Kyk-over-Al

June_1988 ( .pdf )

KYK-
OVER-'
AL 38
p 38
JUNE, 1988
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FRIENDS OF KYK-OVER-AL


A great many individuals and organizations have contributed to the
success of Kyk-Over-Al since it was relaunched in December, 1984. We
owe a very special debt of appreciation to the following for their support
of this issue No. 38 and the forthcoming issue No. 39. Their vigorous
assistance so readily offered in strengthening an important part of
Guyana's cultural tradition deserves the thanks of the whole community.

Associated Industries
Banks D.I. H.
Bauxite Industry Development Company
C. Czamikow Inc. (New York)
C.K. Newbridge (Guyana)
T. Geddes Grant
Guyana Fertilizer
Guyana Liquor Corporation
Guyana National Cooperative Bank
Guyana National Trading Corporation
Guyana Pharmaceutical Corporation
Guyana Resource Corporation
Guyana Stores
Guyana Sugar Corporation
Guyana and Trinidad Mutual Insurance
Hand-in-Hand Mutual Fire Insurance
Laparkan (Agent for Canon Copiers and Fax Machines)
National Bank of Industry and Commerce
Republic Bank
Sir Shridath Ramphal (Commonwealth Secretary General)

The cost of printing and distributing a literary magazine is very heavy.
Please help us to strengthen Kyk-Over-Al by sending your subscriptions
to either of the Joint Editors as follows:
A.J. SEYMOUR, 23 North Rd, Bourda, Georgetown, Guyana
IAN McDONALD, c/o GUYSUCO, 22 Church St, Georgetown, Guyana

In the U.K. please apply to:
F.H. THOMASSON, 9, Webster Close, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 4NJ

Subscriptions per issue (including postage):
G$40 EC$15 4 US$7

The Editors would welcome the submission of poems, 'short stories,
articles and reviews to consider for publication. Publication of course
cannot be guaranteed and because of expense it will not be possible to
return manuscripts. Submissions may be accompanied by illustrations
and photographs of authors, suitable for black-and- white reproduction.

Copyright 1988. No reproduction by any means, except for short
extracts for review purposes, without permission of the Editors.







3?

KYK 38 Edited by A.J. Seymour and lan McDonald


JUNE 1988

TABLE OF CONTENTS


150 Anniversary of East Indians in Guy;
Across the Editors' Desk
Six Mythical Figures of Guyana
The Guyana Prize
Feature Address: "Trophy and
Catastrophe"
Comments Arising from the Prize
Award
Poetry
Hamlet Prince of Darkness
Woodbine
Intercity Dub for Jean
Visit
Plus
Exeunt
The Satin Princess
"Hangman" Cory
Carnival Flag Woman
Paradise
For Maria de Borges
Folk Song
To the Family Home Awaiting Repair
Manhattan Noonday
Fiction and Articles
Street Loving, Loving Streets
Cookman
Wiltshire Car Dead-
Nature Study
Annie
Reviews
'The Infinite Rehearsal" by
Wilson Harris
"Caribbean Theatre" by Ken Corsbie
Contributors


na

Harold Bascom


Gordon Rohlehr

Wilson Harris

Michael Gilkes
Michael Gilkes
Jane King Hippolyte
Sasenarine Persaud
Pam Mordecai
Pam Mordecai
Ian McDonald
Ian McDonald
Cecil Gray
Tony Kellman
Mahadal Das
A.J. Seymour
A.J. Seymour
McDonald Dash

Hemraj Muniram
Rooplal Monar
Ras Michael
John Gilmore
Gillian Howie


Michael Gilkes
Al Creighton







150th ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARRIVAL OF EAST INDIANS
IN GUYANA

Celebration by the Guyana Commemoration Commission

Kyk-Over-Al is happy to join the Guyana Commemoration
Commission in observing the 150th Anniversary of the Arrival of East
Indians in Guyana. This magazine has played its part over the years in
publishing the work of Caribbean writers of East Indian origin and in
recording East Indian strands in the pattern of Guyanese and West
Indian cultural life.

A number of special events have been organised to mark this
significant anniversary in May. These include a 3-day conference at the
Pegasus Hotel; Book, Photographic, and other Exhibitions; and a variety
of cultural activities and displays. India will be sending a large party of
artistes, academics, and other representatives to participate in the
celebration. A number of publications to mark the 150th Anniversary are
being produced, including a reprint of Peter Ruhoman's "History of East
Indians in Guyana" and a new anthology of poetry and prose.

East Indians, surviving and rising above indenture, as Africans
survived and rose above slavery, have become an important part of our
social, economic and cultural mosaic. Of the nearly 5 million people of the
Commonwealth Caribbean East Indians comprise over 20 per cent of the
population. Their contribution to literature, scholarship, and art in
Guyana and the whole region is of great and growing importance. Their
presence in politics, trade unions, business, art, religion, architecture,
dress and customs has added immeasurably to the richness of Carib-
bean culture.

At the same time, the lives and attitudes of East Indians in their
new home-land have been significantly transformed. The occasion of the
150th Anniversary of their arrival will provide a valuable opportunity to
examine the rich contribution made by East Indians and assess their
transformed presence within the West Indian society and culture.




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A literary highlight for the
whole region was the Guyana
Prize Awards ceremony which
took place at the National Cultural
Centre in Georgetown on Decem-
ber 8th 1987. In this issue of Kyk
we carry both Dr Gordon
Rohlehr's outstanding feature
address and Wilson Harris's
deeply considered thoughts on the
occasion. At the ceremony Presi-
dent Desmond Hoyte made the
awards to the prizewinners. It
was, the President said later, an
occasion "typically Guyanese,
dignified yet full of liveliness and
humour". He also saw it becoming
"an important landmark in our
national evolution". The editors of
Kyk agree with that. In a radio
programme aired on the day itself
this view was expressed:
'Tonight the winners of the
first-ever Guyana Prize will be an-
nounced and the awards will be
presented to the prizewinners. A
sense of history tells us that this is
a moment that will be treasured in
the future annals of Guyana and
the wider West Indies. Long after
anniversaries which now seem
important have been forgotten the
first awards of the Guyana Prize
will be remembered.
This is the first time in
Guyana and the English-speaking
West Indies that literature and
writers have been given such sub-
stantial recognition in their own
homeland. The awards them-
selves are of significant value but,
more than that, the Guyana Prize,
and the publicity and ceremonies
which surround it, proclaim the
vital role which writers have


played and should play in society.
Other countries have greatly
honoured our writers. Now we
begin to honour them ourselves.
President Hoyte, in announcing
the Prize in February, summed up
the intention simply but memora-
bly: "We must give stature and
status to our makers of words as
we do to our makers of things".
Material success is important
to a nation, just as money is im-
portant to a man. The saying is
not that man does not live by
bread, the saying is that man does
not live by bread alone. And St
Paul did not say that money is the
root of evil, he said love of money
is the root of evil. However, mate-
rial success and money cannot in
themselves be worthy ends.
Dante said it well in the ninth book
of "The Paradiso":
"You were not born to live the
lives of brutes
But beauty to pursue and
knowledge high".

After all, what is material suc-
cess for? It cannot be for its own
sake because then a stuffed pig
would be the most realized crea-
ture on earth. Human beings
must always ask themselves
Tolstoy's question: "What do men
live by?"
The achievement of Guyanese
and West Indian writers in the last
25 years Is remarkable by any
standard. The works of our liter-
ary people have risen above the
petty politics and the endemic
economic problems which have
plagued the region. Long after the
contradictions and difficulties of


ACROSS THE EDITORS' DESK

THE GUYANA PRIZE









our postcolonial societies have
been forgotten the books pro-
duced by our writers will have
found a permanent place among
the valuable, enduring works of
man.
Countries in the region have
been amazingly indifferent to the
writers of universal significance
whom we have produced and in-
different also to the art of writing
itself. It is as if we continued to
produce our great cricketers and
yet despised and belittled the
game of cricket itself. If for no
other reason than a shrewd
awareness of the international
kudos that comes with outstand-
ing literary and intellectual
achievement one would have
thought that the authorities
would have fallen over themselves
to find and foster our writing tal-
ent. That has not been the case.
But now we have a start, per-
haps a symbol, of something dif-
ferent and better in the Guyana
Prize. It is absolutely vital that a
nation should foster and honour
its writers. The good writer de-
votes his energy to searching for
truth. And in the love of truth,
straight and unvarnished, lies not
only the hope but the safety of a
nation. "The people need poetry",


the great Russian poet. Osip
Mandelstam, wrote "to keep them
awake forever". The good writer,
the true writer, as Cyril Connolly
said in "Enemies of Promise",
"helps to unmask those pre-
tenders which accompany all hu-
man plans for improvement: the
love of power and money, the
short-sighted acquisitive pas-
sions, the legacies of injustice and
ignorance, the tiger instinct for
fighting, the ape-like desire to go
with the crowd. A writer must be
a lie-detector who exposes falla-
cies in words and ideals before
half the world is killed for them."
The great writer, the great
artist of any sort, as the French
novelist Andre Gide insisted,
must bear a wound -
"That wound which we must
never allow to heal but which al-
ways remains painful and bleed-
ing, the gash made by contact with
hideous reality."
In a small but significant and
symbolic way, the Guyana Prize
begins to recognize the unsung,
deep-lying, passionate, life-giving
work that writers perform in a na-
tion. For that reason tonight's cer-
mony will indeed represent an au-
thentic, vital piece of this nation's
history in the making."


A FLOWERING OF WEST INDIAN JOURNALS?

The anguished cry has often been heard, at least in Guyana, that
there are only the most meagre outlets for West Indian writers, literary
critics and scholars to express themselves at home and abroad. The
claim is certainly true if the amount of raw talent and potential is
measure : against the available vehicles for expressing that talent and
potential. It is even more certainly true if one considers the matter in
terms of opportunities to publish book-length, beautifully produced,
widely distributed works locally and regionally. Gordon Rohlehr, in his
address at the Guyana Prize Awards ceremony, lamented the continuing,
inexcusable lack of a full-fledged CARICOM publishing house.
However, as one surveys the scene regionally, it begins to dawn







on one that the outlets for literary and cultural and academic expression
are growing in number, quality, and range all the time. How far is this
known by even writers, much less ordinary West Indian laymen? Let us
see. There are the old-established Bim in Barbados, Kyk-Over-Al in
Guyana (revived in December, 1984, after a long absence), and The New
Voices in Trinidad all of them obviously meeting a badly felt need for
literary expression, if the amount of material submitted to us in Kyk is
anything to go by. The Caribbean Quarterly continues to play its vital
part. But, apart from these, there are a number of other journals which
now grace the literary, cultural and academic scene, all but one of them
very new. These are noted below. Indeed, given the state of isolation from
each other in which Caricom countries customarily live, there may well
be other interesting publications we are not even aware exist.


Jamaica Journal
This, of course, is not a new-
comer. It has been coming out for
20 years. It is now published
quarterly. Jamaica Journal is a
magnificent, beautifully illus-
trated magazine that deserves a
wide audience throughout the
West Indies and indeed further
afield. It is a marvellous example
of what a well-balanced, scholarly
yet very readable magazine of lit-
erature, the arts, historical re-
search. national history and soci-
ety in general should aim to be.
We remember reading in it once
an article on the life and art of
Banja
Banja is new. The first issue
came out in April, 1987. It is pub-
lished twice a year by the National
Cultural Foundation of Barbados
and is edited by John Gilmore.
The first issue (the second issue
has not yet reached us) contains
poems, short stories, reviews and
a number of splendid articles on
Barbadian history, art. "speech in
the 19th Century", and "rare and
Journal of West Indian Literature
JWIL is a new academic
magazine which began publica-
tion in October, 1986. It is a twice-
yearly publication of the Depart-


Louise Bennett which alone was
worth five years' subscription.
Jamaica Journal is edited by
Olive Senior (distinguished win-
ner of the 1987 Commonwealth
Prize for Fiction) and is published
on behalf of the Institute of Ja-
maica. Correspondence should
be addressed to: IOJ Publications
Limited, 2A Suthermere Road,
Kingston 10, Jamaica. You
should order it immediately. The
subscription, if you can arrange
the foreign currency, is J$ 50 or
US $15 annually (4 issues).



endangered species" in that is-
land. This "magazine of Bar-
badian life and culture" is beauti-
fully produced and printed. It car-
ries a full quota of excellent photo-
graphs and illustrations. The an-
nual subscription (2 issues) is
Barbados $18.00. You should
write to : The Editor, Banja, Na-
tional Cultural Foundation, West
Terrace, St. James, Barbados.


ments of English of the University
of the West Indies. It is edited by
Mark McWatt. The two issues we
have seen are of outstanding,







scholarly quality not perhaps
suitable for the ordinary layman,
but certainly for the benefit of any-
one at all interested in West Indian
literature past, present, and fu-
ture. Its aim is expressed in the
following:
"The editors invite the sub-
mission of articles that are the re-
sult of scholarly research in the
literature of the English-speaking
Caribbean. The editors will also
consider for publication articles
on the literature of the non-Eng-
lish-speaking Caribbean, pro-
vided such articles are written in

The Caribbean Writer
Volume 1, Number 1 of The
Caribbean Writer, published in
St. Croix, came out in spring,
1987. It is a magnificently, expen-
sively produced magazine of 100
pages devoted entirely to poetry,
short stories and reviews. The art-
work and printing are superb. If
this continues it will clearly be an
extremely important outlet for
West Indian poets and writers of
fiction. The Introduction to the
first issue, by the President of the
University of the Virgin Islands,
reads as follows:
"Recognising the widespread
interest in creative writing and the
paucity of local outlets for such
writing, the Caribbean Research
Institute has expanded its focus in
order to meet this community
need. The University of the Virgin
Islands, thus, proudly presents
the premiere issue of The Carib-
bean Writer.
Literary magazines have tra-
ditionally played a vital role in fos-
tering writing talent, and that is
certainly one of our goals in spon-
soring this newventure. Our hope


English and have a clear relevance
to the themes and concerns of
Caribbean literature in English or
are of a comparative nature, com-
paring Caribbean literature in an-
other language with that in Eng-
lish. JWIL will also publish book
reviews".
The annual subscription (two
issues) is US$15.00. You should
write to: The Editor, Journal of
West Indian Literature, Depart-
ment of English, University of the
West Indies, P.O.Box 64, Bridg-
etown Barbados.



is also that the existence of a high
quality literary magazine based
close to home will inspire new
writers toward literary endeavour
and that ultimately the audience
for good literature will grow and
prosper.
I look forward to ten or twenty
years hence when we will point
with pride to established writers
who were first published In these
pages. The University is indeed
pleased to make such a valuable
contribution to the Caribbean
community through this land-
mark publication."
The Editor is Erika J Smilow-
itz and the Advisory Board in-
cludes well-known West Indian
literary figures such as Derek
Walcott, Mervyn Morris, Olive
Senior, Alwyn Bully, and John
Figueroa. Editorial and subscrip-
tion correspondence should be
sent to: Caribbean Research In-
stitute, University of the Virgin
Islands, RRO2, Box 10,000, King-
shill Post Office. St. Croix, V1
00850.







Caribbean Affairs
The introductory issue of this
magazine was published for the
first quarter of 1988. It is to come
out four times a year. published
by the Trinidad Express Newspa-
pers. The magazine concentrates
on politics and economics. The
standard is very high. In the first
issue, among other pieces, all of
great interest, there are excellent
articles by Michael Manley on
"The Integration Movement", An-
thony Maingot on "U.S. Strategy
in Nicaragua", Raoul Pantin on
A.N.R. Robinson, Alister McIntyre
on "Developing Tourism", David
de Caires on "Guyana After
Burnham", Lloyd Searwar on "De-
cision-Making in Foreign Affairs",
and Gordon Lewis on "The Imperi-
alist Ideology and Mentality".
There is also a thought-provoking
article, "Caribbean BooKtalk", by
Wayne Brown, that should be the
subject of much discussion in the
Faculties of English at all Univer-
sities in the region.
Keith Smith, in his thoughtful
introductory article, "Birth of the
Journal", sets out what we can
look forward to in the magazine in
the following terms:
"In Caribbean Affairs, read-
ers will find some of Keynes' "eco-


nomic and political thinkers", but
the difference is that their ideas
come from their own laboratory
and are rooted in the Caribbean
experience from Brazil, Suri-
name and the Guianas in the
South to Mexico, the Bahamas
and Cuba in the North. This is not
to say, however, that their think-
ing has not been informed by the
Euro-American intellectual tradi-
tion. When we consider the whole
history of the Caribbean to in-
sinuate anything of the kind
would be naive, blind and lacking
in good manners. But what we are
presenting here for the first time in
a single journal are examples of
that new Caribbean intellectual
tradition placed in the service of
all Caribbean peoples English,
French, Spanish, Dutch and Poor-
tuguese-speaking who have long
struggled for a place of dignity in
their own countries, for self-deter-
mination and self-respect and for
the honour and enrichment of
their brothers and sisters."
Caribbean Affairs is edited by
Owen Baptiste. The subscription
is TT$80 or US$20 annually (four
issues). You should write to: Car-
ibbean Affairs, P.O. Box 1252,
Port of Spain, Trinidad.


There are certainly other publications of great interest. There is
Antilia in Trinidad, the journal of the Faculty of Arts at U.W.I., St Au-
gustine. It seems to come out irregularly but the three issues we have
seen contain excellent literary investigation, scholarly articles, stimulat-
ing reviews and penetrating historical research. Ken Ramchand heads
the Editorial Committee. Then in Guyana there is Kaie (the National
History and Arts Council journal),which comes out irregularly but
contains a good variety of academic and literary work of interest in
Guyana and the wider region. And we have seen one copy of a magazine
called Prince published in Antigua whose editors have brought out five
issues up to June, 1987, and which contains some very interesting
writing from that island. There must be others.
If just the publications we have noticed here were regularly and






widely available in the region surely no one could complain of lack of
home-grown literary and intellectual fare. The problem, however, may
be two-fold. First, there is the "endurance" problem. Will many of these
publications last any length of time? A glossy, good-looking, well-
produced and interesting first few issues only whets the appetite. If the
magazine fizzles out after a couple ofyears, or less, that induces cynicism
and reinforces the sort of self-doubt which is already too prevalent in the
region.
Secondly, and even more importantly, how wide is the regional
readership of these magazines? How many subscriptions to Jamaica
Journal are there in Guyana? In at least some of the territories access
to such publications isjust about non-existent. The huge bureaucratic
difficulties involved in remitting subscriptions and in some cases the
absolute lack of foreign exchange, the deplorable state ofintra-CARICOM
mail services, the almost complete absence of properly organised means
of distributing and selling books and magazines on anything but a tiny
scale these are reasons why the circulation of magazines like those
mentioned here probably number in the tens rather than the hundreds
in most territories in CARICOM other than the one in which each is
published. And, of course, the consequent lack of a growing circulation
all too easily leads to disillusion and a short life-span for the brave new
venture.
Until a way can be found to establish a smoother, quicker, and
wider spread of cultural exchange and distribution throughout the
region, the odds are that the magazines we so enthusiastically launch will
continue to make infinitely less impact on West Indians than the quality
and range of their contents deserve. The even greater odds then are that
such ventures will sooner rather than later fade away for want of a more
universal audience. It baffles one completely why the CARICOM Secre-
tariat, so often frustrated at the political, economic, and commercial
level, does not turn more of its attention to a field so ripe for reform and
so conducive to furthering at the deepest level the ideal of West Indian
unity.

DR A J SEYMOUR, CCH

Jan McDonald writes:
Kyk-Over-Al, as well as its only begetter, is honoured by the
award to AJS of the Cacique Crown of Honour in the 1988 Guyana Re-
public Day Honours list. It is an honour most richly deserved by this out-
standingly dedicated and creative Guyanese and West Indian man of
letters and learning. AJS founded Kyk in 1945 and edited it single-
handedly during its palmiest and most influential period until 1961.
Since the magazine was revived in December 1984, he has continued
indefatigably as joint editor. It is an amazing, probably unique, contri-
bution simply as editor.
For more than 50 years AJS has contributed to the cultural scene
in a myriad of ways. In my Introduction toAJS at 70, published to mark
his 70th birthday four years ago [and still available from Kyk-G$50 by







mail], I tried to catch something of his incalculable pioneering effort:
"His life at one very important level is a record of 50 years of dedi-
cated work in literature. He began in an era when everything was still to
be done. Indeed, it may be that pioneers have to attempt too much. When
young Seymour in the early 1930s seriously began to think what
contribution he might make to life and letters in his homeland, consider
how much needed to be done, how many moulds required breaking, how
many initiatives needed to be taken. The Empire had not yet begun to
fade. The status of his country was colonial, the mentality dependent, the
heritage imperial, the culture derivative. Think of the varied challenges
that must have faced young man of sense and sensibility in those times.
It must have almost seemed too mLch. There were poems to write whose
themes were Guyanese and Caribbean and whose imagery was tropical
and experienced, not temperate, and second-hand. There was a whole
new world of deeply felt historical experience to open up. There was new
thinking to be done in half a dozen fields. Critical work had to be informed
by different themes and original perspectives. So many fresh starts had
to be made. A whole new context had to be prepared for the coming gen-
erations. The work that is done at the beginning of anything, like the
foundations of a great building sunk beneath the earth, is least seen but
is the most important part. Seymour as designer and architect of post-
colonial structures of thought and art and writing in Guyana and the
Caribbean is still to be fully assessed and properly acclaimed."


THE PRODUCTION OF KYK NO. 38
This is the second issue of Kyk to be printed by offset, from laser-
printed camera-ready copy prepared by electronic "desktop publishing"
methods. We are learning this powerful new technology somewhat by
trial and error, as readers of No. 37 will have noticed from its too-small
type. We apologise to those who found it hard to read, and to contributors
whose work was done less than justice. Each succeeding issue should
show improvement as we become more familiar with electronic page
layout and laser printing. We have already gained in the speed of pro-
duction, and are particularly delighted that the offset process allows us
to feature visual art such as the striking work of Harold Bascom in this
issue. Potential contributors of art pieces will, we hope, take note.







NOTES ON SIX MYTHICAL FIGURES OF GUYANA


by Harold A. Bascom

MOONGAZER (page 12 and cover)
The Moongazer is a giant spindly-legged white phantom that
stands with legs astride trenches, roads, or even houses. Its main
preoccupation is said to be just gazing in a fixed pose at the full moon in
the middle of the night sky. Seeing the apparition in its majestics is the
sole reason for its popularized horror.

