight streaming through the trees, strange, wild plants; tense at times like those brooding folk in Harris’ fiction; and ready to “crack the egg [of G/town] and fly”.

 So much has changed in the North West District, though it’s possible that beneath all the “development” not much has changed at all. I think I discovered how absurd that (Georgetown) sense of “self importance” was. I’ve found some bush modes of “survival” work well in our digital world. I learnt, too, how important it is to “watch” closely everything happening around you. (Years later in the 1970s I would read Carlos Castaneda, his Journey To Ixtlan and A Separate Reality, in which he talks bewitchingly about “the awesome, mysterious world” and “places of power”; and it occurred to me that in his own slippery dreaming way Castaneda, too, might have “visited”  the Mabaruma of the 60s.)

 A generation of students from St Stanislaus College back in those days will remember Mr. Chan-A-Sue. They came on Boy Scout trips and camped out at the Mabaruma Catholic school. A fine scouting time was had by everyone.

 But those were days of innocence and unfailingly blue skies – before “the jailbreak”, before the current floods. You’d have been touched by Mr. Chan-A-Sue’s extraordinary kindness, by the Mabaruma that he made home all these years and the people who knew him and worked for him. I feel fortunate to have visited that place, fortunate to have met one of the great Guyanese pioneers.

 O, lucky man! To have lived to speckled-ripe years, to have found a place in the world that gave your life not “power” but such clear purpose! O, generous soul! Who could live a life like yours again?