BACOO (page 23)
The Bacoo is a midget demon having power to shower its owner
with riches untold, that is, providing the owner grants the demon the
things it demands in return for its services. The Bacoo is said to be
satisfied with an endless supply of bananas and milk.
The Bacoo enraged is rumoured to be very vindictive. It is said
that the demon will shower houses with pelted bricks. No one ever sees
where the bricks come from in such incidents. The Bacoo is known to
bring the owner poverty and misfortune.
The Bacoo on the rampage can only be caught and imprisoned in
a bottle by an able spiritist. Once the bottle is corked and thrown away
(best in rivers), the reign of the demon-tormentor is over, until someone
unsuspectingly finds that bottle and uncorks it.
The Bacoo also manifests itself in the form of snakes.

OL'HIGUE (page 35)
Ol'Higue is a skinless vampire. It is said to be a woman who has
the ability to shed her outer skin, change her form into a flying ball of fire
that can dwindle to a speck of light that can enter a house by way of even
a key-hole. Once inside the house, the Ol'Higue will proceed once
undisturbed to suck the blood of a victim. Awareness of Ol'Higue visits
is said to begin by observing that a once chubby healthy child or adult
is growing thinner and thinner paler and paler by the day. The most
extreme form of affliction for the victim ends in death.
The Ol'Higue is most times an old woman, hence the name. But
it is now said that this form of local vampire can be (in seeming road-
walking innocence) a middle aged woman ofbeauty, or a pretty teen-aged
girl.

JOMBIE (page 57)
Jombie (Jombee) is the name given to the ghost of a Guyanese
deceased. The Jombie, though, is not likened to the ghost of popular
fiction. It is not a whispy thing. In Guyanese ghost stories, the Jombie
is most times only realized to be a ghost when the Jombie itself declares
itself one. Until the declaration, the unsuspecting living-person thinks
the Jombie is a flesh and blood human being.
The popular story is told of the late-walking guitarist who meets
a man on the public road. The man tells the guitarist that he can play







the guitar also. And, borrowing the instrument, the man begins to strum
and pick beautiful melodies.
Says the owner of the instrument: "Man...you can masterly play
guitar!"
Says the player in reply: "Ah man...you ent hear nothing yet...You
see when I was alive I used to play sweeter than this!"
Jombies are also nasal speakers. They also are known to laugh
through their nostrils hence someone speaking in nasal tones ought to
be watched closely, then sprinkled with holy water to remove doubts.


BUSH DIE-DIE (page 76)
Bush Die-Die is a bush spirit. Some people say that Bush Die-
Die is the end result of an Amerindian wizard's transformation from his
purely human form. In Guyana, Bush Die-Die is popularized as a horrid
freaky thing that is found in the hinterland forests.

MASACOURAMAN (page 87)
Masacouraman is a man-like water monster, popularized by
pork-knockers of Guyana. This thing is very dangerous to man, since it
makes humans part of its diet. Masacouraman is said to be very hairy
and much larger than a man. It lives below the waters of hinterland
rivers, lakes, and creeks. It is the Guyanese Loch Ness monster but much
more menacing.




The original drawings, which measure 16in by 21in were executed by
Harold Bascom in pen and ink in 1979, and are now held in the collection
ofMichael Cox, a Director ofArts Guyana Ltd. They are reproduced by kind
permission of Michael Cox and the artist.









0


MOONGAZER
12








GUYANA PRIZE FEATURE ADDRESS


'TROPHY AND CATASTROPHE'

by GORDON ROHLEHR

Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency the President. Ministers of Gov-
ernment, members of the Diplomatic Corps, friends and fellow-travellers
in this vale of tears and laughter:
I would like first of all to say my sincere thanks for the honour
which you have conferred on me by inviting me to address such a
gathering on such an occasion. The establishment of the Guyana Prize
for Literature in such hard times as these is an act of peculiar grace,
equalled only by that first memorable Carifesta of 1972, which was also
a Guyanese initiative. It isn't often with all due respects to the
Commonwealth Prize, the Booker Award or the W.H.Smith Award that
the Caribbean writer finds a serious sponsor.
Even in the area of research, it is generally easier to find a sponsor
for research into our chaotic politics or our foundering economies, than
into our remarkably vibrant literature. Thus, both creative writer and
academic suffer in a situation where it is not unusual for publication to
lag behind creation for ten years or more.
During the 1950s and 1960s Caribbean writing attracted the
British publishing houses. It was new and passionate and signalled the
eruption into visibility of the colonial person who, if he had never quite
accepted his servitude, had at the same time never quite articulated his
deepest and most burning necessity in a fiction and language that was
unmistakably his own. Part of the interest of the British publisher no
doubt lay in the fact that a relatively easy market existed for writing that
was new and strange. There was, also, a curious pride and proprietor-
ship; for this new writing was seen as demonstrating the flexibility of the
English language. Despite the astringent satire which it directed at
colonial education, the new literature was taken as proof of the virtues
of that education which, against all odds, had taught inarticulate Call-
ban to speak.
One has only to read those inane reviews that used to appear in
the West India Committee Circular, the journal of the old Sugar
Interest, to realise that our literature was being promoted as a quaint
curiosity, or as a marketable commodity whose meaning did not, and
could not possibly, matter. At a 1971 conference, I heard more than one
of our writers remark that it was only with the advent of West Indian
critics and reviewers such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite who wrote long
essays in Bim since 1957, that they gained a sense of what their work
meant to the community for whom it was intended.
After the novelty of the 1950 to 1965 period had worn off and Reid,
Mittelholzer, Lamming, Selvon, Naipaul, Salkey, Hearne, Harris and
Walcott had been established as our most important voices, the willing
sponsorship of British publishing houses was, it seems to me, tacitly
reduced. One waited for a second wave of writers to follow in the wake








of the first. But this did not happen for several reasons. First of all, the
writers of the fifties had said most of what it was possible to say about
the folk life, politics and landscape of small impoverished societies.
Secondly, the early elation had begun to encounter the hard realities of
self-government and independence, and an already serious vision had
darkened considerably by the mid-sixties. Thirdly, and most important:
new writers were finding it increasingly more difficult to get published,
the publishers being more concerned with the easier task of promoting
already established voices, than with risking money and energy on the
encouragement of fresh talent.
If we think of the writers who emerged between 1965 and 1970,
we'd find that Jean Rhys was a survivor from nearly four decades earlier;
Edward Kamau Brathwaite had been publishing poems in Bim since
1948 and was, like Walcott, only three years younger than Lamming;
Michael Anthony and Earl Lovelace were among the few to be given
exposure and encouragement in the immediate post-Independence
period; while poets such as Denis Scott and Mervyn Morris, who had
developed their own styles, would have to await the emergence of those
brave little West Indian publishing houses, New Beacon and Bogle-
L'Ouverture, who in the post-1970 period have borne the brunt of the new
publishing. I must have at least one hundred poets in slim collections,
which have been either self-published or are the results of the efforts of
Savacou, Bim, Karia Press or the Extra-Mural Department of UWI.
While the presence of local and foreign-based Caribbean publish-
ers is a sign of independence, there is a limit to the exposure which the
small publisher can give to a writer. Sometimes an entire genre suffered
from an inadequacy of promotion, as was the case with drama, which
after the series of one-act plays published by the UWI Extra-Mural
Department from the late fifties to the mid-sixties, went into a slump until
the seventies, when the Walcott plays began to appear. Walcott's main
publisher now is not British, but American.
Relief of a sort came with the short-lived Allison and Busby, who
republished Lamming and C.L.R.James, and promoted the novels of Roy
Heath. Relief of a sort has also come from Casa de las Americas, the
Cuban publishing house, which in 1976 extended their annual literary
competition to include writers from the Anglophone Caribbean. Guya-
nese writers such as Noel Williams, Angus Richmond, Harry Narain and
John Agard have won the Casa prize. Edward Kamau Brathwaite has
won it twice, once for Black & Blues, a collection of poems, and in 1986
for Roots, a collection of essays.
Very recently, through the agency mainly of West Indian publish-
ers, we've seen the healthy and exciting emergence of several women
writers such as Merle Collins, Grace Nichols, Ema Brodber, Velma
Pollard, Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Christine Craig, Pamela Morde-
cai, Jean Goulbourne, Jean Binta Breeze and Opal Palmer. I think,
indeed, that it is safe to predict that our most significant voices for the
next two decades will be female. There are several reasons for this. First:
the time demands it. All over the world women have been coming into
visibility, and redefining in ways as significant as their male counter-








parts, the fundamental reality of human existence. Caribbean women
are part of this universal redefinition, this transformation of reality.
Second: the emergence of women writers in the Caribbean indicates that
the other half of Caribbean sensibility is seeking fulfilment through self-
expression. If the male writers sought their liberation of spirit in the face
of rigid colonial structures, the female writers seek theirs in the face of
equally rigid patriarchal ones.
The third reason why our next wave of writers may well be women,
lies in the contempt for things of the sensibility which our societies have
unconsciously bred in the minds of young men. Young men have
absorbed a notion of development based on the idea of science and
technology, to the exclusion of the Arts. It is quite normal in a class of,
say, sixty literature students at UWI, to find only three males. While there
is no necessary or inevitable correspondence between studying literature
as an academic discipline and becoming a creative writer, it is still true
to conclude that over the -last fifteen years far more women have been
exposed to a wider range of literature than their male counterparts.
Given this exposure and the already described need for self-definition,
the women will be carrying the major burden of our writing in the near
future.
Popular artistic forms such as the Calypso, Reggae and the
emerging "Dub" poetry, are still largely dominated by young men. The
Calypso, contrary to some opinions, is neither dying nor deteriorating. If
there are fewer narrative calypsoes, there are more celebratory ones. The
Calypso today also contains a range of political recall as well as an
analytic grasp of the political moment that is equal to, if not greater than,
what obtained in the age of Atilla. It provides us with an index of popular
attitudes to an increasingly bewildering social experience, and has had
to wrestle with growing problems of madness (Terror's "Madness", 1974),
drug addiction (Duke, Sparrow, Explainer, Singing Francine among
others have all sung on this theme), unemployment, corruption and
vagrancy.
The darkening social experience since Independence has
changed the nature of calypso laughter which, in the process of adjusting
to bewildering paradox, has become a very complex thing. Chalkdust's
"Learn to Laugh" advocates bitter mirth. It disturbs precisely because it
unmasks the source of laughter, revealing it as chaos, bitterness and
helplessness: as well as its function: masking, evasion and dereliction
of the intolerable responsibility for setting the situation right. The
language of some calypsoes has returned to the singalong simplicity of
the old-time kalinda chants, while that of those singers who have
accepted a burden of self-definition, has become more metaphorical,
more dense, and more capable of expressing a wider range of feeling.
But calypsonians, like most other creative artists, face extreme
problems when it comes to having their records produced. The young
singer, like the young writer, may find that there is no one who is
prepared to invest in an unknown voice. Or an investor may not offer fair
terms. Tales of the exploitation of singers can fill a book. Plagiarism for
commercial gain has been a major concern. Subtle or overt political








censorship has existed in some Caribbean territories. Such censorship
places an additional pressure on the singer, whose revenues are inevita-
bly affected when his songs aren't played on the radio. A paradoxical
situation is often created, where one sector of the community blames
singers for composing trivial party songs, while another sector damns
them for telling too much depressing political truth.
It should be clear, then, that all categories of artists need help of
some sort. There is pressing need not only for awards such as the
Guyana Prize for Literature, but also for a CARICOM Publishing House,
which should belong equally to the public and private sectors in the
Caribbean, and which, utilising the infrastructure that already exists in
abundance throughout these territories, should publish school books,
literary, academic and historical texts, as well as the burgeoning music
of the region. There is no reason why, equipped with skilled panels of
editorial advisers in each discipline, panels drawn, as CXC panels are,
from all over the region, such a CARICOM Publishing House should not
be able to select work that has merit and quality; work that is vital to our
perception of self and possibility; work, too, that is informed by that
critical intelligence which will be necessary for our self-knowledge and
our location of the Caribbean self in the world and in the cosmos.
Such a CARICOM Publishing House can become a means
whereby we may ingather our wandering wits, or, to use Martin Carter's
arresting image: collect our scattered skeleton. No regional cultural
policy will emerge without something like it. We need institutions that
are more permanent than Carifesta, which, indeed, will give us some-
thing to celebrate whenever Carifesta comes around. A CARICOM Pub-
lishing House should also serve to stem the annual outflow from the
region of millions of dollars, which is what we as a region pay foreign
publishing houses, by presenting them with our captive primary and
high school markets.
The act of writing poetry, prose or drama is, now that we know the
extent to which science and technology are controlled by the metropole,
one of the most crucial necessities and possible frontiers for development
in the Caribbean. We cannot control the price of oil; we cannot control,
try as we may, the price of bauxite; nor can we control the American quota
for sugar. But we can control our exploration and presentation of
ourselves. The Arts are probably the only area in which sovereignty is
possible; though even here the burden of autonomous statement is
exacting as frightening a toll as the region-wide collapse of our econo-
mies. This is so not only because of the difficulties artists experience in
getting their work published, but also because of the difficult conditions
in which the average citizens of these territories have been existing for
some time.
At times these conditions objectify themselves, crystallize them-
selves, as it were, into moments of terrible atrocity, that have wrung from
the poet and novelist and playwright outcry after outcry. Since Inde-
pendence, we've had in the Caribbean guerillas and gundowns, the Malik
affair in Trinidad with its gruesome lettuce-patch murders of the
Trinidadian Skerritt and the Englishwoman, Gail Ann Benson. Guyana








became unwittingly involved in that drama when Malik, who was
married to a Guyanese, chose this landscape as the stage for his final act
of folly: an attempt to walk from Berbice to Brazil. We all know the
literature that grew out of that catastrophe: Vidia Naipaul's lucid essay,
"The Killings in Trinidad", and his stark best-selling novel, Guerillas,
which became very popular in North America, a country so much
engaged in the conversion of fact into fiction, that many people there can
no longer distinguish between the two. Trinidad, which is very similar to
America in this respect, converted the Malik affair into the Carnival Ole
Mas Band, BENSON UNDER HEDGES.
Jamaica has since Independence been conducting its fixed
dialectic of gunmen; its unending, fratricidal conflict has concretised
itself in acts such as that of gunmen feeding children and mothers to the
flames in Orange Lane; old ladies burned to death in Eventide; and, worst
of all, the sacrificial waste of the 1980 elections when well over five
hundred people were killed. This scenario is being re-enacted in far more
gruesome terms in Haiti, to whose assistance Jamaica, pre-schooled in
similar atrocity, has self-righteously rushed.
The Jamaican tragedy has given rise to several poems. One has
only to read Brathwaite's Kingston poems such as "Spring-blade",
"Starvation", "Dread", "Wings ofa Dove", "Sun Song" and "Kingston in the
Kingdom of this World" to see how this tragedy has affected the
expression of one of the region's leading writers. The Orange Lane fire is
directly alluded to in his "Poem for Walter Rodney" where he makes the
connection between two atrocities, twinning the cities of Kingston and
Georgetown. Recognizing in contemporary Jamaica patterns and struc-
tures of mind as old as the slave plantation, Brathwaite has shown in
some detail how what he calls "the return of the status crow" has
produced "the resurrection of the dread". The poems of Denis Scott,
Brian Meeks or Kendel Hippolyte, Scott's play Dog, the reggae songs of
Marley and the recently murdered Peter Tosh, the Dub poetry of Linton
Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka, Jean Binta Breeze and Mikey Smith, who
couldn't believe that children were being deliberately thrown into the
Orange Lane fire, but was himself soon to be stoned to death by people
who disagreed with his political views:- all provide us with a range of
artistic responses to Jamaican atrocity, and define the bleak spiritual
landscape out of which many Caribbean writers operate.
One of the duties of the Caribbean State should be to provide the
citizen and artist with the necessary space within which he can operate,
even when the citizen and artist see through and beyond the structures
and devices of the State. Where such space does not exist, literature
creates it through protest, or through the imaginative territory which it
liberates in quest of living-room for the spirit. The creative voice in the
Caribbean has always challenged the political reality or unreality,
fostered by ideologues for or against the prevailing political order. When
this happens, the creative voice may find itself confronted by the ignorant
machinery of an oppression which, when it is not fostered directly by the
State, may be tacitly permitted to happen because of the indifference or
neglect of the State. The word may then find itself in chains.








Edward Kamau Brathwaite's "Kingston in the Kingdom of this
World" dramatises the outcry of the voice against such imprisonment.
The poem's voice is simultaneously that of a Christ figure awaiting trial
and crucifixion; that of the artist, whose authority of sunlight, vision,
music, dance and the illuminating power of the imagination is pitted
against the incarceration of the State; and that of the Dogon Nummo, the
primal creative word and voice and spirit ofAfrica, rotting in a Jamaican
jail. I'll read this poem now for Mikey Smith, for Walter Rodney, for Martin
Carter and for George Lamming, allowing, as you may have noticed, the
living and the dead proportional representation.

Kingston in the Kingdom of this World

The wind blows on the hillside
and i suffer the little children
I remember the lilies of the field
and fish swim in their shoals of silence
our flung nets are high wet clouds, drifting

with this reed i make music
with this pen i remember the word
with these lips i can remember the beginning of the
world

between these bars is this sudden lock-up
where there is only the darkness of dog-bark
where 1 cannot make windmills of my hands
where 1 cannot run down the hill-path of faith
where i cannot suffer the little children

a man may have marched with armies
he may have crossed the Jordan and the red sea
he may have stoned down the walls of Jericho

here where the frogs creak where there is only the
croak of starlight
he is reduced
he is reduced
he is reduced
to a bundle of rags
a broken stick
that will never whistle through
fingerstops into the music of flutes
that will never fling nets white sails
crossing

gospel was a great wind freedom of savannas
gospel was a great mouth telling thunder of heroes
gospel was a cool touch warm with the sunlight like








water in claypots, healing


this reduction wilts the flower
weakens the water
coarsens the lips
fists at the bars, shake rattle and hammers at the
locks

suffer the little children
suffer the rose gardens
suffer the dark clouds howling for bread
suffer the dead fish poisoned in the lake

my authority was sunlight: the man who arose from
the dead called me saviour
his eyes had known moons older than jupiters
my authority was windmills: choirs singing of the
flowers of rivers

your authority is these chains that strangle my wrists
your authority is the red whip that circles my head
your authority is the white eye of interrogator's terror.
siren price fix the law of undarkness

the dreadness of the avalanches of unjudgement

it is you who roll down boulders when i say word
it is you who cry wolf when i offer the peace of wood-
doves
it is you who offer up the silence of dead leaves

i would call out but the guards do not listen
I would call out but the dew out there on the grass
cannot glisten
i would call out but my lost children cannot unshackle
their shadows of silver

here i am reduced to this hole of my head
where i cannot cut wood where i cannot eat
bread
where 1 cannot break fish with the multitudes

my authority was foot stamp upon the ground
the curves the palms the dancers
my authority was nyambura: inching closer
embroideries of fingers silver earrings:
balancers

and








i am reduced
i am reduced
i am reduced
to these black eyes
this beaten face
these bleaching lips blearing obscenitities

i am reduced
i am reduced
I am reduced
to this damp
to this dark
to this driven rag

awaiting the water of sunlight
awaiting the lilies to spring up out of the iron
awaiting your eyes o my little children

awaiting

Guyana has matched the rest of the Caribbean in atrocity. We
had the mind-blowing Jim Jones Affair being enacted in the Guyana
forest of the night, involving a handful of white masters of the religious
word and nine hundred black slaves to it. This atrocity has produced
about a dozen prose accounts, including one from Shiva Naipaul who,
imitating his elder brother as he usually did, also squeezed a novel out
of the catastrophe. There were also two or three American movies, one
of which was significantly entitled not an American, but The Guyana
Tragedy. Popular response in Guyana was provided by two songs, one
by Nicky Porter and the other by the Trade Winds, who summarized the
Jim Jones catastrophe with the couplet:
He tell them to think and they thinking
So he tell them to drink and they drinking
What the Caribbean mind can't comprehend, it converts into a
macabre carnival of humour, behind which still lurks the cadaver of
evaded catastrophe. Here the Trade Winds are, perhaps unconsciously,
establishing the link between centralised propaganda, mind-control and
self-destruction, and suggesting a lesson pertinent not only to the Jim
Jones commune, who were in any case no longer capable of learning it,
but to the Guyanese nation as a whole.
Guyana can also boast the death of Walter Rodney which, like the
Grenada fiasco three years later (Grenada is already an American
movie) was a devastating body blow to an entire generation; the literal
reduction to ashes of passion, energy, commitment, courage, laughter
and intelligence. That death has evoked an entire anthology of poems,
as well as collections of papers from conferences and seminars on the
meaning of the life's work of an outstanding historian, Caribbean and
international personality, who could not find a job at the University of
Guyana, even when the History Department there was being headed by








an American alcoholic, of whom the kindest thing that one can say is that
he was colourless and nondescript. That this could happen under a
regime which four years earlier had had the generosity, scope and vision
to inaugurate Carifesta, is perhaps the most astounding paradox to have
been produced in a country of astounding paradoxes.
Moving as all these elegies to Rodney undoubtedly are, I'd have
preferred other poems and Rodney alive. I'd even have preferred him to
have rejected what Linton Kwesi Johnson termed "History's weight", and
obeyed the advice which Wordsworth McAndrew offered him in a 1976
poem, written in reaction to his being denied the job at U.G. Mc Andrew
at that time had already intuited a sort of doom, and advised Rodney to
leave a country which could or would not find use for either his academic
excellence or political commitment.
Mc Andrew himself, by far Guyana's best and most active folklor-
ist, who almost single-handedly provided a forum for scores of new
Guyanese short stories, unearthed the customs, sayings and practices
of Guyanese from all corners of the land, took his own advice and left
Guyana. The warehouse manager where he first sought work in New
Jersey gave him a simple arithmetic test which he clearly expected him
to fail. When Mac returned after a few minutes, the manager exclaimed
in the mixture of amazement and contempt with which Prospero is
sometimes grudgingly forced to acknowledge Caliban as a being capable
of intelligence: "Geel He got them all right!" Our national talent has been
to make the real man into a small man. As the voice in "Kingston in the
Kingdom of this World" laments: he is reduced. He is reduced.
Tonight, we are celebrating the sponsoring of Literature by State
and School. It is worth reminding both State and School of the strain
under which writers exist, particularly when they are politically critical
of the State. In Trinidad five poets were among the 1970 detainees, and
Jack Kelshall, whom Guyanese of the early sixties might well remember,
became a poet after he was wrongfully imprisoned in the 1970s. Martin
Carter had, of course, experienced this under the British nearly two
decades earlier.
Under such stasis, such unchange, some writers have chosen the
amnesia of alcohol. Others, like Mittelholzer, Leroy Calliste, Eric Roach,
the painter and folklorist Harold Simmons, and the poet and teacher
Neville Robinson committed suicide by rope, poison, the knife or fire. It
is a dangerous thing, often a fatal thing, to even possess sensibility in
such an age, where there are so many ways that a person can be
destroyed. We live in societies in the Caribbean where the price of a
certain type of clarity is sudden death; where the price of a certain type
of commitment is certain arrest? of a certain quality of feeling is possible
self-immolation.
The grimness of the age has affected the styles and modes of
functioning of both the State and the individual. If many individual
sensibilities have succumbed to despair or become fixed in automatic
attitudes of protest and resistance, the State has tended to ossify into
rigid authoritarian attitudes, which are really the mask of a fundamental
impotence.








Surveying West Indian societies since Independence, one is
forced to conclude that we remain colonial in how authority reacts to
critical challenge; that certain aspects of our consciousness have become
paralysed in ancient attitudes of crippledom; that, sadly, it has proven
easier to mummify entire nations than the individual corpse.

Our neo-colonial situation of simultaneous freedom and mental
enchainment is one of deep and perplexing paradox. In Trinidad last year
it was possible for black policemen to unleash an unprovoked attack on
black people demonstrating against the anti-black racism of South
Africa's apartheid State. The same Trinidad moved a vote in the United
Nations to enforce sanctions against South Africa. Faced with such
inconsistency, deeply rooted in our colonial past and blossoming daily in
our neo-colonial present, the mind of artist and critic alike seeks
naturally to express and explore paradox.

I have, consequently, named this address "Trophy and Catastro-
phe". If the catastrophe refers to these societies in which we now live and
breathe and have what remains of our being, the trophy refers to the
Guyana Prize for Literature which, Your Excellency, you have with such
imagination and generosity inaugurated. I am proud to be identified with
this effort and this occasion, and to congratulate the winners in each
category. I hope the prize is only the beginning of a new dispensation for
writers, and that the graciousness which inspired its inauguration will
also inform the political future of the Guyanese people.

Thank You.



















































..,










BACOO








GUYANA PRIZE ADDRESS


by WILSON HARRIS

In responding to the award of the 1987 Guyana Prize for Best Book of
Fiction for his "Carnival"' Wilson Harris gave an address at the ceremony
held at the National Cultural Centre on December 8th, 1987. Subsequently
he expanded on this address in the form of further comments contributed
to Kyk-Over-AL

Your Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen, before I move into my
address may I be permitted to coin a phrase from the unpalatable wisdom
of the Gods "Imaginative writers bite the hand that feeds them". This
ancient legend possesses obscure roots but one tends to think it relates
to an age when men and women stood in awe of the furies. Art is rooted
in creative conscience and the bite of the furies that the mythmaking
writer himself endures brings a cutting edge into every serious address
he or she makes in the name of imaginative truth.
May I now thank the judges of the prize committee who have, I am
sure, worked conscientiously and thoughtfully in the matter of these
awards which are, I believe, the first of their kind in the Caribbean as a
whole. This occasion signals and confirms the.necessity for a serious
examination of issues of creativity and cross-cultural innovation. Ed-
ward Kamau Brathwaite has stated in his new book X/SELF that
"Caribbean culture has been cruelly neglected both by the Car-
ibbean itself and by the rest of the world".
In such a context of "cruel neglect" these prizes may have a
remedial edge and they transcend the honour conferred on individuals.
Imaginative writers may take some comfort from the proceedings. They
are members now of a profession of the arts it seems though let them
never forget such status has been long and painfully achieved within an
indifferent if not philistine mental climate.
My gifted colleagues Fred D'Aguiar, Janice Shinebourne and
Marc Matthews belong to a later generation, but we share across the
generations one prime feature. That feature is an adventure into arts of
memory. Apart from the obvious application of the theme of remembered
places, persons, etc., there is a tremendous momentum and value in arts
of memory seen from another standpoint. Such arts are closely linked to
a force of tradition that has been virtually eclipsed for centuries in
Guyana and the Americas. And the paradox is that communities such as
Guyana and the Caribbean may, if they understand themselves pro-
foundly, play a significant part in the revival of such lost traditions.
A brief word about this. Arts of memory are peculiarly associated
with grotesque imageries. The grotesque in this context signifies a
bizarre, even unpreposssessing, constellation that nature sometimes
wears through which however a door opens, so to speak, into concen-
trated processes of creativity and beauty and ecstasy at the heart of
being.
Take the anancy/spider grotesquerie. I do not need to dwell on








its bearing nor the nature of the trickster, on the one hand, the saviour
on the other. Then there is Quetzalcoatl of ancient Mexico whose
Guyanese cousin is the eternal child of the bone-flute, Yurokon.
Quetzalcoati signifies an evolutionary metaphysic in the marriage
of the fabulous bird (quetzal) and the legendary snake (Coatl).
Quetzalcoatl assists us now in modern times from the shadowy
workshop of the Gods that he still inhabits to penetrate one of the most
formidable of European myths that of FAUST and to re-interpret it,
bring a new density into it, from an original and partly non-European
position.
It is only recently that European scholars began to revive the
bearing that the grotesque image possesses in arts of memory upon the
greatest of European writers Dante and Shakespeare.
The enigma of such tradition is its deepseated application to a
universal humanity in all extremity, all disabilities of nature through
which the spirit of creative moment still triumphs. The emphasis in such
tradition upon the grotesque that we find in medieval books was not a
cult of despair (as was once thought to be the case) but a classical memory
procedure through which a reader was energised to identify with layers
of meaning beyond a particular boundary of sensation.
All this bears on the Third World, on its potential for awakening
into a new literacy of the imagination.
The great predicament, the economic sorrows, the destitution of
the Third World, obsesses the mass-media press today in Europe and the
United States. That press makes no bones about the grotesqueries of fate
in many societies.
Should not all this energise us to place renewed emphasis on
cultural, philosophic, environmental thresholds into arts of memory?
Guyana sometimes appears as a marginal society to the Carib-
bean and in South America. But it is here in such apparently marginal
societies around the globe that supreme importance attaches to creative
conscience, to the freedom of the person, to the conduct of politics, the
conduct of democracy, to innovation, to arts of the imagination.
For all these bear on the value of survival, and on the most
important and troubling questions that plague our divided and ghetto-
fixed civilisation. What has marginal being to offer the world at the heart
of extremity, not heart of darkness, but heart of extremity?
What is true value? What is true spirit?
Such questions are of intense and burning moment. Because they
arise most tellingly within apparently marginal communities they raise
a momentous paradox. T.S. Eliot has implicitly expressed a hope for the
revival of allegory. I think he had European writers in mind.
But such revival as an art of memory may be more relevant to
societies living on edge, so to speak, and which need to plumb resources
of inner confidence in addressing the difficult problems they face. Modern
allegory revives in new ways the inner guide; it stresses how real are our
intuitive powers to interrogate the building blocks of a civilisation and
to breach or cleave a perverse addiction to authoritarianism in Third
World regimes or to authoritarian realism in narrative fiction.








Men have walked on the moon. The extraordinary swaddling
clothes they wore like clowns bouncing in a circus have become little
more than hollow puppetry to the computerised and insensible body of
an age. And yet seen with another eye by suffering Mankind they bring
home the marginality of a stellar universe by which we are all fascinated.
In such marginality we dream of new centres of selfknowledge rooted in
the densities of space and time. A rich parable for men and women who
have long been subject to the traumas of the conditioned mind, the
colonised mind, the obsessive colonising mind. How to transform such
traumas into cross-cultural innovation is an issue that must loom, I feel,
with greater and greater pertinence and urgency as we move towards the
21st century.
The difficulties that encompass this country are many and
serious but the fabric of these difficulties possesses varying and troub-
ling dimensions throughout the modem world. These difficulties may be
disguised or hidden from view in prosperous societies. In essence they
are difficulties to do with an age in profoundest transition.
Guyana has deep roots in many cultures. This could be its
greatest memory resource, strength and hope.


GROTESQUE IMAGERIES AND INTUITIVE POWERS

I feel I may best expand on issues I raised in myacceptance speech
at the National Cultural Centre on December 8. 1987, by commenting on
two elements in the address.
The first relates to "grotesque imageries" and their bearing on the
recovery of apparently lost traditions and arts of memory.
Frances Yates, an outstanding English scholar, has written with
illumination in this area though confessing to the major difficulties
involved in salvaging an art of memory so long in eclipse.
In brief the grotesque image is a kind of short-hand that energises
a society to recall and act upon a corridor of associations in a body of
imaginative work. Thus in Shakespearean theatre in the sixteenth
century memory images of a very peculiar nature were part and parcel
of the equipment of poet, playwright, actor and audience. Through such
impetus and momentum there came into play a diversity of connection
with the distant past even as that diversity came peculiarly and paradoxi-
cally alive in the original mind of the present.
All this enriches I believe the authenticity of the collective uncon-
scious of which C.G. Jung wrote.
The contours of imagination one may trace in what I have Just
been saying are native I feel to the Caribbean and to Central and South
America. I referred toAnancy and to Quetzalcoatl in my address. Anancy
is a spider-grotesque that energises the imagination to map hidden or
frail interrelationships in nature even as it points through the Middle
Passage into Africa. It embraces newAmerican content in explicating the
body of the trickster, on one hand, the subtleties and trials of the saviour
on the other.







Quetzalcoatl assists us to break a narrow confine or boundary
situation. It is a metaphysic of evolution with roots that lie deep in buried
cultures. Walter Roth has pointed to a bridge of associations (which I
sought to explore imaginatively in my critical book The Womb of Space
published by Greenwood Press. USA) linking Quetzalcoatl, Kukulcan,
Huracan (hurricane) and Yurokon (the Guyanese child of the bone-flute).
Yurokon therefore belongs to the family of Quetzalcoatl and may
even, who knows, be antecedent to Quetzalcoatl in the workshop of the
gods and the obscurity of Carib blood. One sees in all these connections
- as one turns them into multi-faceted approaches to the mystery of
psyche complex and subtle links between music and theatre, art and
language, nature and culture.
In the same way one may explore the Indian goddess Kali. Kall
you may remember is a goddess from whom many arms and hands
sprout in a most disconcerting manner.
There are notable uses of the Anancy theme in Caribbean writers
such as Salkey, Mais, Selvon, Jean Rhys, Brathwalte, Carew. Major ex-
amples in North American literature are Melville's The Confidence Man
and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in which Rhinehart is a sinister
equivalent of Anancy.
The grotesque image therefore is a paradoxical formation that
unlocks the strangest capacity for ecstasy and beauty born of evolutions
of the unconscious into a new consciousness even as it unfolds caveats
or warnings of the manipulated personality who alas may become the
manipulator of others.
May I now turn to the other element of which I spoke in my
address, namely, intuitive powers. This is a far-reaching issue that I may
best illumine through a talk given at the Commonwealth Institute,
London, in the autumn of 1986.

Validation of Fiction: a Personal View of Imaginative Truth

The world in which we live sometimes appears to border upon a
theatre of demonic comedy, and to reveal a tissue of absurdities, not to
speak of disinformation, if I may quote the current jargon. But when one
looks deep into the fabric of creation one may discern there, I think, the
outlines of genuine hope, however apparently frail. Deeply nourished
one may be by a vision of consciousness, a vision of hope, but it is clear
that complacency would be gross folly. There is no short cut to solutions
of famine, to the pollution of the globe, to authoritarianism and rigged
elections in the so-called third world, to nuclear peril, to violence, to drug
addiction, etc. Yet creative solutions do exist, and such solutions hinge,
I believe, in significant part on a profound literacy of the imagination. I
shall define, as this address proceeds, what I mean by literacy of the
Imagination. First, however, before touching on such a complex concep-
tion we need to take account of standard or common-or-garden literacy
and illiteracy. Surely the disturbing scenario of illiteracy in many
societies around the globe must engage the conscience of writers
everywhere. No conference devoted to literature can ignore this. In the








Times Higher Educational Supplement I came across a brief summary
of a report published in the United States recently:
Virtually every young American adult can sign his or her name
and nearly 95% can read at a level normally expected of 8-year-
olds.
That is the good news. This places America at the head of the
world's literacy league table, the report says. But there is also bad news.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress which produced the
report after testing 3,600 adults between the ages of 21 and 25 found
that, although about 95% could read a simple newspaper article, fewer
than 40% understood it. Just 20% could use a bus timetable to get from
one place to another. Only 38% could work out the cost of a meal by
reading the menu and 43% had trouble following directions on a map.
When asked to interpret a 4-line poem by Emily Dickinson fewer the 10%
could do so.
Now as you know, poets such as Derek Walcott and the Negritude
poet Cesaire are far more difficult than Emily Dickinson! The report,
which cost $2 million, predicts that the illiteracy rate will rise during the
next decade unless action is taken to help the growing minority popula-
tions. Among Blacks who took part in the survey just 10% could
understand a newspaper article, 2% could interpret a bus schedule and
even fewer were able to utilize unit pricing in a supermarket. Hispanics
did a little better but still scored lower than whites. So, that is the
situation that affects our society and it would seem to me to be bad news
for democracy.
Now, in my judgment illiteracy and semi-literacy possess para-
doxes we need to explore. We need to approach the matter from many
angles to stimulate a breakthrough from habit or function that may chain
an individual into passive acceptance of his role or function. This is a
matter which addressed me intimately in the Guyanas when I used to
travel along the coastlands and when I.led engineering and surveying
expeditions into the interior. There were occasions when one would have
a crew of about 25 or 30 and many of those could just manage to write
their names on the pay sheet. Some could read an article in a newspaper.
Now I knew those men extremely well and we had a good relationship. I
grew over the years to understand their problems and their potentialities.
They performed admirably and intelligently within their specific function
but appeared lacking in curiosity about the cosmos (if I may so put it) in
which they dwelt, the complex rainforest, the river, the night sky that
seemed intimate and close in the black dark of a landscape unlit by
electricity. It wasn't that they didn't respond to all this but I felt such
response had they confessed to it would have been a measure of
weakness. I was reminded of people who fear their dreams and therefore
say they never dream.
They were defined on my paysheet as chainmen, staffmen, bush-
men, boatmen, woodmen, axemen, etc. (and that in a way was an
eloquent testimony to the ways in which they were psychologically bound
or chained).
It happened that one of the crew came into my camp and saw an







anthology of English and American poetry. He opened it and read, by
chance, it seemed:

Tyger tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night

He found this Incomprehensible and commented 'tigers do not
burn.' We had seen leopards and tigers in the forest. Furthermore he did
not understand what forests of the night' could mean. My first impulse
was to tell him that it was a difficult poem and perhaps he should leave
it alone. And then I was struck by an illustration that I felt might help him
to relate to Blake's imagery. I had with me a book on pre-columbian art
and I turned to the ancient calendar which as you know was completed
just before the conquest of ancient Mexico. I explained to him that it was
a calendar that should be read in conjunction with certain codices or
signals that bear on astronomy, legend, astrology, etc. And then I said
to him suddenly 'those lines could have been written by a Mexican poet.
He replied 'how could that be? Did you not say that Blake was an English
poet? I explained that the codices to which I had referred place unusual
emphasis on the tiger-imagery and that such imagery was a major
element in the calendar. I explained that the Aztecs believed that the
cosmos was governed by certain leaping tigers or jaguars these were
suns, curious suns and that vast aeons of time would move or give way
to new dimensions with the appearance of a new sun or tiger. This was
a rough, perhaps crude way of explaining a remarkable myth but it
helped to throw a new light, as it were, into Blake's lines. I went on to
suggest that if he looked around into the sky and the river and the
rainforest and the interwoven tapestry of the landscape he would gain a
threshold into the meaning of 'forests of the night.' For that tapestry
enhanced the constellations, the stars which came so close to the tops of
the trees at night above the clearing we had cut in the forest.
We were camped not far above a waterfall. Take a stroll and look
into the waterfall. You will see the lights streaking through, striped
reflections like a tiger leaping through. And remember that the tiger is
one of the most ancient myths and symbols of the South Americas. The
tiger is also a kind of drum I would say. The stripes upon it can be related
to the drum of genesis from which a certain music erupts. All this bears
upon a cross-cultural dialogue in Blake's lines with ancient Mexico and
South America. Blake would have been unconscious of this but here one
perceives the mystery of the universal imagination as it discloses itself in
all sorts of cross-cultural connections and tapestries.'
I had no idea what bearing this would have on his perception of
things but in subsequent conversations it became clear to me that he had
begun to look at the world around him in a re-visionary way and that the
concept about which I had spoken had done much to loosen the frame
in which he was confined as though that frame were ordained by fate or
history.
So it was that I came to perceive the matter of illiteracy and semi-
literacy in a new and startling light that was to address me years later in








re-visionary strategies I employed in writing fiction.
Obviously there were ways to deal with illiteracy that invest in the
mechanics of the alphabet. But one wonders do such teaching mechan-
ics genuinely breach the psychology of illiteracy that has its roots in the
hierarchy of functions and a subconscious alliance with that hierarchy
through frames or roles determined by the rigidity of cultures?
The universal imagination if it has any value or meaning has
its roots in subconscious and unconscious strata that disclose them-
selves profoundly within re-visionary strategies through intuitive clues
that appear in a text one creates. That text moves or works in concert
with other texts to create a multi-textual dialogue. Let me seek to
illustrate what I mean through Carnival, one of my recent fictions. There
were two epigraphs to Carnival. One is from Dante, The Divine Comedy
- the translation is by Laurence Binyon. I'll read that epigraph:

Here all misgivings must thy mind reject,
Here cowardice must die and be no more.
We are come to the place I told thee to expect

His hand on mine, to uphold my falterings,
He led me on into the secret things.

Now that epigraph was deliberately chosen. On the other hand
there's an epigraph from Norman O. Brown's book Love's Body. I had
completed Carnival when I started reading this book, sort of glancing
through it, and came upon a passage which startled me because it
appeared to validate the imagination-strategy I pursued in Carnival. I
use the word 'validate' to imply proof as well. I am suggesting that
imaginative fiction may be proven or validated. This is not a dogmatic
assertion. It is a personal view, it is something I discovered. It seems to
me that the imaginative writer especially when he diverges from
conventional realism may find his or her strategy validated by live
fossils in the soil of tradition of which he may know nothing at all. Such
live fossils or archetypal myth break into the narrative on which he is
working, take on a different form as if a subtle evolution is occurring in
unconscious strata of memory that erupt into the conscious mind. One
can see the outline of the ancient, live fossil-myth but it is charged with
different edges, different implications, different complications. One
revises one's drafts by scanning these closely. One comes upon what I
tend to call 'intuitive clues' which appear to have been planted by another
hand. It is as If a daemon navigates within the Imageries in the text. And
that navigation assumes startling force. You look at these intuitive clues
and then you revise through them you concentrate with all the energy
at your command on the draft as if it is alive, a living text. I would imagine
this strategy was known to the ancient Greeks and indeed to the ancient
Arawaks of South America. The ancient Greeks believed that their sculp-
tures would come alive as they sculpted. As they broke Into marble or
stone or whatever materials with which they worked they saw outlines
and features planted, it would seem, by another hand a hand that arose







from unconscious or subconscious selves or self. In that way the
sculpture spoke to them. And they revised, changed, altered, drew
different complications into the work as it came alive. The ancient
Arawaks likewise sculpted the cherry tree and it came alive. The same
principle I would imagine operated. Thus cultures far removed in time
and space were involved in a cross-cultural loom or medium of creativity.
May I return to the very first line of the epigraph drawn from
Love's Body:
The wanderings of the soul after death are pre-natal ad-
ventures, a journey by water in a ship which is itself a
goddess, to the gates of rebirth.
I was instantly struck because I recognized an important strand
in the strategy here which had been running through the novel, but
which one needed to read as one consulted all the images in the canvas
of the novel, to see how one image played back on another so that you
began to see the strategy appearing as if it is a subtle complex evolution
of the validating myth. It is not a static design, it is a constantly moving
shifting design, the outlines are there, changing. One can recognize, as
it were, one's dialogue with an ancient world of which one knew nothing
but which lay buried in the unconscious. Let us remember that
Caribbean literature (which is a new literature but which has its
paradoxical roots in ancient legacies, in ancient Europe, in ancient
Africa, ancient India, and above all in the ancient world of the Americas,
the pre-Columbian world) possesses strata in a universal unconscious.
Anyway, let us look at that line again:
The wanderings of the soul after death are pre-natal ad-
ventures, a journey by water in a ship which is itself a
goddess, to the gates of rebirth.
Let us take one of the first indications of that strategy. It appears
in Carnival when Masters runs into his house. Masters is the Dantesque
guide. He has died but returns to guide Jonathan Weyl, the major
character. Masters comes from the grave to unveil his childhood to
Jonathan Weyl. He tells Jonathan something about his adventures on
the sea shore and how he ran.into the house, ran away from a sinister
figure. He arrives in the house he is in the house now:
His trapped sobbing breath had ceased and he moved
gingerly (as he had crawled gingerly like a king crab on the
foreshore) toward his parents' room. The door was very
slightly ajar. He was about to rap or push when he
glimpsed something through the slit of space. It was his
mother's tears that he saw, tears that masked her and
suddenly made her into the mother of a god in the play of
Carnival. She was sitting at a mirror and her tears were
reflected in the glass. (Carnival, Faber and Faber, Lon-
don, 1985 p.26)
So there you get your first clue to do with the mother of a god. The
passage I have read speaks of a goddess. So you have your first
intimations of a mother of a god. The passage goes on:
She did not turn. He did not disclose he was there. He felt







nevertheless that she knew; he felt as she touched her
glass breasts in the mirror that she knew he was inside
her, halfway between a wall of glass and a cavity of flesh,
that she knew he was looking through her into a kind of
fire that mingled with her tears. (p.27)
Now there you have this strange encounter or implicit dialogue
between Masters and the foetus in the womb. He sees himself as a foetus
in a womb. You get your pre-natal adventure, your pre-natal text of
which the epigraph speaks. May I remind you "The wanderings of the soul
after death are pre-natal adventures...
You have your pre-natal text, you have the wanderings of the soul,
the dead Masters who comes back. One is now immersed in the intuitive
imagination at a certain depth. In a way you can see that Dante, when
he chose his guides, did not do so arbitrarily. We are aware now that we
know very little about the traditions which informed Dante and
Shakespeare. Frances Yates has made an effort to salvage those
traditions. But what I seem to learn is that Dante's guides are intuitive,
real, guides who came up out of his unconscious, subconscious; spoke
to him and therefore linked him to the past. What I am saying here is that
one is now involved in a situation in which the guide, who is substantial
to the fiction and appears to help in the revision as one concentrates very
deeply on what one is doing, begins to unveil a series of adventures, so
to speak, such as I have been describing within a re-visionary strategy.
That re-visionary strategy breaks the uniform mould of realism. No
realist document would speak of conversing with the foetus in the womb.
Thus the realist text is broken and it is as if you have entered a realm of
multiple texts.
There is another text secreted elsewhere which addresses one, a
text one tends to eclipse. Now, one must remember that many of those
men I spoke of, the men with whom I travelled in the interior, lived in a
world where so many things had been eclipsed, so many things lost. Even
though they worked in the forest they know very little about the people
who had passed this way. Now let us resume our analysis of the passage
I read. We have the flesh and the glass. The passage speaks of glass
breasts in the mirror, of a wall of glass and cavity of flesh. That is an
important clue which will assist us in the next quotation from Carnival:
Queen Jennifer stepped out of a shower, out of a waterfall,
out of the ocean, into the bedroom. I was lying half-asleep,
half awake on her bed. She handcuffed me to her body as
to the mast of a ship. (p.95)
Now, look back at the epigraph a journey by water in a ship
which is itself a goddess. So 'she handcuffs me to her body as to the mast
of a ship.' So we have another element coming in, in which you can see
the design of the ancient myth though with different edges and compli-
cations.
The third quotation that I would like to glance at is the following:
The storm hit the vessel at last. The glass sides of the ship
darkened.








Now note that 'glass' comes in here. We have seen the glass
earlier, the glass breasts in the mirror, the cavity of flesh and the glass:
The glass sides of the ship darkened and it was as if I saw
it now, I saw the sea, in Masters' eyes. [Masters is the
guide, the dead guide] The sea was black and white fire ran
along the ridges and valleys of space. I held to my dream-
support for bleak life and yet this was my leap into
Purgatory all over again, purgation through the terror of
beauty. (p.91)
So there we have our ship. What is astonishing is that in revising
the work with complex concentration, in sensing the force of the intuitive
guide, one begins to elaborate a strategy, which, if you read the novel
carefully, one would see, in the very first line of the epigraph fromLove's
Body. But it appears, as I said, in a subtle evolved form. It has different
edges, different complications, different values. Nevertheless you can
see the outlines there. So that the force of the thing makes it seem that
one is in dialogue with the past and yet one has an original voice. One is
sustained by the past and yet one _ias an original voice. One is in dialogue
with something very ancient, and yet one has an original voice.
Now the last part of the epigraph from Love's Body 'the gates of
rebirth'. That comes at the very end of the novel in which I actually quote
a line from The Divine Comedy, but I'll just read the last part:
"Whether she is Masters' child or not", said Amaryllis,
taking my hand with one of hers and holding the child to
her breast with the other, "she runs in parallel with all
wasted lives to be redeemed in time. And in that spirit she
is his child. She is our child. We killed our parents,
remember, in Carnival logic even as they, besieged by fear,
fear of a blasted future, were tempted to destroy us. And
now in mutual heart, mutual uncertainty across genera-
tions, across seas and spaces, as to who is divine parent,
who human child, who will parent the future, who inherit
the future, we surrender ourselves to each other. The love
that moves the sun and the other stars[This is the Dante
line, so there is another text inserted there deliberately,
but yet coming in as part of the multiple texts, the multi-
textual fiction] The love that moves the sun and the other
stars moves us now, my dearest husband, my dearest
Jonathan, to respond with originality to each other's
Carnival seas of innocence and guilt, each other's Carni-
val skies of blindness and vision". (pp. 171-172)
And there you have the implicit gateway into rebirth. This is not
the first time I have discovered I discovered it in The Guyana Quartet
but long after the novels were published a validating or proving premise.
In Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness I discovered it there too but
after this novel had been submitted and virtually published. Carnival
was the closest I came to arriving almost immediately upon a validating
myth and I was able to use that epigraph from Love's Body. The point
I am making is that revision is a much more complex matter than people








think. Revision is not Just correcting the grammar or the syntax. It's a
matter of coming into attunement with a profound concept of creativity
rooted in live fossil and archetypal myth. It has to do with the way one
scans the draft, picks up elements in the draft, of which one is uncon-
scious, unconscious of planting them there. I have discussed this with
students in the United States in my creative writing classes. That is how
I drew them into revising their work. And students are sometimes
dumbfounded when I say "But look, you've put that there. There it is .
Now what can you make of it? Look at it, and let's see if you can revise
through it." And as the student revises, as the writer revises, an
unpredictable strategy begins to appear. It calls for immense concentra-
tions because one is running against the grain of one's time, which is
authoritarian realism. Or if not that, some kind of nihilism, or if not that,
carefully calculated things to do with sex and violence, etc. One is really
immersed in a strategy in which one pays the closest attention to the
language of the buried imagination erupting into consciousness. You
listen to the radio or the newspapers and there are people all the time
saying: "Oh we're looking for a form of words which will allow x and y to
come together" and the form of words is always dismissed as some kind
of irrelevance But language is world. It may be that one may never
discover how a strategy one pursues can be proven or validated because
one may never come upon the validating premise. And critics rarely
approach imaginative work in this way. Yet my hopes remain profound
and rich because I believe when fiction can be proven or validated by live
myth, living fossil-strata, the confidence of the humanities must rest on
something other than fashion or some other complacent ideology.
Unless a society is prepared to revise complexly the various
levels on which it exists, to move with depth and to see that the creative
arts are a profound phenomenon and as important as science and that
we need very careful concentration on the issues of the imagination -
(we don't want pundits on the television who discuss a novel as if it is junk
food) then illiteracies of the imagination will become endemic, virtu-
ally incurable. But I cannot believe that a best-seller age, a mass-media
age, is destined to eclipse creativity as a meaningful paradox born of age-
old truths and the spirit of innovation and originality.



























































35








MICHAEL GILKES


HAMLET, PRINCE OF DARKNESS
('What, hath this thing appeared again?')

By night
in this enchanted wood
a jewelled toad comes down to drink
its own reflection
in the stream.
Bubbled eyes, tender as love, reflect
the curvature of earth,
the moon's bright beam.
Its squat, humped body settles on a rock
to dream.

By day
the wattled toad becomes
a thing of dread:
its slimy back and mottled head
are odious, obscene.
The princess hurries from her bed
to wake the sleeping queen.

"Alas! To know what I know!
To see what I have seen!"


WOODBINE

In those slow burning days
quietude held passion.
Flambouyantes, brooding in heat
hung out red parasols, dropping cool shadows
on back and head. Sunlight splin-
tered East Street canal. Noiseless
we lay, bent pin-hooks baited with bread,
angling for sun-fish.
A lizard, noosed in grass, threshing itself to death,
was common play.
Boys will be boys.

But there was that insistent thing
in our flesh that tore
when we ran in the night
dizzy with freedom; that made us gorge
green mangoes, starapples, sweet bursting sapodillas,
taught us to store pleasure
without thought of price.








At Mrs Cash-
tinheiro's we mixed mauby and compress
dark syrup marbling the ice.
Remember Mary-bruk-iron, legendary whore,
empress of vice?
Where now is Lengery, that towering skeleton
whom we would jeer?
And there was plump and married Oona who
gave our Big John his first sweet taste, I think,
of sin, to our vicarious delight
and fear.
Innocence, always precarious in those days,
vanished that night.

Children at play,
We pulled life by the root
every new day.
Old Baije, mute, vengeful woodsman
could scare us away
from the great Tamarind tree,
but not from knowledge of its sweet
and sour
fruit.


JANE KING HIPPOLYTE

INTERCITY DUB FOR JEAN

Brixton groans -
From the horror of the hard weight
Of history
Where the whites flagellate
in their ancestry
And the blacks hold the stone
And they press it to their hearts
And London is a hell
in many many parts.
But your voice rings true
From the edge of hell
Cause the music is the love
And you sing it so well.

And I travel through the country
On the inter-city train
And the weather may be bad
But the sperm of the rain
Wriggles hope, scribbles hope
Cross the windows of the train
And the autumn countryside







Has a green life still
And the rain-sperm says
It will come again, it will
It will come, it will come
It will come again
New rich life from the bitter
And dark and driving rain -
And you run like water
Over Brixton soil
Writing hope on the windows
Bringing light through the walls
Like the water you connect
With the light above
Like the water writing making
The green life swell
Cause the music is the love
And you sing it so well.

Now I cannot give to you
What you gave to me
But one small part
Of your bravery
Makes me stand up to say
That I want to make them see
That you showed me the way
That the way is me
Like the way is you
And the way is we.
And the love is in the water
In the wells pooled below
And the love is in the light
And the cold cold snow
And the rain lances down
From the light to the well
And it points to heaven
And it points to hell
And the love is real
Make the music swell
Cause the music is the love
And you sing it so well.

There's a factory blowing smoke-rings
Cross the railway line
You know it took me time to learn
That this country wasn't mine
And I want to go back home
To swim in the sunset bay
Feel the water and the light
Soft-linking night and day







Like the music makes a bridge -
But there's Joy here too
And I might not have seen it
If I hadn't heard you.
And I hope now I'll be writing
This poem all my life
For the black city world
Where the word is a knife
That cuts through the love
And divides up the life.
For you saved me from a trap
Just before I fell
Cause the music is the love
And you sing it so well.

The Brixton-battered sisters
Hissed their bitterness and hate
With their black man the oppressor
And death the white race fate
And they don't want to build
No bridge no gate -
And I nearly turned away
In pain and rage and fear
Till I heard your voice
Ringing clarion-clear
And you burst like a flower
From the sad sad soil
And you blew like a breeze
Round the shut-tight hall
And you danced like a leaf
And you sang like a bell -
You said Music reaches heaven
And music changes hell
Cause the music is the love
And you sing it so well.








STREET LOVING, LOVING STREETS


by HEMRAJ MUNIRAM


I was about to retire for the night at my dwelling place at the South
Street side of the Supreme Court building when Bullet started barking
madly at something moving in the rain towards us. It turned out to be
Naomi and her shivering puppy.
They were soaked to the skin, and while Naomi wasn't shivering,
she was visibly uncomfortable. I hushed Bullet, then rummaged up from
my plastic onion bag an old shirt which I handed to Naomi. She relieved
herself of the bundle she had slung on her shoulder and accepted the
shirt. In a while she was dry, but for the dress she wore.
"T ankyuh fo' leh me change, mistuh," she said. I straightened
up the box-boards that constituted a make-shift room for me on that cold
pavement and discreetly turned away for her to change into dry clothing.
Bullet was compassionately licking Naomi's puppy's mangy skin,
apparently to provide warmth from his tongue.
I did not object. Bullet had also suffered from mange when I
discovered him by the Stabroek Market wharf a year ago.
Naomi finished dressing and wrung the rain-water from her
dress. I advised her to spread it out on one of my box-board walls.
Naomi spent the night with me, during which she rested her head
.n a tattered Bible wrapped in cellophane.
She awoke next morning as I was feeding our two pets some pieces
of tennis-rolls I had managed to gather from the waste drums in Stabroek
Market the previous day.
"Yuh is de bes' gentleman of dese streets, mistuh. Yuh offer me
lodging pon yuh small bedding while you yuhself sit an' brace pon cold
walls content as ever. Yuh ent even try fo' intafere wid me, like some hoo-
ligans does do. Yuh is really a Good Samaritan. God bless yuh, mistuh."
When we had finished packing our belongings in our respective
bundles, we trudged to the old wharf at the head of Robb Street to cook
our breakfast, as I do every morning and evening.
We were early, for none of my companions who also lived on the
streets elsewhere was there, as is customary. I put the two claybricks in
place, so that they sandwiched the firewood I had saved up nearby.
Having lit the fire, I then proceeded to place my butter can of water on the
claybricks when I spotted Roland approaching us with fish in his hands.
Roland is a strange person. Long before the advent of our local
Rastas, Roland has been sporting heavy dread-locks on his head. And
Roland gads about Georgetown all day long with his pants front open so
that his private parts are always exposed to the public view. Sometimes
you would see Roland's face painted with coats of chalk-dust as he moves
proudly about.
But Roland is helpful and generous, and wears a permanent
smile; his face never expresses any negative emotions.
So we fried Roland's fish, using some lard Naomi offered us from







a Nescafe bottle. That, coupled with boiled plantains and bush tea, com-
prised our breakfast.
"Mistuh, ah goin' by Bourda Mall fo' pass me time today aftah ah
beg me day's living. Leh we meet dere dis mid-day, nuh? I does need some
sensible company fo gafwid."
I felt honoured on hearing this from Naomi, and promised to meet
her again. Roland, Naomi and myself then went our separate ways to
earn our day's keep.
That day at Bourda Mall turned out to be one of the best days of
my life. Sitting in the shade on a concrete bench and mercifully fanned
by a cool breeze, Naomi again called me a gentleman. After learning that
my full name was Benjamin Horatio Nelson, she asked me where I learned
to speak "proper English".
Tears dripped down my face when I told her how I was once a
Language Master at one of Georgetown's top high schools in the days of
my youth; how I was jilted by a beautiful switch-board operator at the
Telephone Exchange, then situated adjacent Donkey City; how I gravely
suffered a nervous breakdown as a result and lost my job; how I never
got another job and was neglected by my parents; and how I was
introduced to street life by Matthews.
Naomi knew Matthews. After all, who would fail to notice the
short, bearded character in his ever-present suit and pants with pockets
bulging with papers of all sorts? Matthews is still going strong. I am
indebted to him for many things. He is well-educated also, and spends
almost all day reading newspapers at the National Library.
Whenever we meet, he starts recounting all the events he thinks
I should know about, having read not only our local newspapers, but also
such foreign ones as the Trinidad Guardian and Barbados Advocate. Now
and then he would pull out from his pocket a dog-eared copy of TIME
or NEWSWEEK, donated to him by a lawyer whose office he frequents in
Croal Street. He attributes his gratitude to the same lawyer for the suits,
ties, trousers and shoes he usually wears.
Matthews literally lives on reading; food is his least concern, and
this explains why he is seldom seen begging as we do. "Dat man really
gat stamina," Naomi remarked. "He not only a book worm, but a book
god."
Naomi was right. Matthews would explain to you world affairs
with such ease that even a seasoned politician would be amazed. Besides,
there isn't a subject under the sun that Matthews doesn't know some-
thing about. You feel very enlightened when he talks to you, and it would
be uncultured not to invite him for a morsel at meal time. Matthews is
my best friend, and as I recalled my past life for Naomi's benefit that day,
she started crying.
"Yuh lucky God send yuh a bes' frien'. For donkey years is me an
God alone bin treading dese sinful streets. Not a soul to comfort me with
sweet words but dis Bible in me bundle. Jonathan only come in me life
de other day," she lamented as she tenderly caressed her mangy puppy.
I immediately proposed to Naomi that we live together, since
contrary to her thinking, I was very lonely also. I told her how much I







admired a religious woman like herself, and that our lives might be happy
once we shed our loneliness and shared our responsibility for soliciting
our daily bread.
I wiped Naomi's tears away with my shirt tail, and she looked
squarely into my eyes and said, "De Lord don't come, but he does send."
Naomi and I decided that it would not be convenient to sleep
beside the Supreme Court building anymore, for reasons of privacy, and
she suggested the G.P.O. building pavement instead. I objected, on the
grounds that Sajiwan resided there, and he would be a nuisance to us.
Sajiwan is addicted to methylated spirit, and everytime he drinks he
picks a quarrel with anyone nearby.
She agreed, and we settled tentatively for a bushy vacant lot at
the corner of Regent and Alexander Streets.
With indescribable enthusiasm we related our good fortune to
Roland, Matthews, Senseh and Saywack that evening when we as-
sembled at the wharf for our dinner of metagee, prepared by Naomi.
Everyone applauded, and agreed to the proposition that Naomi
continue to cook every day. "She gat a nice han'. Ah bite me tongue eatin'
dis metagee, man." Senseh remarked. Roland gave an approving smile.
Matthews shoved his hands into his bulky pockets and shook his head
professorially. Saywack pointed out that the occasion called for celebra-
tion. Again, everyone agreed, and promised to buy the best with his day's
collection.
The next morning, Naomi and I woke up very early, and, after
bathing at the stand-pipe near the Fire Station, proceeded to the wharf,
where she made me read no less than five psalms. I hadn't prayed since
Noah was a boy. Now, Naomi cajoled me to practise praying.
Evening came, and when Naomi and I arrived at the wharf,
Senseh and Saywack greeted us and motioned us to a bench which they
had 'borrowed' from Vendors Arcade and then decorated. A massive slice
of beef, wrapped in eddoe leaves, lay on the ground nearby.
Matthews and Roland arrived shortly, flaunting a sizeable piece
of cardboard, and brimming with smiles. Then Matthews, Santa Claus-
like, pulled out a brand-new silver ring from his pocket.
"Wheh alyuh t'ief dat?" Senseh demanded.
"It's like this," explained Matthews, "we demonstrated all over this
city today, and with the funds we collected, we bought this humble
wedding ring."
"Demonstrate wid what?" shouted Saywack.
Roland confidently turned around the cardboard, on which was
boldly written:

BAN POVERTY
MAKE US RICH!








SASENARINE PERSAUD


VISIT I

Here away from the city
I see no houses.
For miles man and
Nature fuse irrevocably.
Freckles bleat on rice-fields
Turned pasture.
Dots moo and nibble grass
Prick-pin-white Egrets
Service cows and glean
Plowed fields for specks
Of food, or wisdom or love...
Down, around, searching I see no time -
Nothing except endless webs
Of love whistling through ages gone/Ungone.


VISIT II

Nothing and everything
Rises from Dharti Mata.
Riding this tractor through trails
Bordered by black-sage, a combine
Gathers golden rice and is lost in motion.
Hardee plumed birds dive through limbs
Of splashed green, (Glad for rare human presence)
Flirting melodies louder than this tractor's throb.
A flock of gaulings silently wheel
Into the air ahead a magic arc -
Lead the path and swerve smoothly Eastward.
Everywhere Krishn's Flute sings in my ear but it is
Radha who chases this tractor, swallows it
From everyside and allows its passage on your hair.


VISIT III

Dusk, my love, gathers your skirt
Around my eyes
And what a blessed vision
Assails my sight.
Dark clouds flaying the westward sky
Are dotted red -
The Sindhoor in your head.
Drakes come home to roost
Dipping from the sky,








Gliding unto the soft surface
Of the pond -
Mating with moisture.
Gentle ripples tug my crying toes
O come. O come, my love!


VISIT IV

They stand in clustered solitude
Honey-smooth-brown,
Clean-black-spotted-white,
Coffee creamed, smooth.
A flicker of tail at irritant flies.
A stamp of feet
A chew of cud
Above all a motionlessness;
Meditation on the sky and beyond -
The mysteries of loving.
I feel them look down, deep into themselves.
I see no beef nor mutton or meat.
I see us, our soul, our love holding fast to
The settling dusk on this delicious land.


VISIT V (SURUJ PURAN)

You slippered on the morning air,
And there was a flicker of sunbeams.
I searched and could not see
I felt and could not feel
Your eyes on mine and you in me.
The Pandit expounded -
The lady lost her pin
In lightless house
Went outside in brilliant
Moonlight to find it
Brought me down
Into my dark self
I delved
And found the wisp of your smile EVERYWHERE








PAMELA MORDECAI


PLUS

The plus eludes you: synchronic
thread from thing to thing, as grains
associate in sand as waters
run to rivers, seas, as man is
bound in love to man so am I
bondaged; it is time you learned these
chains: and diachronic exigence
invoicing actions for account,
withdrawal or receipt; you can-
not, dear, pile debt on debt against
the sweet collateral of un-
diminished wifely love. All charges
get called in: the best investments
badly husbanded fall into
bankruptcy. And so I beg you
not to spend your substance -
a life waits for your tendering.



EXEUNT

the moon hung there
bald as your head

you said: its bed
my sweet, or else

goodbye. It seemed
a pity, but that

was no choice
I tucked my tail

under, as dogs repulsed
and dancers do

and turned and went.
Exeunt, you and I.








COOKlAN


by ROOPLALL MONAR


Ask any local cricketer from Leonora Estate to Blairmont Estate
in Guyana who is this chap call Pandit. The cricketer would watch you
straight in you face as if you stupid, click he tongue like turkey, inhale
one draught fresh air, and sigh as if he miss something precious.
"Ha boy! Pandit! Eh-eh, he is a specialist in cooking mutton
curry," the cricketer would say, smacking he tongue as if the mutton
curry in front he eye... "Anytime ahwe cricket team going to play against
Lusignan cricket team, by hooks or crooks, I bound to get in that team.
Know why? Is Pandit self cooking the mutton curry and dalpurri for the
two cricket team. He is Lusignan cricket team master cookman, you
hear? Boy is a love to eat Pandit mutton curry while them two team retire
fo lunch. Eh-eh, is like you get new life in you body. You could bowl more
longer than Wesley Hall in the hot hot sun."
Pandit rep gone so far that even them sport-loving whiteman and
white women from Georgetown city who does attend presentation in
Lusignan Community does be carried-away like a child seeing Father
Christmas the moment Pandit succulent mutton curry drop in they
mouth. If they ain't careful they could bite off they tongue. Them
whiteman does sigh yeh yeh, the mutton curry gravee running down they
lip, eye red and watery, the taste biting they tongue.
Eh-eh, some eating mutton curry voraciously as if is the last time
they seeing mutton curry. Some filling they stomach until they can't
move, lost to know how mutton curry could be prepared in such a mouth-
watering manner. The garlic and geerah still on you tongue. Is like
reading good poetry one whiteman say.
"That Indian hand set to prepare mutton curry," Mr. Douglas'd
tell them chaps one Sunday afternoon in Lusignan Centre. This time Mr.
Douglas come pissing drunk after he stuff down bowl after bowl of
mutton curry, using he finger like fork. Then he lick them fingers as if
them fingers is mutton self, sucking it chu chu... .
With all due respect them chaps had to lift-off Mr. Douglas from
the chair that afternoon. Mr. Douglas is a big thing in Bookers. Was in
the 1960s time. Bookers been own most of the sugar plantations in
Guyana. All the while Mr. Douglas belching, belching then he let-go a
fart. It sound like thunder. Mr. Douglas feel a great ease. Was ready to
attack more mutton curry.
This time Mr. Douglas fart smell pure mutton curry. And you dare
not laugh when Mr. Douglas fart. Mr. Douglas is a big thing. One bad
word from he mouth and Lusignan cricket team come in shambles. A
good word from he, and any member in the cricket team could get an
office job. You only have to know to spellyou name and add two and two...
In truth is Pandit mutton curry does take Mr. Douglas to
Lusignan Community Centre whenever the cricket team invite another
team to play cricket. Them chaps say Mr. Douglas navel string left in the








Centre, in the kitchen, where Pandit does cook the mutton.
"Never know a whiteman who like mutton curry like Mr. Douglas,"
them chaps does say. "If all whiteman been stay like Mr. Douglas ahwe
Indian people could be far in dis country."
One Sunday evening Lusignan cricket team was celebrating
victory. They'd wash Enmore cricket team for a song. Two to one. Them
chaps say Enmore cricketers stuff so much mutton curry during the
luncheon interval that they couldn't able to bowl when they land-in the
ground. Then Lusignan star batsmen Hakim and Solo hitting the ball
blam, bladam. Is sheer four and six. Them chaps say if B.L. Crombie was
present he would turn commentator.
And if you'd see sluggish fielding! Eh-eh, them Enmore players
claim the ball was too quick for they grasp. They been moving in the
ground as if egg stick between they leg. They say the mutton curry get
them drunk. They only belching and farting in the field, and they could
empty-down mugs of ice-water. And the joke is, Enmore is a strong team.
Them Lusignan spectators really taunt them bitch. "Stuff more
mutton curry. Stuff more..."
While celebrating this victory the same evening Mr. Douglas
shout, the mutton curry gravee dripping down he lip blop blop... "Where
is the cookman?" Mr. Douglas ask, commandinglyjust like how Estate
manager barking at you.
The Centre caretaker been believe he would fall down. You see
Mr. Douglas voice'd roar like cannon. This time the Lusignan cricketers
serenading in the Centre hall, drinking and smoking, laughing he he he.
And cricket history flying out they head. Eh-eh, is Hall and Griffith,
Sobers and Kanhai, Godfrey Evans and Walley Grout! Kensington Oval,
Lords, Bourda Green... Is like the whole Wisden in them cricketers head.
Meanwhile the caretaker task was to get Pandit for Mr. Douglas.
The caretaker heart in he hand. Can't afford to vex Mr. Douglas. And
where is this blasted man Pandit? the caretaker say, checking the Centre
kitchen, the library, the film room and the store-room. Can't vex Mr.
Douglas...
"Is where de hell you been"? the caretaker ask soon as he spot
Pandit, standing in the outside hall smoking, and watching the empty
ground.
"Is what you mean"? Pandit ask in anticipation. "Mean to tell me
the mutton curry done?".
"The big man self, Mr. Douglas want see you," the caretaker talk.
"And is important."
Sametime Pandit feel a chillyness run thru he spine. He heart
beating bap bap... Mr. Douglas! That big man! But is an order. Pandit
had to go. Mr. Douglas is a big thing in Bookers. He out the cigarette
quick time and follow the caretaker, thinking how to answer the big man
soon as the big man start talk to him in backra man English. Them words
so crisp and cutting, you would believe is Dutch. And the big man self
want see me.
Soon as Pandit glimpse the big man in the Centre bar corridor he
start tremble.








"This is de cookman bass," the caretaker point at Pandit and say.
Then he hurry to refill Mr. Douglas glass.
Mr. Douglas eye'd red as if it turn bloodshot, and the words
gurgling in he mouth, mix with spittle. You would believe he is in a
different world.
"Take a seat man," Mr. Douglas order Pandit.
Quick time Pandit find a chair, still trembling. This time the
cricketers and a handful of fans, still drinking and gaffing, guffawing like
pigs. Some seated in chairs. Others with full glass in they hand saunter
about. The atmosphere lively. The scent of brown rum and mutton curry
rolling about like rainclouds. The caretaker and assistant busy.
"Tell me the secret of your cooking. Why your mutton curry is so
tasty?" Mr. Douglas ask persuasively, smacking he tongue, eyes flitting
drunkenly. Mutton curry still settle on he lip.
"Me me na know bass," Pandit say uneasily, the words choke in
he throat. He could never make head-an-tail of this backra man language
never mind he working in Lusignan Estate for donkey years now...
"But how you don't know man?" Mr. Douglas question impa-
tiently, eyeing at Pandit in friendliness.
Pandit feel Mr. Douglas eye want bore he inside. O God! this is a
big man and me can't displease he. But is what me going tell he? Is how
me does do the mutton piece by piece til it done cook, eh? But me have
to tell Mr. Douglas something. Then in a flash Pandit recall he baap...
"Never fraid white people na matter you can't spell you name.
Always get commonsense in you head. They would respect you fo that..."
he baap, a darkskin Madrasi man from South India always drum them
words in Pandit ears.
After pandit mumma'd drop dead with bronchitis he baap self
bring he up, teaching he how to cook all them Indian dishes which he
baap know. Pandit was about eight years old, attending the Estate
school, not too far from the Sugar Factory.
He baap'd never believe in much eddication. "Once you get com-
monsense people going to respect you," he baap use to say in the dark
logie near the fig tree. Them words stick in Pandit head like glue.
Attending school make no sense to Pandit. Wasjusta formality as though
he marking time. He feel more at home sling-shotting at birds, thieflng
jamoon in cow pasture, playing marble, bathing in the canal where fine
shrimp prickingyou like needle,Jumping like flying fish in the blackwater
canal.
And was a blessing in disguise that morning when teacher Jodhan
flog Pandit. A girl student complaint teacher Jodhan that Pandit curse
she. Teacher Jodhan let-go bakers' dozen at Pandit behind. Pandit bawl
for murder. The class watching at teacher Jodhan with wide-eye. If a pin
been drop you could hear.
Pandit march out school with hurt in he eye, he behind biting as
if ants crawling on it. When he show he baap he behind, he baap want
overturn the logie. Passion turn into froth on he chillam-stain lip, he
brown teeth grinding yap yap. "Teacha beat am me betta," he baap talk
and fly out the logie, Pandit following.








Teacher Jodhan want fly out the school window soon as he see
Pandit baap and Pandit walking straight at he class, the hackla stick in
Pandit baap hand. Pandit baap still grinding he teeth, froth leaking down
he mouth now. But is the hackia stick which cause teacher Jodhan to
shake like cane-arrow.
Teacher Jodhan know them sugar workers don't mince matters
too much. And they na get head to reason. The fastest thing they could
resort to is the hackia soon asyou eye-pass them, or want push you finger
in they eye.
Is quite a few bombastic teachers nearly get they head split-open
like coconut. They'd pass P.T. and believe they know the world of
teaching. That whipping a child could discipline he head to take
education... pounds shilling and pence... Baba black sheep have you any
wool....
But was the other way around with sugar workers. The hacKia
stick does talk for them. If them bombastic teachers didn't request a
quick transfer they skull would be fractured with hackia stick lash. And
teacher Jodhan know all the incidents that centred around the infamous
hackia. Sugar workers love to use it.
Teacher Jodhan eye been spell terror. The chalk slip thru he
finger flups, and rebound on the floor blops. Then he watch at the
window on the eastern school wall. If Pandit baap only attempt to fire the
hackia at he, he would make a quick dash like monkey, flying thru the
windowjust like a cat with a stolen-fish in he mouth. Meanwhile the class
come quiet like mice.
"Teacha teacha," Pandit baap advance in front the class and
shout threateningly.
Teacher Jodhan back-back, watching the hackia in Pandit baap
hand. He eye wide-open, averaging the spring he going to make to the
window.
"Teacha teacha," Pandit baap say, pointing he left finger at
Jodhan, inching-inching at he. "Scratch am me betta name out school
book. Scratch am." Then Pandit baap suck he teeth schuuu, tap he
hackia on the floor, eye teacher Jodhan like one hungry lion, and walk
out. "Scratch am"... Pandit following.
Teacher Jodhan sigh, then he wipe he face with he handkerchief
and whisper: "Praise God. Never trust them coolie with hackia stick."
This is the way how Pandit quit school. He start haunt the cow
pasture, Cabbage Dam, Mule-stable, doing all the mischievious things
which fly in he mind. While he baap in the caneflelds working, Pandit and
one-two boys killing the whole day.
But as the weeks turn into months, months turn into years,
Pandit baap diligent like a school master does show Pandit piece by piece
how to prepare potato curry, chicken curry, mutton curry. "If me drop
am dead, you going know to feed you own belly," Pandit baap does advise
Pandit in the logie kitchen, the spice, garlic, and massala want stifle you
nose.
When Pandit put-on long pants and believe herself a big man, and
start work in Estate Mule-gang, he'd know the art of preparing a tasty








curry, and was wanted by wedding-houses in the Estate as the chief
cookman.
And due to he cooking he start mix herself among drivers, book-
keeper, dispenser, and overseer, specially at wedding-houses. But the
moment them overseer and the book-keeper and dispenser start talk in
backra man English, Pandit slipping out the company. Them words too
big for he. And if the overseer should turn and ask Pandit for his
comment, is like asking a door post. Is how he could answer when he na
understand A to Z? Talk in Pandit own mix madrasi and creolese tongue,
and Pandit with you eye to eye.
The only Airtue Pandit possess is he commonsense. He always
keep he head cool like cucumber. But when Mr. Douglas question he, he
make sure he watch Mr. Douglas lip before he answer. "Once you put
correct geera and garlic and salt in curry, then you stir, then you taste,
you bound to get correct taste," Pandit clear he throat and say. He want
disappear.
O, Mr. Douglas shake he head, drain the glass of rum in he mouth,
and declare: "I will get you a job as chef in a hotel. Think about it and
let me know."
"Yes baas," Pandit reply and vanish out of the Centre.
Hotel chefl Ever see such eye-pass? Me going make meself one
jackass when them big tourist and big shot clap they hand and order in
backra man English to bring this dish and that dish. Eh-eh! Thinking
about it the next evening Pandit feel confused. He was in his front
verandah, regaling. He just bathe he skin after arriving from the
caneflelds.
Me damn happy, EHI Pandit remind herself. As a bull-boy in the
backdam, the job paying well. Is a lot of overtime specially when loaded
canepunt stuck in the canals and them bull and mule had to take rest
three-four time before they pull in them punts at the Sugar Factory. And
by then is midnight. Overtime payment. But not every night it
happening.
Beside, Pandit get he own house, built with a loan from the Estate.
He wife still working as a weeder. He four children look healthy. Is what
the ass me want with hotel job? He tell herself the third time. Me getting
all the satisfaction cooking mutton curry for them cricketer. That is me
happiness...
And is true! Cooking in he blood. You know how much people
does request Pandit presence the cook night at wedding-houses? The
whole Scheme. Pandit does feel nice when he get the invitation. "Never
mind me can't read an write. People respect me", he does tell he wife
sometime. Commonsense beat eddication, he baap words does echo in he
ears. And if me didn't know to cook good mutton curry people would spit
at me. True, is every kiss-me-ass bady want make you a damn fool when
you can't read an write in this place. Good thing me apply me
commonsense! eh...
But though cooking mutton curry giving Pandit maximum satis-
faction he still feel a bit empty. Unwanted. Feel left-out in certain
conversation held by the street-corers. In order to arrest this feeling








Pandit start see American cowboy films, picking up the language easy-
easy. But when them hard back, sunburnt cowboy like Gary Cooper,
Allan Rocky Lane, Broderick Crawford, talk in tough-guy, drawling voice,
cigar stuck between they lip, Pandit does still believe them cowboy
talking Dutch.
But he does pick up the cowboy conversation step by step
although he jawbone does crack whenever he utter them slangs. And if
you say: "hey man come here," in heavy cowboy slang, Pandit quick to
respond. True. Sometime Pandit would say: "hey man draw your gun..."
action and slang in typical cowboy style. But later he jaw does pain he
as if he get tooth-ache... But Pandit does feel nice. Is like climbing Mount
Roraima. But he could never confront the Manager or the Overseer face
to face, and talk to him in backra man English. Like something does hold
back he tongue. He courage gone.
Pandit love to see American cowboy films. "Cooking and seeing
picture is me only satisfaction in life." he does tell them chaps at
wedding-houses. "Is God make it so. Every man gat to find he own
satisfaction in life. If you use commonsense properly you going to feel
nice in what you doing. If you don't use commonsense you explode.
Think life is only work, eat and sleep? Ha boy! You have to know to make
you self happy in this Scheme..."
Watching cowboy films does elevate Pandit. He does feel like
being in a different world. Hard and rugged. Is man against he fellow
man, the terrain mountainous, gunshots exploding all in you ears. Them
with commonsense does survive. Is not strength. Is commonsense!
Pandit does tell herself. Is just like the canefields. Hard. But common-
sense beat all. Not the pundit and majee advice. Eh-eh! Them does tell
people sheer piss one-two time. But he respect the pundit and majee.
They know to read the books. But they na live properly. Pandit does feel
like spit. Is only money, money they want. That is not religion?
"Eh-eh, think pundit and majee could put food in you mouth",
Pandit'd tell he wife one morning. "Learn fo think fo youselfand use you
commonsense. Life not easy..."
Come a time in the country now when local politics was swinging
people head left to right like soldier marching. Some people could give
up they life for the P.P.P. the P.N.C. or the U.F. party. Who couldn't read
and write get sense overnight. They would argue politics more than me
and you who went far in school. Eh-eh, is Colonialism, Capitalism,
Communism... words rolling out they mouth like poetry. How England
is a bitch. Take out all the country wealth. How it doesn't want to grant
the country independence....
"Them English people think we still ah slave?" them people does
talk in the streets, sucking they teeth schuu schuu ... "And Duncan
Sandys taking all order from America. See kiss-me-ass eye-pass?"
"Know how much C.I.A. in this country? Why the hell they na left
ahwe in peace?" them young boys does talk. They could kill theyself for
the P.P.P.
Meanwhile them black people does say this is not Africa. This is
Guyana. Like England want bleed Guyana just how it bleed Africa?








Cause big-big war among them black people over there. Whiteman and
blackman at war. Like they want a next Kenya or South Africa.
True to God, politics make people come wise overnight. The
atmosphere always tense and expectant. It does want to explode like a
cannon whenever them politicians done address people in the country
areas and in Bourda Green.
"Independence. Independence. Why the hell the Queen don't give
the country independence?"
Then bladam like bullet one proclamation come from the Queen
that the country, Guyana, on the mainland of South America, would be
granted its independence soon after the general election in 1964. And
which political party commands a majority of the voters, the leader of the
same party would be Prime Minister, and usher the country in independ-
ence.
Eh-eh, you would believe is Carnival break out in the streets.
Jubilation in the air. And everybody calling each other Comrade. Was
1962 before the big race riots.
"When you too hasty to get something which you don't know
about, you does land-in hot-water," Pandit tell them boys one mid-
morning by the street-corer. Them sugar workers had a go-slow
exercise. One driver been curse one canecutter. Soon as the canecutter
talk for he right, the driver tell the overseer to suspend he from work. The
go-slow exercise was in support of the canecutter.
"This independence thing na look too nice." Pandit add. "Jagan
and Burnham should use more commonsense. Boy! When you playing
with fire you bound to get burn. Is that what really going to happen with
Jagan and Burnham. They swell-headed. To run country is not
plaything."
But it had a set of young people, among them is the local
cricketers, who like the British rule. Who want to keep they British
passport. But soon as the country come independent you come
Guyanese overnight. You getting Guyanese passport. When the set of
young people hear that, them fart sometime. Think is joke! Who want
Guyanese passport?
Then the big emigration thing start. Them young people, sports-
man and teachers, forsaking the country for England. Who want Guya-
nese passport? Even them who can't read and write like Baij, Soony and
Speedy, hustling to get British Passport to exit the bloody country. Was
like a fever gripping the country. Is pure England, England in they
head...
This time them politicians want cut each other throat. Say how
Jagan going to sell the country to the Russians. How Burnham taking
ahwe back to Africa. D'Aguiar to America. You would believe is a war
break out between them politicians.
Meanwhile was confusion and commotion among the country
people. Worse yet when them men drink bush rum. Is only Burnham
and Jagan in they mouth, and the coolie people and black people should
work together.
"People getting damn stoopid nowadays," Pandit does talk, sad to








see that them good cricketers too going away to England. "England
running this country so nice. Independence going make it worse. Mark
me word...."
Truel He would miss cooking mutton curry and dalpurri for them
cricketers. Schuu schuu schuu ... and is how nice he does feel while
them cricketers stuffing the mutton, calling fo Pandit, Pandit, smacking
they tongue. Is like he fulfilling a calling, cooking mutton for them
cricketers. And he love to watch the game.
Suddenly one evening during the same period the Lusignan
Cricket team Captain and vice-captain arrive at pandit house. "We
taking yoU to England Pandit." the captain say. "You would do a hefty
business with mutton curry and dalpurri among the West Indians in
London..."
London! England! Pandit eye want pop out. Then he mind flash
at the language. God! is there the backra man English born. Chu chu
chu! Me just going to make meself a damn fool. Is everybody talking the
backra man language in London.
A chillyness invade pandit inside. He watch the Captain straight
in he face and say: "All yuh go first, me going come later."
The Captain believe.
With the departure of the Captain and vice-captain to London the
Lusignan cricket team come in shambles. All the best players gone to
England. Panditjob as cookman end. Pandit feel empty like one barrel.
He couldn't catch he bearings.
Eh-eh, three months later Pandit start play the tassa-drum at
wedding-houses. Watching Pandit playing you believe he merge he entire
soul in the drum as if he whole body inside the goatskin, eye closed as
though in trance.
When them chaps ask he why he playing the tassa-drum now,
Pandit clear he throat and say: "When one door close, another door open.
This country like that. Always have to find something to pass you spare
time. Life is not work, eat, and sleep. Is something else. Use you
commonsense and living get a purpose."








IAN McDONALD


THE SATIN PRINCESS

In the drear mist of Long Island Sound
I think of the Satin Princess.
Hearing the cold clang of the fog-bells
I see again her moon-walk on the river:
All around her from the forest
The warm breath of flowers.
This clammy morning
Pale as ice seem the ladies'
Wrapped, colourless faces:
Their breath puffs white
And bitter are their eyes.
I recall the warm breathing
Of the far Princess.
She dresses with jewels:
The river fills with night,
Immense Van Gogh stars
Shine on her black bosom.
This pallid, shining world
Is bracing, bright, I know
But ah God! I shrivel in this land
Where life's laced tight
And unburnished air congeals.
The cold throws a spear
Through hearts here
Across half the earth
The Satin Princess moves and loves.

"HANGMAN" CORY

When the launch sank off Fort Island
People were drowning in the black mud
Bawling out "Oh God! Oh God!"
God did not come. It was like any day,
Sun shining on wind-rippled river,
Except men were struggling and dying.
Women and children choking in the mangrove roots.
People were running on the shore and calling
"Oh God! Oh God!" How God could come?
God can't mind everyone.
But look at this now! Look at story
"Hangman" Cory arrive like God.
Let me tell you "Hangman's" story.

Nathaniel Cory once loved a lady
She was a wanton lady, she used him badly.








His mind stop work when he see her beauty:
He was a puppy-dog in her company,
People laugh at "kiss-she-foot-bottom" Cory.
This wanton lady take another man one day,
Open, brazen, she parade before Nathaniel Cory
Laugh and say for all to hear clearly
How this man was the sweetest man for she,
How Cory never, never could satisfy she.
Nathaniel Cory stay quiet all the long day
Night came and when the man lay with the lady
Cory walked in open so, easily, terribly,
Lash both two with his sharp timber-axe fiercely
Cut them in pieces like red melons on a tray.
When judge-man say she provoke the jealousy
And Cory get only five years off his liberty
"No! Nol Nol No!" shouted Nathaniel Cory,
"She be life, my love, my beauty,
I have to go to hell with she, my life, my beauty.
She only gone in front of me.
Hang me by the neck to die gladly,
Hang me high, high and quickly!"
The people whispering make it legendary:
It so he get the name of "Hangman" Cory.

Off Fort Island that bright morning
Was he who God send to save the people.
People bawling on the black selling for a saviour,
They never expect to see "Hangman" Cory come.
He live so quiet among them all the years,
Minding a pumpkin patch behind the white Chapel,
He smoke his thorn pipe, never say one word.
There he stood on the black selling like a God.
Bibi La Fontaine, ice-pick thin and hard,
Fifty years trading plantain along the river coast,
Recount what happen that bright morning in her life.
Launch just left the Fort to go Parika side,
Deep inside boat-belly a thunder-sound was heard:
Time flicker, in a second, in a cat-wink
Boat gone bottom. How quick it was:
She belched a warm beer she was drinking,
Before the belch belch good the boat capsize and gone.
"Under I go the whole boat on top of me:
Mud yellow dim my eyes, cold log brace my heart.
I see my little Fancy who die fifty years gone by,
And then I see for sure is the monster death that come.
And my mind saying why an old woman should struggle so,
Let me go, and still I fighting not to go
And there is Fancy, the little one, crying in my arms.
A rough hand come and choke me round the neck








And pull me where I done pin good in mud
This man had come for me in the dark water,
He find me like a miracle and take me safe ashore:
Sun so bright, earth hard, I hear a singing bird.
Never morning wind feel so sweet, you hear I give my word."

"Hangman" dive and dive in the dark water.
Everyone like they turn to stone but he:
Women bawling and running and pointing trembly
Big men shouting and doing nothing foolishly.
Only "Hangman" Cory doing the work of God.
And everytime he come up with another one
As if God guide him in the mangrove mud.
A score he save and still he went for more
Coming up with weed-tendrils round his head
And wound around his throat like gallow's rope
He delivering up children from the river-womb,
His eyes staring red and cold and terrible,
Not one word he said in all his glory.

These are the plain facts about "Hangman" Cory,
His day of evil, his day of glory:
He cut his beauty up like a red melon in the market;
God send him one day to save the drowning people.
Time will sort the meaning of all this out:
The hunting moon will rise one last, appalling, time
And he will come to rest like all men come to rest.
Though years pass, men should know his story:
"Oh God! Oh God!" the people call and God send
"Hangman" Cory.


















/


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JOIMflBIE
57


... r*i,


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g. :~r


I







CECIL GRAY


CARNIVAL FLAG-WOMAN

The room is darkened, as befits the time;
the dancers jerk like junkies up and down
as passion disregards its thin disguise.
The singers' voices pump with coarsened cries
a carnal message of the carnival.

But there is one who prances sick of heart;
whose whoops are rites of burial in the dark.
The balloons of her days that rose so high
are curled up scraps of cringeing rubber now
trampled by those who revelled in her thighs.

Fresh from her loins the murals that they painted
portrayed her on her knees, where, like a child,
she did not understand that men will talk
of those they count as prey, nor thought of how
they'll dance away with all her future tainted.

The sticks of pleasure she at random tasted
were paid for in a market where love dies;
now fingers poke her name into the slime
and whispers dress her as the revels' clown.
Around her feet streamers of faith lie wasted.

She moves her body now in Joyful style,
wears merriment as costume for the night,
as if her cloud of shame had taken flight.
It is their smiling glances she defies
and from her leaping sorrow turns her eyes.



TONY KELIMAN

PARADISE
(For Winston)

A pepper tree poxed with blight.
A black cat curled like a vowel
at your carpeted feet. Your new watercolours bright
like pendants on the wall. Eight o'clock and all ain't well.

We talk, we talk...
and always the same conclusion.
This island is a bad Joke.







Art, a social insignia, is a sunken boat,
The greater part of culture, farce and mimicry.
Only the scansion of the word keeps me from drowning,
Only my lover's caress calms my tumult...
Omnipresent gluttons bloated with greed
assault your morality with their thirst for possessions.
They swagger like untrained models
lumbering down a cat-walk. The background,
a resplendent logo of sea and sun:
the cruellest bitterest irony.

Your return is an aquarium snapper
excited by the thought of salt-water,
Unaware that lurking there
is a barbaric barracuda.

In a society where without reasons
originality is flushed into the sea,
one must choose one's weapons carefully!
That inner watercourse must be found
as a lance to wield on this chaotic mound.
The sunrise, cupola of silence,
be your glaring shield!

Claustrophobia, that inveterate terror,
makes you wonder if exile's not a better niche,
To survive here, idealism must be firmly leashed.
It took Walcott fifty years to realize his error.

The metropolis has its own brand of horror,
there is the weather, the bullet, the dagger
lurking in the underground (Did you say the palms
are glistening spears? the khus-khus, knife-blades
fanning round and round?)...

This land, as unchanging as a mirror,
is still, after all, my home;
If I can live with foreign terror,
I can live with my own.

A pepper tree fleshed with lamp-light.
A cat yawning like a vowel
uncurling. Newly-hung oils bright
like pendants on the wall. Mid-night, and all ain't well.








WILTSHIRE CAR DEAD


by RAS MICHAEL


Wiltshire car died. Wiltshire carjust sputtered and died. The day
that Wiltshire car died, Wiltshire just stand up there and let out one big
sigh. Look is better to tell the truth, Wiltshire hang he head down and
cried.
Wiltshire car broke its heart out and died and old Wiltshire stood
there and cried that Saturday afternoon outside Lucius Rum Shop.
The car give two gasps and shudder and belch a black soot on a
little girl dress up in ribbon bow and a new stockings.
"Wiltshire I ain't able with you an this old thing," Miss Margery
said as she squeezed out breast after breast, then hold she breath and
bruise she belly through the rear door. The other two passengers done
gone through the other door and reach up the road hustling for Russell
Street and reliable transportation. They ain't even bother tell Wiltshire
nothing. The two old women in the front seat start to complain through
the open door that they tell Wiltshire to make sure he car was fit cause
where they going find transport home?
Wiltshire stand up and cried and the passersby and people
drinking over at Lucius Rum Shop and the little girl that the car belch the
black soot on, stood up and watched a white steam rise out from under
Wiltshire car bonnet. Then the car suddenly get tall as though it tip-toe
on its chasis. Then it shuddered again. The little girl, people drinking
over at Lucius Rum Shop and passersby stood up and watched Wiltshire
car die. It shuddered and danced, a dance to its own solemn rattle, its
lifeless wheels splayed outwards as it sank, its body mere inches from the
tar.
Is all well and good to curse old Wiltshire about he car. True is a
old time Vauxhall Velox and when the brakes taking too long to make the
car stop, old Wiltshire does whistle a whistle and grip the wheel like to
hold it back, all that is true, but what about Wiltshire part of it?
The people say that the couple of springs left in the seats uses to
tear they clothes. Teacher Morris say at top speed of fifteen miles per hour
Wiltshire car make he go to school late three days straight. Wiltshire say
he lucky, some people ain't reach to workyet, they still waiting 'pon trans-
portation. And when you lookat it, maybe is not Wiltshire fault. Car parts
were hard to get. As a matter of fact, foreign currency was hard to get to
buy spare-parts. Foreign currency was the problem. And Wiltshire had
currency problems. He barely eked out a existence collecting a dollar for
his run from East and West Rulmveldt to Bourda Market. Foreign
currency! Local currency was Wiltshire problem. That and the daily
break-down and the road-side impromtu repair work-shops he estab-
lished as the necessity arose. But really and truly things get much worse
when everybody god-mother, grand-mother, sister and brother start to
send and bring mini-bus in the country.
You see what happen was that getting most essential things was








difficult and the Government say that it got what they call foreign
currency problems. Since then a whole portion of hustlers turn out to
work on America Street and begin buying money up blackmarket and sell
it all out blackmarket.
They say the Government didn't like this since this same black-
market money use to find it way into foreign country to buy needed
essentials which traders sell at real high prices. A lot of these essentials
was car-parts and Guyana didn't have enough car. It didn't have enough
taxi. That is why so many people was always standing up on the road
waving like if they going away tomorrow when the cars drive pass. Which
is why Wiltshire feel shame.
Wiltshire feel shame for all them people out there on Sheriff Street
who was punishing for transportation whole day, every day while he was
living quite well without burdensome responsibility. Wiltshire had
retired and had a little money. He could live cool at his grand-son and
his family.
'I have a little money,' Wiltshire say to himself.
'I could set up a transportation and help out the situation.'
Truth was that Wiltshire was a truck driver with the Government
before he had retired and he was used to making friends quickly,
especially women, through his job.
Driving motor-car was the correct runnings, Wiltshire felt. There
were dozens of women on Sheriff Street, nice young women. It wasn't that
Wiltshire was a fresh old man. It was that he had this talent for making
friends quickly, especially women. So Wiltshire seize the oppo-tunity.
For example when Campbellville traffic slow down after lunch Wiltshire
use to make a last trip up West and East Ruimveldt. Was a last trip for
truth because whenever he hit East back road, anything could happen.
Sometimes you use to see two/three passengers walking coming up and
somebody would look out they window and say 'Wiltshire bruk-down.'
But next day he gone again. He was a determined man. Was because he
was a determined man that he set up the Vauxhall Velox that he did buy
a couple years ago and repair it. He decide to use some of the little money
he did put one side for old age and invest it in second hand tyre and so.
That is why Wiltshire did stand up there and cry, that car did represent
Wiltshire whole life savings.
Nobody didn't know or care where Wiltshire get he car parts or
how he get them but one or two people did say they hear Wiltshire used
to stop little children when they playing and examine they playthings.
One thing I know for sure I never see Wiltshire in no mechanic shop yet,
even though Wiltshire car always used to park up on some parapet with
Wiltshire under it. Wiltshire say is rest it resting.
Wiltshire did prefer the Housing Scheme run to the Campbellville
one. Housing Scheme girls was different to the Campbellville passen-
gers. The Campbellville ones was mostly teacher or office girls or young
bodies seeking other young bodies. But all of these was in the Housing
Scheme run and more. More women. The kind that Wiltshire was
comfortable with, big, broad and wuthless in conversation. Wiltshire did
develop such a reputation that at one time they had people who did rather








stand up by Wiltshire car 'pon the roadside and wait till he either walk
to the Esso for more gasolene, roll one of he smooth tyred wheels to a
vulcanizing shop or squirm out from under the engine, than to travelwith
any other car. And sameway, Wiltshire had he special passengers.
People used to stand up 'pon the road and tell them Tapir drivers
whenever they pull and shout "Georgetown/Housing Scheme", "We
waiting for Wiltshire." Wiltshire car itself was prejudiced, it didn't mind
who it pick up as long as the passenger had money and did like a good
gaff and a laugh. Of course it did prefer women more since was women
who did really know 'bout everybody story. Wiltshire car used to well and
enjoy the gossip and laughter and when it tired, it just used to break
down.
Wiltshire car use to get plenty competition at first from them
Tapirs. Was Tapirs all about, picking up East Coast passengers, running
up South, Sussex Street, Housing Scheme, and then slowly, slowly they
bow out one by one, which is why Wiltshire old car wasn't worried even
when the first mini-buses start run Campbellville route.
The Tapirs them did start to stop run. Wiltshire car was as un-
concerned as when they did first join the business. Wiltshire old car
proper use to enjoy heselfwhenever he was out on the road, running and
picking up all them girls, even pulling up he brakes right in front of them
big Tata Buses and taking away they passengers once is a woman.
Nobody couldn't say Wiltshire car wasn't a good hustler. However,
Wiltshire car, though it was looking for a dollarjust as much as Wiltshire,
use to pride itself that it was more sweet-man than Wiltshire, with the
girls. It use to laugh at them modern motor-car cause theywasn't as hard
as he.
'Look at them how they soft' Wiltshire old car say. 'Is years since
I come here on the road and look how me body still black and hard and
shine.' Wiltshire old car was vain. But then suddenly so things change
up and get different again.
At first was second hand clothes, still looking new but was second
hand clothes that people in America did already wear. After that people
start get in on the latest fashion and even the old girls them start wearing
stone-wash jeans and bobby-socks with sneakers. After-a-while one set
of motor-scooter come in the country and poor people start ride them. By
the time the mini-bus them land everybody was looking nice.
Plenty people stop travel with Wiltshire car. I mean afterall. f you
got on a new stone-wash and you going to market with attache case, well
then you can't look to travel in no old Vauxhall Velox. It got to be
something more new, like a Hiace mini-bus with tape deck and passen-
gers so that you could look out the window and play important by
pretending you ain't see nobody. A lot of people in Campbellville start to
do just that and soon time come that Wiltshire nor Wiltshire old car
wasn't getting they usual kind of customer.
Wiltshire change he route to the Housing Scheme.
Every morning that the car wasn't sick, Wiltshire and the car
down at Regent and Bourda Street hustling passengers for East and
West. They use to cut through Charlotte catch Camp street, bounce over








Sussex and take Russell through to West backroad with stiff tantalize
and laugh echoing all through the city. As a matter of fact they use to
blow two horn whenever they drive pass Lucius Rum Shop 'pon Camp
Street to let the people in there know that they happy too. Wiltshire car
was so happy that it use to roll up it light bulb and rev up it engine when-
ever it passing a woman with a chassis it admire.
When more mini-bus come they start to run South. Lazzo did
send down plenty. Then more mini-bus come and they even start to run
East and West.
Wiltshire old car take in with bad feelings that same Friday
morning when a mini-bus pull up right in they car park and the
conductor shout out "East and West Ruimveldt".
Old Wiltshire take on. Whole day Wiltshire use to be smiling and
laughing, now Wiltshire grumbling and fretting and forgetting people
change. One by one the passengers get less. Wiltshire old car ain't say
nothing. It start to work more hard. No softy, softy' now come' mini-
bus from America ain't gon make it look small, gon take it eyes and pass
it. 'Is only because Burnham dead,' it grumble to itself. 'or they won't
of be here.'
For two months straight Wiltshire car ain't breakdown. It Jostle
with all the new mini-buses for the passengers. It didn't even checking
for young girls no more and one exceptionally busy Saturday morning,
Wiltshire car even touch a top speed of twenty miles per hour, but things
couldn't go on so forever.
Well Wiltshire hear like if a big choir singing 'What A Friend We
Have In Jesus' and like if the whole sound big up in the skies and the
whole outside world. He get a sudden feeling like if God upstairs
watching down at he and the car and he raise he hand up and look over
he shoulder, right up in the sky just over the incinerator 'pon Princess
Street where the Government use to throw way old car and old truck,
Wiltshire imagine he see a big cloud like a face watching down at them.
Every body, the passersby, the little girl with the ribbon bow and even
the people at Lucius come out and watch up in the sky like Wiltshire but
they ain't see nothing. Only Wiltshire did see.
'Is because Burnham dead,' Wiltshire say.
Nobody never see Wiltshire again. We hear that he was living at
the Dharam Sala poor house opposite the burial ground where the City
Council did throw away the chassis of the old car. And everytime I hear
that hymn What A Friend We Have In Jesus' I does remember how
Wiltshire .ar dead.








NATURE STUDY


by JOHN GILMORE

Stanley Maycock was fascinated by dinosaurs. He was sitting on
the carpet looking at a big illustrated book all about them, which he had
got out of the Children's Department at the Public Library in Coleridge
Street.
"Mummy?" His mother was sprawled all over the sofa, in the
middle of piles of sixth-form essays which she was marking. Some of
them seemed very long, and Stanley hoped he never had to do so much
homework when he got older.
"Mummy?"
She grunted at him, without looking up from her work.
"Do you think it would be nice to have a brontosaurus as a pet?"
"Don't be silly darling. We wouldn't have any place to put it."
Stanley continued to pore over the book. Suddenly he picked it
up and took it over to his mother.
"Look, it says here 'dinosaur' mean 'thunder-lizard'...
"Means," she corrected, interrupting him.
"... so is a lizard a sorta dinosaur?"
"I suppose you could say they were distant relatives."
"You mean like how my Auntie Ethel who isn't really my auntie
is a relative?"
"Sort of."
"So you mean the lizard that lives behind the picture is like a baby
dinosaur?"
"No, it isn't. Now go away and let me get on with my work."
At this point Melanie came in. "Hi,mummy! Can me an' Glyne
borrow the car?"
"Lord have mercy I spend half my life teaching English and I can't
even get my own children to talk properly. No, you cannot borrow the
car."
"But, mummy, you know Glyne's a careful drive-!"
"No teenager is a careful driver. Heaven knows what you'd be
getting up to."
"We only want to go to the East Coast Road," said Melanie, getting
plaintive.
"No, I tellyou. Wait- I need some peace and quiet. You can have
the car if you take Stanley with you."
"Mummy, do we have to!"
"Yes," she said, the red-ink pen poised once more above essays
scrawled in blue and black, ready to strike.

Stanley sat in the back of the car as they headed out of Rock
Dundo Park and up Lodge Hill, through Warrens, Jackson, Bridgefleld
and on in the direction of St.Andrew. His sister and her boyfriend talked
the whole way. Stanley was not included in the conversation, but 'ie was
quite happy staring out of the window. He could not rememb,'r seeing







this part of the island before. It was very different from the bustle of town
and school, or the concrete boxes surrounded by neat lawns and well-
trimmed hedges where he lived. There was field after field of sugar-cane,
the first arrows of next year's crop waving in the breeze. And after
Welchman Hall, as they began to drive downhill again, the cane-fields
began to give way to vast open hillsides, covered in rough pasture, with
here and there the line of a gully marked by a thick growth of trees.
They came on to the flat towards Belleplaine and drove round to
the East Coast Road. Glyne soon pulled the car off the road and parked
it under some casuarina trees. They got out and walked along a path.
Glyne and Melanie walked ahead, carrying the cooler between them.
Stanley lagged behind, with the bundled up beach-towels.
And suddenly he ran after them, waving a long leafy stalk he had
pulled up, a five-petalled white flower at the end of it.
"Melanie! Melanie! What this is?"
"Stanley, I don't know An' you shouldn't go grabbin' up every
plant you see this one over here is a manchineel."
"But, wait," said Glyne, pointing at a nearby bush, "sea-grapel An'
it got ripe ones 'pon it tool" They put down the cooler and started picking
the grapes.
"Here, you can eat this." Melanie handed her brother a small,
rather wrinkled, purplish fruit. Stanley looked at it questioningly, and
then bit into it. It was sweet, but with a faint hint of salt.
"Crunch up the seed an' see what it taste like," Glyne told him.
He did so, and spat it out almost at once. "Man, it too bitter!"
Melanie laughed.
They walked on, and the path came out into an open space. A rich
green plant, with bright yellow flowers close to the ground, covered much
of the soil around them. Stanley's curiosity got the better of him and he
asked what it was.
"Carpet weed," said Glyne.
About a hundred yards ahead, some cows were grazing. Stanley
counted them. There were three black and white cows, and seven brown
and white cows. Beyond them was visible the edge of a flat body of water.
"Is that the sea?" Stanley asked.
"Boy, you really ask too much questions," Glyne said. "That ain'
the sea, that is Long Pond." He and Melanie turned and walked towards
a low hill and then up its slope. Stanley followed them. The hill was all
made of sand, with strange plants growing on it. At the top he realized
that the noise he had heard earlier was the sea roaring. There it was in
front of them, crashing on to the beach below in torrents of white foam,
in a way he had never seen when his mother took them swimming at
Paradise.
"Look, Glyne," said Melanie, "fat porks!" Part of the slope of the
sand-dune was covered by a dense growth about twelve or fourteen
inches high, stalks with large, almost oval leaves slanted up towards the
cloudless sky. Glyne and Melanie gathered a couple of handfuls of the
red blobs which appeared among the leaves.
"Here." She offered one to her brother. "Just suck it off the stone.







The fruit was the size of a large marble, but dimpled and mottled
in different shades of red, with bits of green in it as well. Only when
Stanley saw his sister was eating one herself did he try it. The flesh inside
was white like cotton-wool. It felt funny in his mouth, but it was quite
nice.
"You like it?"
"Yeah."
She gave him some more. "Don't eat too many, or they going tie
up your tongue."
They walked down again and skirted the pond. Coconut husks
and old bottles littered the margin of sand and mud. Here there was a
gap in the build-up of sand, and incoming waves, their force spent by the
ten or fifteen feet from the edge of the surf, contributed a clear trickle to
the murky water on the land side.
"Move fast," Glyne said. "Nowl"
They got across with dry feet, between one wave and the next,
their rubber flip-flops slapping the damp sand. Now they were on the
other side of the pond, and Stanley could see it was only about twenty feet
wide. Little brown-speckled birds with long beaks, long legs protruding
from white bellies, scuttled about on the mud. A plop caught his
attention.
"Lookl" He caught Melanie's arm and she and Glyne turned
round. Once again, three of four small fish leapt into the air and made
a silvery curve back into the pond water.
"Hush your mouth an' come 'long!" was Melanie's comment.
They walked along the beach, which stretched on and on in front
of them, and was almost a hundred feet wide from the dunes to the sea.
Here and there an empty plastic container, or an old aerosol can, or even
a light bulb, showed the proximity of civilization, but there was no one
else in sight.
They spread out the towels and sat down. There was a big purple
towel, and a green and white striped towel, and Stanley's towel had
pictures on it of cats trying to catch fish. Melanie pulled off the over-sized
white T-shirt she wore as a dress, revealing a long, leggy, golden-brown
body in a black bikini. Glyne had on a pair of baggy beach-shorts and
a shirt like the ones Magnum wore on the TV, except that the letters
curling around the palm-trees and the surfer-topped waves spelt out
"BARBADOS" instead of "HAWAII." He unbuttoned the shirt. Glyne was
supposed to be white, but a tan made him almost as brown as Melanie.
Stanley wore navy shorts and a T-shirt with a picture of a pelican sitting
on an old cannon. It said "MARGARITA I LA ISLA MAS BELLA DEL
CARIBEI" His mother had bought it for him when the three of them had
gone there for a holiday and shopping trip just before last Christmas.
Melanie opened the cooler, which had in ice and bottled soft
drinks. The openerwas inside as well, but attached to one of the handles
by a long piece of string so that it couldn't escape. She opened one of the
bottles and gave it to Stanley, and then took for herself and Glyne.
Stanley had finished the fat porks and was glad of the drink. He drank
it all and stuck the bottle upright in the sand. He moved off the towels







and began to build a sandcastle. Nobody told him not to get sand on his
clothes, and he had already finished the outline of the castle a square
with a turret at each corner when he turned round, his ear caught
by something Glyne and Melanie were whispering.
They looked at him, and then, "We're going for a walk," said
Melanie. "So you stop here till we get back. You can have another drink
if you want one. Don't move too far from these towels, and don't go near
the sea. It too rough. You hear me?"
"Yeah," said Stanley.
Glyne and Melanie stood up. Melanie put back on the big T- shirt
and then they walked off, taking the purple towel with them.
Stanley added another tower in the middle of the castle to serve
as a keep. Then he carefully put extra sand all round the outside of the
top of the castle walls and round the top of the towers to make
battlements. He stood up, walking round the castle to look at it from all
angles. He sucked his teeth and gave the castle a kick, demolishing one
of the corner turrets. Then he set off down the beach towards the sea.
Crabs ran away from him as he approached. Little crabs and
bigger crabs, all with grey bodies supported on dirty white legs with a
yellow tinge to them. Some dipped into their holes. One of the big ones
headed purposefully into the surf. The sea looked very rough and Stanley
retraced his steps. Just below the high-water mark he spotted one of the
small crabs. Its colouring was the same, but it was so small as to be
almost transparent. He dived at it with both hands and caught it.
"Shitel It bite me!" He dropped it at once, and sought to crush it
with a safely ensandalled foot, but it moved too fast for him.
He continued back inland, past the towels and on to the line of
dunes. There were more fat porks growing here. Most of the fruit were
green, but he found a few ripe ones and picked them. He explored further,
eating as he went up the dune. He saw a long trailing green vine with
mauve flowers. There was what looked like a path, and he followed it now
moving down and sideways, away from the beach, but almost parallel to
it. There were more dunes, and casuarinas grew here, deformed, rising
as high as the top of the dunes and then bent inland by the wind. There
were sea-grapes too, but bigger than the ones he had seen earlier, much
taller than himself,with woody trunks grey like the crabs on the beach,
the veins crimson in their broad green leaves. Another kind of vine, its
flowers a different kind of purple, and with broad, flat green pods, wound
itself up into the casuarinas.
Stanley stopped, thinking he heard something. There was a
rustling sound, like somebody moving through the bush.
"Melanie? Glyne?" The rustling continued, very close.
"Melanie!" There was still no answer, though the sound seemed
to be right next to him. He was about to call out again when he saw them.
The rustling sound was right next to him. It was made by the
crabs, hundreds of them. They were all bigger than the beach crabs, and
these ones had blue-black bodies with legs and claws of an angry red.
They moved about under the sea-grapes, and around the vines, and
among the fat porks and over the carpet of brown needles cast by the







casuarinas. They rotated their stalked eyes to stare at him in defiant
challenge, and waved their claws at him like banners.
Stanley ran. Stumbling in the loose sand, tripping over vines, he
ran. He lost a sandal, and stopped for it, but the rustling sound was all
around him, and he kept on running. He ran up dunes and down dunes
and along dunes. And he crashed into a space under some casuarina
trees where Glyne and Melanie sat up on the purple towel.
"Christ! How you did get here?" said Glyne.
Stanley paid him no attention, but rushed, sobbing, into his
sister's arms. As she pressed him to her, trying to comfort him, he
realized, puzzled, uncomprehending, that her breasts were quite naked.








MAHADAI DAS

FOR MARIA de BORGES

Death, black moon, high mark
on night's blue canvas.

Stumped shadow beneath the lynching-tree.

A star hangs over me.
Dark sore.
Is it death?

Like a phantom
honed into walls,
I inhabit a city of steel.

Between its iron teeth, mechanical, regular;
in escalators, prisonlike elevators,
I am lifted indifferently, dropped

like a stone,

borne, like a Jumbie
beneath stony earth.
Shadowless, I descend deeply
into nightmares of childhood;
down to steel-lined metros,
to summerheat that beats, insistent,
at my temples. Down, down to carriages,








grimy steel-boxes caging men like packhorses
being driven to a mill.

Down to obsessions caged underground -
down down down.

Phantomlike
I move in long narrow streets.
Down Broadway.
A single head of cattle exiled
from gentle grazings of our pasture.

From whence has this traveller come
with his long hair, his lost eyes?

I am a pair of hands.
A pair of feet.

Eyes without candle.

Bird stricken.

Shrunken globe, my joys,
small circumference.

My token is the same
Little copper sliver moving me around.
Little city token. Little metal ring.

Expensive little sliver.
Dear metal moon. Small perimeter of dreams.
Small perimeter of dreams.


II

A death-broker awaits me.
He counts his cash.

Slight and weary,
I stand. Tears
trail in the dust.

He takes all my jewels.
He takes all my rings.
He steals my rubies,
my rope of pearls.

He grabs my tiara, my bangles








of silver. He gives me tokens
to send me to his factory,
send me to his store,
cage me in his offices,
keep me in his kitchens.
At gunpoint, he steals rubies in my cheeks,
my full curve of hip.
He bestows me coppers -

so I may buy
a jacket for my shoulders
from his huge garment-store,
hose from his hosiery, wine from his cellars.

so I may purchase a space for my bed,
a closet for my clothing, a space
for my child
and a space for my spouse.

He takes moons from my eyes,
my fingers' nimble gifts -

he hands me rose colored glasses,
hard rimmed, rectangular.

I look through his spectacles.
I see him better.


Moons in my eyes are lost but to me
They have moved to another orbit
larger than me. In private
constellations, I only could see them.
Wheeling in wide orbit now,
all may espie them.

They are wheeling round and round
in a luminous light.

Dreamlight ignites them.
An inner lights.
Music, cosmos, world:

we are in harmony.

I surrender my tiara of stars.

He greedily grabs them.
He returns








cheap sparkle from his factories
cheap glitter from his streets.

I go there to buy
things that appear like the real,
spending my life in imitation,
never knowing what's real.

What is real is what I've given,

What's real is a city token.

What's real is the theft.

I am a pair of hands.

A pair of feet.


III

Death rides,
high black moon over all my dreams.
Secret rider across sky's low fields.

Sacred shadow beneath the lynching-tree.

Like blue aether, I move
through streets of dreams.

I go to the river's edge
where the moon is real.

To sea's edge where moon's
dressed in silver.
I stare at the stony stars.

Waves of eternity wash over me.

I have come to the river.
I have come to the forest.
Forest of Jade.
Forest of emerald.
Forest of clear streams in my head.

I an flesh and blood.
I breathe.
I eat like a lion when hungry.
I touch. I caress. I sigh upon another's neck.








I am man, love.
I am woman, love.

IV

Tomorrow, I rise
between dead thighs of another day.
To be bridled, like a horse between the hours,
a bit between my teeth, a bruising saddle
on my back.

Like a packcamel in desert terrain,
I will ride, the load of existence
upon my camel's hump, the print
of my hoof in the sand.

...but a wind
can erase my mark, a gale blowing
inland,or a storm.

No hoofs ink may be written
on the sandy dust of this world, no hoof,
cloven or human,

to declare I was here:

that I walked
with another's pack upon my back,
without water for days,
my face bridled with leather.

My shadow is here in the midday sun,
my bridled shadow in the desert sand.

V

The black sun of death
sinks into sky's atavistic dome, where
I stand, invisible to all
but that black judge, mocked
by my nothingness.

This phantom and I,
ignorant, shadowless,
packcamel by day, creature
of moon by night.

Locked,
between these hours' iron bars,








sunlight is divested from me.

I, who dream
of being a riderless unicorn,
at sea's edge where the moon is high.

I, who should wear
stars on my wrist, flowers
on my forehead. I,
who should sing like birds,
and like them, fly.

I. who believe in emerald forests,
sapphire skies, ruby rocks, silver seas;
in opal skies, jade stems, "oral sea-roses,
rockplants of ivory

curled

within her seabreasts, her hairy forests.
Jadegreen seaweeds making mermaids' hair
by moonlight.

I who believe in the magical moonrock.

In faeries in dresses of aether.

In the noble prince on a fine horse.

In flowers which converse.

In plants that whisper.

I who believe in the jewelled existence:

sunlight's gold upon each finger,
diamond-spray waterfalls on rock.
The mink coat upon the mink.
The jewelled emeralds of the tiger's eyes.
Rainbows after rain.


VI

I sailed upon a Persian rug of dreams,

now sold.

in the marketplace,








without my song.
or name.

Ah poems of invisible authors!

How many years in the weaving,
this pattern of dreams?

Where, the tightwoven self
buried beneath the counter?

You spend ten thousand on my design.
You spend five.

You admire my motifs.

Can you explain their weft, their warps?


VII

Death is a lonely shadow flickering
through the night. A lonely passage
between birth and beyond.
Secret nightmare.

0 song of my voicelessness.

Song in the sand


VIII

Landscape of nightmares
city of skyscrapers,
treeless and flowerless city -
city without children.

What has become of persian dreams,
their neat emblemmatic borders,
their central motifs?

Bloody splatters stare at me,
the steely knife twisted in the stomach,
the bloodied machete wielded in hate.

Guns smoke.

Muggers








and their hates
await knife or bullet, or both.

Victim reproduces victim by default.

IX

into the real world I come
with my muscles pumped
so you may drain me

with my hands polished, shining,
my feet ready.

into the real world I come
with the hurt in the bone
the agony in the flesh
the vacuous eyes of hours
the feral teeth of the air.

with my coffee and my coffeebreaks.

with my madness at nine, my dash at five.

into the heat of subways, that fester
in my brain.

into mugging at gunpoint
on a night I am most high.

into the rape of the defenceless

into the lies and into the theft.

















































I,

aj -
*-1.


BUSH DIE-DIE

76







ANNIE


by GILLIAN HOWIE


Annie Benjamin n6e Annie Sterling:
Born May 1901 in English Harbour. Antigua,
Died 12th December 1986 in Cedar Grove. Antigua.


August 1983

Annie came today calling 'Maaa'. My whole family have a special
place in their hearts for Annie 82 years old and still trundling her little
cart from Cedar Grove to Hodges Bay. Her cart is full of a variety of vege-
tables, most of them rotten. I'm sure Annie must get the cast offs that
other vendors cannot sell as she is too old now to go down to the wharf
to make her selection. Annie has been selling local fruit and vegetables
in our area for well over twentyyears. For years she came with her donkey
'Harris' (Horace) and at one stage it was Annie,'Harris' and 'Harris's' foal.
But eventually Harris became too much for Annie to manage and she was
given or sold to family and Annie got her little cart.
Annie lives on a pension of EC$35.00 a month paid to her as a
war widow; her husband fought in the World War. She has no children
of her own and all her brothers and sisters are dead. She had a piece of
land in St. John's which she sold and bought a piece of land in Cedar
Grove where she built a one room wooden house. Although she had no
children she looked after many of her nieces and nephews. Her favourite
niece, Mary, married young and had three children. Then Mary's
husband decided to go to Aruba where he'd been offered a good job on an
oil rig. Within a few days of his arrival in Aruba he was killed in an
explosion on the rig. Mary was notified but by the time she got a pass-
port and got to Aruba her husband was already buried. While still in
Aruba Mary's mother (Annie's sister) died in Antigua of a heart attack.
She came back to bury her mother. Some time later Mary re-married and
had three children by her second husband. Tragedy struck again when
her husband was killed in a car crash at Friars Hill leaving her penniless
with six children. It was then Annie gave Mary piece of her land at Cedar
Grove and a two room wooden house was built on it for Mary and her six
children.
Annie also looked after Mary's brother (her nephew) who had
become mentally ill after his mother died. However he became worse and
worse and was put into the mental home.
Mary is now dead and her brother is out of the mental home and
is claiming Annie's house and land as his own and is trying to get Annie
put into Fiennes Institute (the Old People's Home).
In the last few years the Government built a two room concrete
house for Annie to replace her one room wooden house which was on the
verge of collapse and she is proud of her new house. There is no running







water or electricity but Annie does not seem to miss these things as she
has never had either and I doubt she would be able to pay water and
electricity rates. Her water is stored In a rain barrel at the side of the
house and cooking is done on her coal pot.

June 18th. 1984

Annie came today. She no longer pushes the cart as it is a long way
for her to walk and some months ago we told her not to bring vegetables
but please to visit regularly and we give her a monthly allowance. On the
way here she picks different kinds of bush for her tea and always gets
some limes from our lime tree when it's bearing. She was using an old
piece of wood as a walking stick and I replaced it with a nice smooth piece
Skene had in his room. She told us that she has left her house to a
nephew who lives in St. Maarten and who has promised to return and give
her a good funeral when she dies. Annie often gives news of people in our
area. While she was sitting having her drink of juice she told me that
when she was walking past St. Hilaire's house she saw someone clearing
the bush in front of the gate (the house has been overgrown and deserted
for years) and wanted to ask him if he was St. Hilaire's son "but
mistress I too embarrass to ask the gentleman after what I did. You know
one thing I fraid too bad is cattle and the way I walk bend over now I
suddenly see two cattle hoof in front my eye so I hit out with my stick ...
and shout "MOVE OFF! GETAWAY FROM ME1" When I look up I see a
gentleman looking down at me. Like he wearing those shoes with a white
piece of rubber across the front..." by this time I was laughing and Annie
was laughing too.
We found out later that the St. Hilaire's had just returned with
their son and his wife and are busy putting the house back in shape.

June 27th, 1984

Annie came today. She still has the good stick of Skene's I gave
her. She told me she had seen the same gentleman by St. Hilaire's house
and had apologised to him for the episode last week "mistress I tell him
I too sorry for the way I treated him but he must excuse me because I
thought he was cattle."

Sometime in late 1985 I started visiting Annie once a month
bringing her the family allowance as the walk to our house had got too
much for her. I would sit on her sofa (an old car seat) and we always had
a chat. Annie loves to tell stories of her childhood.

June, 28th 1986

Today I went to see Annie bringing some Ovaltine and her monthly








allowance. She told me this story from her childhood in Falmouth,
English Harbour....
"My mother die when I very young and my stepmother she don't
treat us good at all so all the children leave home, but I too young to leave
so I stay right there and my father don't pay no attention.
One day my brother pay us a visit and when he go back to where
he staying he tell my older brother You better go and take Annie away or
she go die right where she is.' My brother came down to English Harbour
and he take me back with him to my aunty who live by where the old
cemetery used to be. A few of my brothers and sisters already were
staying with she. (The old cemetery was by the entrance to Deep Water
Harbour).
Every morning before coalpot light Aunty get we down on we knee
on the floor and she open the Bible and read to us. She tell we 'All of you
who understand what am reading remember and if you don't
understand yet listen because this is the word of God I am reading.'
And every night before we lay down we head we get down on knee again
and listen as Aunty read God's word and try to remember. Also we say
Our Father together.
One day my father came to take me back with him to English
Habour, but I do not want to go back and Aunty would not let him take
me. She say I am not going from her house and my father tell she he going
to bring Police for she.
Well some time after that my father came back with two police to
take me back with him. I hang onto Aunty dress while Police ask she
question after question and then bring out a big book with lines and give
Aunty a pen and she have to write in plenty different parts of this book.
Then the Police tell my father that he cannot take me 'Because the child
want to stay with she aunty and my aunty has signed on to take care
of me.
Well, time pass and one day when I reach about twelve years old,
a man came up from English Harbour to tell us that my father is dying
and he wish to see his children to ask forgiveness before he dies. My aunt
sit in front of me and she tell me that all this time she would not let my
father have me because he treat me too bad, but now the time has come
when I must go and see my father.
She help me to dress in my church clothes and tell me the way to
English Harbour is not difficult that once I get to the gates of St. John's
the road goes in a straight line from there. I leave home about twelve
o'clock. Sometimes I running, sometimes I walking, and I reach English
Harbour about five o'clock.
My father was lying there in his house. His woman was not with
him she was in the village talking with friends. He hold my hand and
start to cry and ask if I was really Annie his daughter. I tell him yes. He
say he want to ask my forgiveness and the forgiveness of all his children
for the way he treat us when we were very young 'Annie, do you forgive
me?' he ask. Yes father I forgive you,' I say to him.
Then he sigh and roll over on his side and he say'Annie, get a cloth
and clean your father.' Poor man, I lift his shirt and I see his body covered







in poops. I get a bowl, fill it with water from the barrel out-side and with
a piece of cloth I find in the house I wash down his body and take away
his shirt to wash.
I stay with him until he die which was the next week."


August 31st, 1986

Today I went to see Annie with her allowance and a few things -
ovaltine, sardines, condensed milk, corn beef, biscuits, limes and some
dog food for her dog. Annie has not been feeling well these past few weeks
the cloudy weather affects her arthritis. She says the Doctor gave her
a prescription but the Dispensary has no medicine at this time. Her
great nephew came in to see her while I was there. His name is Gavin. I
stayed with Annie for a while and Annie talked to me about her husband.
Harry Benjamin was born in Sea View Farm. His mother and
father were married but his father did not spend much time at home.
When he was in his teens he got into trouble with his Church Minister,
a Moravian, who was very strict with the young people and if he did not
approve of the way they were behaving during the week he would
admonish them in his Sunday sermon and sometimes they would have
to stay in after service for a caning with 'the big stick'. The Church
Minister was an Antiguan, born in New Winthropes and sent to Sea View
Farm after he was ordained.
Mrs Benjamin was very upset when her son was given a caning
one Sunday and said "No one ever going to beat my picknee again," and
packed a bag for him and sent him to work on the boats so that he could
see the world.
Harry went to sea and was in Panama when the 1st World War
started. He was asked to Join the British Army and his mother received
papers from the War Office asking permission for her son to sign on. She
signed the papers and sent them back, feeling very proud of Harry. By
then she was high up in the Moravian Church and everyone knew her as
'Ma Pinch'. So Harry Benjamin joined the British Army and fought for
them in the 1st World War.
Annie had not yet met him. She was only seventeen in 1918 when
Victory was declared and says she will never forget the day.
They woke up to church bells ringing everywhere clang a lang,
clang a lang, and when they went outside they saw a car driving by with
its horn blowing and a little while later another car with its horn blowing.
"In those days there was only a very few cars in Antigua and no planes
at all and yet on this day I think all the cars inAntigua drive into St. John's
with horn blowing and all the while church bells ringing clang a lang,
clang a lang. Everybody gather in the streets to find out what is
happening and then someone came running up the road shouting to all
of us "WE DONE WIN THE WAR," and we all felt very excited and
happy."
The celebrations continued throughout the day and that night
there was a b/g fireworks display on Otto's Hill (now Michael's Mount).








Everyone had gathered to see the fireworks and the display started well
with all eyes looking into the sky at the showers of stars when suddenly
a rocket misfired into the huge box containing all the fireworks and there
was a loud explosion with all the rockets taking off in different directions.
Many people were badly burnt, among them Annie. She spent a
month in hospital and then went home, but it took her over a year to
recover completely and the scars were with her for the rest of her life.

It was a couple ofyears later thatAnnie met Harry Benjamin when
he came back to Antigua and joined the Police Force. They fell in love and
got married but she says Harry was not a good husband to her. A real
roamer who 'lived out' with other women and did not support her in any
way.
Eventually she left him and went back to her aunt where she
made a living by making coalpots and selling them.
One day she got a message telling her to come to the hospital
because her husband was ill. He'd had a stroke while riding on his
donkey. Annie went to see him but says, "He was already travelling to
death and could not recognize me." He died a few days later.
Although he had a house and land it was taken over by his parents
and Annie got nothing. His parents told Annie that he had 'drunk out'
his house and land.


November 21st, 1986

Annie is now bedridden and she is dying. I feel depressed and sad
over the poverty she has lived in all her life and the hardships she's
endured. For someone like me who is accustomed to all the basic
comforts of life, living in the poverty of Annie would be worse than death.
I doubt I would survive very long. To Annie who has known nothing better
since birth that way of life was normal and as she got older and bought
her own piece of land and had her concrete house built for her by
Government life did get better and Annie was proud of it. Annie is not a
morose person and must have experienced many happy times but now
when I visit her with some basic things to make life easier I still feel very
helpless in this little house with no furniture except a bed, two small
tables heaped up with odd bottles, pieces of cloth and this, that and the
other, and the old car seat with broken springs. The walls are blackened
from months of cooking inside the house on the coalpot there are no
curtains; an old, torn dress covers part of the window. I knowAnnie does
not want to move from the house she loves so much but she is now
helpless and there is never anyone here when I visit and everything is
soiled. I do not know where to start. I have given her neighbour Ruby
some gifts for herself and asked her at the same time if she could visit
Annie three times a day for me, just to give her a drink and light the
kerosene lamp at night and we have sent a message to her family
(nephews and nieces) to ask if we can bring in some members of the
St.Vincent de Paul Society to help us clean the house and bathe Annie.








I see a lot of soiled clothes piled up in different bundles on the floor but
do not want to remove them in case among the different bundles may be
some treasured possessions of Annie.


November 24th, 1986

I visited Annie today to find there had been a complete transfor-
mation in her house. I could hardly believe my eyes. The house had been
swept and scrubbed, all the soiled bundles of clothes had disappeared
and now there was a lovely old hat/coat stand in the corer and hanging
on it was an umbrella and a ladies coat. The old car seat was still against
the wall but now it was covered with a clean bedspread and even had a
cushion placed on it; against the other wall was one of Annie's small
carved wooden tables with a tin of Ovaltine and an enamel cup on it.
I went into Annie's room. Annie was lying on the bed on her side
and did not seem to recongnise me. She was murmuring to herself. The
bed (an old four-poster) had been made up with clean linen and a clean
cotton blanket (one that Mum gave Annie years ago) was tucked in over
her feet. There was a clean pillow-case on the pillow. Annie herself looked
washed and clean. For the first time there were curtains over the
bedroom windows. The curtains were blowing in the breeze and sunlight
came through the window and across the edge of the bed. Beside the bed
was the other wooden table and on it was a thermos of hot ovaltine and
a covered water container with a clean enamel cup beside it.
I sat on the bed beside Annie and said a prayer of thanks while I
held her hand and looked at our old friend. She seemed thirsty so I
opened a packet of apple juice, put a straw in it and Annie drank almost
all of it. She can no longer eat anything solid. I talked to Annie for a while
and although Annie did not talk her eyes seemed to understand. I told
her how much all her friends in Hodges Bay loved her and missed her and
how we all remembered her coming to us with 'Harris' and how each week
we'd looked forward to her arrival and Annie smiled the first smile I'd
seen in a long time. I'd brought some limes with me as I remembered how
Annie loved limes and always asked for them. When she saw the limes
she pointed to them and then to her head, so I rubbed her head gently
with one half of a lime. While I was still there Annie's great niece came
in to check on her and her neighbour told me that Annie's parish priest
was coming to give her communion the next day. Annie is Church of
England.
I never saw Annie again, but early in the morning of December
12th I dreamt that Mum had come with me to visit Annie and with us had
come a man who was a stranger to me. I tried to see him clearly because
in my dream I was puzzled as to why he was with us but his face always
seemed turned away from me. Mum and I and this stranger went into the
house and there, standing in front of us was Annie, dressed in a bright,
flowered dress and looking very well. Her face had filled out and she was
smiling. Mum held my arm and said, 'Gillie. Annie is getting better'. Then
Annie walked past us, through the front door, down the steps and started








walking down the road without looking back.
I half woke up, turned over and said to myself, What a relief-
Annie is getting better'.

On the day of the funeral I was ill with a very bad stomach pain
and could not attend but heard that it was very well attended and the
nephew to whom she'd left the house had arrived from St. Maarten with
two lovely wreaths and had made all the funeral arrangements and all her
nieces and nephews were there.







A.J.SEYMOUR

FOLK SONG

Supenaam water sweet, son
But Supenaam water deep, son
And you got to paddle more
Or else you got to sleep, son
The deep long sleep and sure.

Itanime water strange, son
And Itanime waters change, son
Watch for the river roar.
Itanime took a score, son
And hungers still for more, son
Itanime water danger, son
Some people go ashore.

Itanime rocks are sharp, son
And Itanime waters dark, son
Dark like a danger door.
Let the Captain drop a trick, son
The Belly-Boat rips so quick, son
You drown in it for sure.

Supenaam water sweet, son
Itanime water sharp, son
So once and never more.








TO THE FAMILY HOME AWAITING REPAIR

Oh, long narrow home heavy with living
An age of memories people the walls
Around your naked frame,

Warm shell of love & crowding children
Where the young girls in uniform
Hats worn like horseguards
Speech full of the school diction
Cycle up to ask for who's at home.

And the cool Trade Winds carry echoes
Pavan for A Dead Princess
Played on the Thorens
Until it wore the grooves.

The scent of roses in the slim garden
Growing in the four-hour overhead sun
Smell of bread from the oven
Everything mingling in the wind.

The tales we told around the dining table
Linking the luncheons with their spell
(Sometimes the battlefield for table tennis).

The statue of JT at the desk
Image of the dedicated student.
The stairs are torn away that quivered to the steps
Impatient for games & parties but slow for school.

So many came here tea-visiting professors,
Exam students, poets, novelists, sculptors,
A Chief Justice a future Prime Mininster
Once talked halfway through the night.

Through a hole in the hooded verandah
The bats spelt six o'clock evening patrol.

And little children to the Kindergarden
Wrestling their way into the hall of learning
Chattering, tormenting the wild cherry-tree
That always yields its fruit.

Oh, crowd your long years of memory
Into a prayer for their future
For all who lived & Loved & studied here.







McDONALD DASH


MANHATTAN NOONDAY

I sat in my Calvin Kleins
adjusted my Benetton sweater
and contemplated Fifth Avenue
Like a trapped tourist
on a bench in Central Park S.

Takes a hell of a lot
of patience
to live in New York

Manhattan My island
in the sun

Up from the "E" train
in Reeboks stepping sturdily
at 53rd and Lex
Pushing inward through the
fabric of the Big City.

Heading to Midtown and late
for work past Charlie's Corer
Hard by Florsheims and
Bloomie's

Moving aside to let
old ladies
with autographed varicoses
through multitude
of hot-dog-and-Haagen-Daaz-
chocolate break
half pound of David's
cookies in Gucci handbags
The big city pauses in the
Manhattan noonday.

Prince skirts swish by

Standing by newstand perusing
People Hustler Business Week
Plunking dime and a
quarter for a USA Today.

The Big City throbs as
Matrons waddle into
Petrossian's for turtle-loaves







at olympian prices


Tell their story to their
friends in the Hamptons

Manhattan my island

Dense jungle of concrete
and steel
looking at Mr Trump's tower
Black
Up to the blue sky.

Gazing across at
Bergdorf Goodman's
where price-asking
is a presumption
A 14th Street refrain

Where is Herman's Sporting Goods?
Oh! Down Third by FDR'S
postal facility (how I
love these New York words)
gorging out of Cinema II
After a spider woman kissed me

New York
New York
in the noonday

Cross over to West side
in the M-28
Alight at the Henry Hudson
To look in on old Mrs Nissenbaum
large lady in small apt.
And nasturtiums stand in the
window sill

Manhattan survivor's song
My island in the Big City
Puts on its Ferraris
in the Noonday.




















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MASACOURAMA


87


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"THE INFINITE REHEARSAL" by WILSON HARRIS

A REVIEW by MICHAEL GILKES

Wilson Harris's The Infinite Rehearsal is the most recent work
in what is already a remarkable bildungsroman. It begins with a 'rene-
gade' note from the protagonist, 'Robin Redbreast Glass,' complaining
that:
W.H. has stolen a march on me and put his name to my
fictional autobiography. So be it. I do not intend to sue him
for my drowned rights. Call it character licence on his part.
He and I are adversaries, as my book will show, but we
share one thing in common, namely, an approach to the
ruling concepts of civilization from the other side...(p.vii)
The note is a reminder that Harris, as author, refuses to be au-
thoritarian in his approach to character or text, abandoning conventions
of realism, authorial omniscience or artistic detachment. The author
enters into the narrative, becoming a 'character' in his own fiction,
admitting to his own biases. Later on in the book, Glass, who serves as
the reflection (rather than simply a transparent device) of his author,
challenges him on the accuracy of his facts:
'May I give you the facts?' said W.H. 'I may be a character
in your book but still...
'Facts?' said I.
You Robin Glass your mother Alice, your aunt Miriam,
and three children were drowned in June 1961, the
afternoon of the earthquake. The boat Tiger over-turned
at sea...'
'It's not true', 'I shouted. You know damn well I was in bed
with flu at aunt Miriam's.'
'It was I,' said W.H. gently.
You?' (pp. 47/48)
The 'autobiography' touches intimately both author and charac-
ter. Aunt Miriam, who runs a children's school of drama in her home, is
drowned along with several children, when their boat capsizes in a storm
during an outing. Alice, Robin's mother (the father has long deserted),
a literate, intelligent and brave woman, is herself drowned attempting
rescue. Robin, ill in bed at his aunt's home, hears the news from his
childhood friends, the orphans Peter and Emma, whom Alice had
managed to save. From these slight ingredients, a visionary 'rehearsal'
of events takes place in the child's fevered brain, deeply affecting his view
of the real world. Catastrophe is converted into creative insight. Not only
has the child been exposed (at aunt Miriam's) to a world of 'magical
theatre' where 'the histories of the world' are re-enacted through 'the
shoestring budget of childhood theatre' (p. 65); but he has also been
influenced by stories of his eccentric, bookish grandfather who has 're-
written' Goethe's Faust while 'pork-knocking' (prospecting for gold and
diamonds ) in the rainforests of his own 'Sacred Wood' where he dies of
beri-beri on the day Robin is born, the same day the nuclear bomb is






dropped on Hiroshima '... and history changed, revised itself backwards,
never to be the same again.' (p,12)
The awareness of childhood deprivation and global turbulence
(conveyed with great power and economy as the simultaneous trauma
of childbirth and nuclear devastation) imbues Glass with the conviction
that he has been charged by the Creative Spirit (a 'revision' of the ghost's
charge to Hamlet, 'the glass of fashion', to seek revenge) to embark upon
'the ceaseless rehearsal, ceaseless performance of the play of truth,' in
which the Self is 'fictionalised' as a means of locating the creative
imagination within 'ageless author, ageless character.' (p.82)
Like his grandfather, he becomes 'gravedigger/pork-knocker' in
the 'Sacred Wood' (a rather more humble role than Eliot/Frazer's priest/
poet):
The graves I dug were libraries of myths of gold,silver, bone
... texts that broke a uniform narrative domination by the
conquistadores of history in inserting themselves into my
book despite the apparent eclipse they endured, despite
voicelessness or oblivion. (p.2)
Classical and modern texts of European civilization are
subjected to a 'panning' by the author as 'pork-knocker' in 'a library
of dreams', and made to yield up their correspondences with other,
'lost' or unregarded cultures. The result is a novel-amalgam in which
bits of the 'revised' texts are embedded within a rich magma of cross-
cultural, universal significance. Tiresias, the seer, for example, now
observes things from within a third world perspective, 'like a tourist
under a black sky'. The other side of the Great Tradition appears.
I saw the negative film of Thebes ... I saw Napoleon's
negative crown and Alexander's sceptre and Captain Cat's
tombstone floating with Alice's ring and with the stone
from a Jamaican hillside ... It was an uncanny vortex. The
flotsam and jetsam of empires (p.72/73)
The idea of flcton as a continual rehearsal or 're-vision' of accepted
traditions (including the art of fiction itself), was already present in
Harris's early work. In a 1967 lecture he described it like this:
It is as if within his work [the writer] sets out again and
again across a certain territory... of broken recollection in
search of a community or species of fiction whose exis-
tence he begins to discern. (The Writer and Society', in
Tradition, The Writer and Society New Beacon 1967)
That technique of'rehearsal' is at the root of all his work from The
Palace of the Peacock (1960) onward, and the overwhelming concern
is with avoiding the 'sovereign', absolute nature of Tradition, or the
tyranny of'hard fact'. His use of Classical myth and allegory, or of the
European literary tradition, is part of a process of re-interpreting or
'retrieving' values that have become ossified, their links with other, so-
called 'primitive' cultures, lost. In the unlocking of those 'sovereign'
traditions, there is a release of potential energy for creative change.
...my grandfather's Faust (which he wrote or brought to







completion in the year I was born) possesses roots as
much in the modern age as in the Columbian workshop of
the gods and therefore addresses a European myth from
a multi-faceted and partly non-European standpoint.
(p.7)
Robin Redbreast Glass, in writing his 'autobiography', is aware of
this 'pre-natal text' which, like Goethe's lifelong work, mirrors its
author's own sense of involvement in a drama of consciousness in which
final vision is never acheived. Faust appears as a central text in the
novel, but the figure of Faust, brought alongside the modern age, revises
his perspectives:
'You know, Robin, ... I like to think of my surgery as a
window upon heaven. Except that heaven's changing. ...
technology's changing. And quite frankly I'm not sure
what investitures the devil now wears.' (p.64)
In fact, Faust now sees with 'Quetzalcoatl eyes in which were
entwined the marriage of heaven and earth' (p.64) The reference to the
Aztec 'plumed serpent', the god unitng aetherial and earthly life, also
conjures up Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with its plea for
a wedding of physical and spiritual 'contraries'.
For Harris, as for William Blake (whose prophetic books with their
airborne, energetic figures Harris' s work often calls to mind), without
contraries is no progression; and the novel, both 'autobiography' and
'fiction,' is also organised on this principle. Glass, both fictional character
and author, is in dialogue with the 'Erdgelst' of a 'Faustian' world:
Thus it was that I welcomed Ghost, conquistadorial and
victimised Ghost (was he male/female? I could not tell)
when IT appeared on a beach in Old New Forest ... (p.1)
The Faust/Mephisto dialogue is expanded, however, to include
political tyranny, ballot-rigging in the 'third world', the refugee problem,
the commercialization of Space, the Challenger disaster, Chernobyl:
Don't exaggerate. Chernobyl is a disaster complex in the
Soviet Union. What has it got to do with the free West and
the choices that lie before the electorates of the free West?
'Hush-hush disaster, dateless day bearing' said Ghost.
'When Communist Rome burns an empire of souls inhales
its ash. But no one sees the fire or the brute faery at our
fingertips.......Cheap energy is the opium of the masses,
the new lotus.' (p.54)
In his previous novel, Carnival (1985), Harris had used the alle-
gorical densities of Dante's Divina Commedia as a 'text' through which
his imaginative, cross-cultural vision ranges, picking up Mediaeval
threads of meaning and connecting them to contemporary, but broken,
lines of communication, rather like a lone linesman in a disaster area
where most of the power lines are down. In this 'repair work,' post-
colonial cultural fragmentation and the resultant masks of carnival are
linked with the social and political corruption and consequent need for
spiritural'guidance in Dante's 14th century Europe. The 'guides' in
Harris's novels are culturally heterogeneous, modern figures, but their







roles are the same: to re-establish the inner authority of unconditional
love in genuine revolutionary change. The last sentence of Carnival
begins with the last line of the Paradiso:
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.'
('...l'amor che move il sole e I'altre stelle.')
The Infinite Rehearsal, like Carnival, like much of Harris's
fiction, is not so much a 're-reading' as a're-visioning' of European Myth
(itself concerned with the retrieval of Value), in order to discover the
deeper springs of the enabling Universal Truth that all myth contains. It
was, Harris argues, the enshrining of the great myths as 'Sovereign
Tradition' which, in a sense, created the 'third world' and broke the lines
of communication between peoples and their cultures; a disruption that
now appears on a global scale. Goethe's Faust serves as another Great
Myth which, since its origins lie even deeper, within an 'Ur-text' or myth
of the divorce between Reason and Emotion, may have resonances that
suggest and reveal:
... a play that is infinite rehearsal... that approaches again
and again a sensation of ultimate meaning residing within
a deposit of ghosts relating to the conquistadorial body -
as well as the victimised body of new and old worlds, new
forests old forests, new stars and old constellations within
the work-shop of the gods. (p.1)
This is, in fact, a description of Harris's own fictional practice,
where the writer 'sets out again and again across a certain territory ...',
but without any preconceived destination, open to revisionaryy strate-
gies' available to the creative imagination. This is what Goethe's Faust
means when he tells the Erdgeist that he needs help in order to leave
'dabbling in words' and seek to discover 'what holds the world together.'
In Harris's novel. Ghost acts as Geist to Glass/Harris's quest:
I say revisonary strategies to imply that as you write... of
the dead or the unborn, bits of the world's turbulent
universal consciousness embed themselves in your book.
Do you see? (p.46)
'And I revise around these and through these. I see', W.H.'/Glass
replies. It is a method of 'validation of fiction', going against the grain of
conventional form and practice, the author becoming involved in the
fiction, following where the work (Geist) leads while also engaged in the
writing.
Above all, this is a novel about the prophetic nature of fiction as
a means of apprehending the dilemmas of our post-colonial civilization
involving traumatised Third Worlds' as well as bewildered 'First Worlds'.
The 'spectre of wholeness' that underlies the strange, rambling narrative
lies in the hidden densities of the texts themselves, where there is a
visionary thread of meaning running through them into a seamless,
cross-cultural garment. Extracts from T.S. Eliot, Walter De la Mare,
Dylan Thomas, W.H.Auden, Wilfred Owen, R.L.Stevenson, Robert
Bums, Karl Marx and Shakespeare appear at odd moments within the
narrative, ofter altered slightly, the result of cultural frisson. The texts
Jostle each other, share in each other's meanings:







'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking at the moonlit door.

Belly to belly
Back to back
Ah don't give a damn
Ah done dead already.

And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
I who sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.

At first sight, De La Mare's simple ballad, a relic of school days,
and Eliot's classical allusions from The Waste Land seem to be joined
by an unlikely bedfellow: the bawdy Caribbean folksong. 'Jumble Jam-
boree'. But the folksong with its despairing echo of the cramped hold of
the slave-ship, becomes a mediating comment on both De La Mare's
Traveller, unaware of a 'host of phantom listeners', and the Waste Land
with its expiatory message for a historical and cultural Tradition in crisis.
The Great Tradition was always (as Conrad saw) deeply implicated in the
Imperial Adventure which served to support that Tradition. The texts
gain a new 'immediacy of utterance' from their juxtaposition.
Harris is making a plea for world sanity; for the compassionate
understanding denied by crude polarisations of language and thought.
The novel is part of a profoundly moral undertaking; an attempt to
understand the apparent paradoxes of remarkable human achievement
in science and art alongside the equally remarkable record of human
misery and deprivation. Instead of merely investing in the 'human
interest' of these paradoxes, Harris looks within, at our own biases, our
own failure to 'connect' because of an 'illiteracy of the imagination' which
obscures the link between material progress and increasing violence in
a world dominated by the stock-market mentality of 'Billioraire Death'
(one of the allegorical figures which rise out of Aunt Miriam's children's
theatre). The hope for the future is Emma, who, in becoming the first
female Archbishop, witnesses to a new Divina Commedia: a 'Divine
Communism,' a reversal of the bankruptcy of the human imagination
which has led to the collective death-wish inherent in global violence,
drug-trafficking, environmental rape and the spectre of nuclear destruc-
tion. It is to her that Glass/Harris sets out on his final journey.



(This article first appeared in Artrage, No. 18, Autumn, 1987. This
magazine is published by the Minorities Arts Advisory Service, 23-31
Tavistock Place, London WC1H 9SF, U.K.)









"THEATRE IN THE CARIBBEAN" BY KEN CORSBIE

A REVIEW by AL CREIGHTON


The importance of a major publication on Caribbean Theatre at
any time is considerable since the field is markedly underdeveloped in
the area of published literature. The total collective of documentation,
critical works, analyses and even published plays is much too slim for a
region that has produced so much theatre. Critical attention in this area,
as well as publications generally, has certainly lagged well behind that
given to poetry and fiction and, partly for this reason, any work of some
merit is welcome as a necessary advancement upon an unsatisfactory
situation.
Arough survey of the literature reveals books byJohnston (1972),
Omotoso (1980), Hill (1972, 1982, ed.), while Wright (1938) remains a
major source. Baugh and Morris, eds., (1986 Carib No. 4) contains
further valuable material and other works include Hill (1972, b; 1985),
Gray (1968), Morris (1983), Creighton (1984), Anderson (1984), Walcott
(1971) and Noel, ed., (1985).
The list is quite nearly exhausted by the above and so, an account
of Caribbean theatre, such as Ken Corsbie's Theatre in the Caribbean
(Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1984; 58; vi pp.) written by one whose
familiarity with his subject has spanned several years as actor and
director, may be looked upon as being extremely valuable. But Corsbie's
work disappoints, falling short of expectations and turning out to be
limited in achievement for many reasons; not because it confines its aim,
at best, to the middle forms in secondary school, but because its content
is too often cursory treatments of very important issues, conversational
rather than analytical, wants thoroughness in a number of areas of
research, and is often erroneous.
The book is meritorious and useful for its recognition of many
areas in which theatre is alive in the Caribbean, and is particularly
progressive in its acknowledgement of the oral arts in which Corsbie
appears to be particularly interested. He very necessarily draws atten-
tion to the importance oforality and of its traditions to the region's drama,
but his definitions/concepts of drama and theatre are rather too promis-
cuously all-embracing and his tendency is to describe phenomena that
are merely marginally theatrical as drama without the often needed
qualification.
Starting probably frpm a broad notion of all the world's a stage"
and all action of man as theatre/theatrical/dramatic, he proceeds with
an all-embracing readiness to admit varied forms of spontaneity, proba-
bly reflecting a belief in the misconceived cliche that "Caribbean people
are natural actors/(singers/dancers)". He asserts:
The historical backgrounds of the
islands with their mixtures of
strong folk cultures and traditions,
have blessed us with very expressive








dialects and body languages.
An assumption there is that something makes Caribbean dialects
more effective and "expressive" than other languages, but any native
speaker anywhere can claim equal efficiency in his language. What is
true in the remark is that the backgrounds have indeed created rich
material for theatrical forms, sources and inspiration, not that they have
given rise to superior languages or gesture.
Such stereotyped notions might also have led Corsbie into some
of the errors in the work. He is careful enough to add that:
natural talents and exciting roots
are not enough to make excellent
actors. It takes a good deal of
hard work, intelligence and discipline
.... many Caribbean actors ....
have mastered the necessary skills
But he never gets around to telling readers what the skills are or
how they may be acquired/sharpened. Both are important since the
book's aim is instruction at a fundamental level. He lists qualities
possessed by some of the region's leading performers, perhaps in an
attempt to fulfil that role, but all the attributes listed often remain
physical/personal qualities; at best the raw material or what one sees
in the finished product. "A powerfulvoice", "physical and personal power
and vitality", "a natural warmth", "tall handsome athletic physique" and
"a spontaneous sense of humour" seem to suggest natural physical gifts
rather than skills that one can work at to acquire. This neither supports
Corsbie's own earlier argument nor leads us in the right direction.
One still needs to know what makes Joy Ryan "Just beautiful to
watch in any role" or what gives Louise Bennett "attention-getting stage
presence". The student is not told how to achieve any of these. The belief
in 'natural talent' also affects the kinds of questions he poses at the ends
of chapters, such as:
Is there a student in your class
who can always tell a good story?
Are you a good actor yourself?
which is of limited usefulness in skills acquisition/development and
keeps the emphasis on possession of natural ability.
Corsbie misunderstands the art of dub poetry and is thus
misleading as he asserts:
Dub poetry could be easy. With a
background of reggae rhythm from
your class mates, just tell of some-
thing in your own life.
That is hardly likely to produce poetry. Far from being spontane-
ous/ex-tempo composition, dub poetry is a more complex craft involving
techniques of scribal structure and oral performance. Neither was
American soul/funk "rap" a pioneering influence for dub poetry as he
suggests. This form, which developed in the 1970's, pre-dates rap which
reached its height at the beginning of the 1980's. Dub poetry is also
vaguely related to DJ Dub performances with which Corsbie seems to








confuse it but even DJ virtuosity dates back to the 1960's.
Further, when Corsbie shows his consciousness of skills for
which actors have to be trained he is, again, less than instructive, as in
the question
What techniques do you think are
needed to be a good actor? Do you
know any of your friends who have
some of those skills? Perhaps they,
too, will make top-class Caribbean
actors some day.
The answer to the first question is not quite that subjective. One
cannot assume that a student without the necessary technical knowl-
edge can think out these answers, but rather, he has to be taught them.
For most of the book, one gets brief, introductory references to
sources, dramatists and productions which rarely get beyond generali-
zation and superficial description. A wide range of subjects are ap-
proached without being addressed and, indeed, these are so varied that
they could hardly have been properly covered in one book of this length
and range. It is likely, though, that the book aims only to sensitize and
to stimulate debate and further research through the questions it poses
but does not answer.
Corsbie is consistent in his very progressive approach to theatre
and is fully aware of the vitality of oral traditions. But one is left with the
impression of an insufficiency and thinness in the research and inatten-
tion to detail which led to many mis-quotes of lyrics and incorrect
information about performers (for example, "The Rivers of Babylon"
which is really a Melodians creation), as well as unscientific conclusions.
A major strength of Theatre in the Caribbean is that it does not
treat drama as a purely literary discipline but more progressively
recognizes it as "action", paying due attention to its technical/practical
aspects. Such an approach is superior to what usually happens in
school/exam situations where drama is treated no differently to litera-
ture. Corsbie's design of activities and exercises at the end of each
chapter forces the introduction of those aspects of theatre into the school
curriculum.
It is understandable that stimuli are being provided for the
students to think more about theatre and relate various relevant issues
to it. Though sometimes a little short on real information, the style used
is more beneficial than any attempt to provide information through
straight expository prose.


REFERENCES

Anderson, Paula Grace, "Two Can Play", West Indian Literature
and its Social Context, Mark McWatt (ed.), U.W.I., Cave Hill, 1985.
Baugh, Eddie and Morris, Mervyn (eds.), Carib No. 4, WIACLALS,
Kingston. 1986.
Corsbie, Ken, Theatre in the Caribbean, Hodder and Stoughton,









London, 1984.
Creighton, Al, "Commoner and King: contrasting linguistic perform-
ances in the dialogue of the dispossessed", West Indian Literature and
its Social Context, M. McWatt (ed.) U.W.I., Cave Hill, 1985.
Gray, Cecil, "Folk Themes in West Indian Drama", Caribbean
Quarterly, Sept. 1968.
Hill, Errol, The Trinidad Carnival, University of Texas, Austin,
1972.
Hill, Errol, "The Emergence of a National Drama in the Caribbean",
Caribbean Quarterly, Dec. 1972.
Hill, Errol (ed.), Introduction to Plays for Today, Longman, King-
ston, P.O.S. 1985.
Johnston, Robert, The Theatre of Belize.
Morris, Mervyn, Introduction to Trevor Rhone, Old Story Time and
Other Plays.
Noel, Keith, (ed.), Introduction to Plays for Playing, Heinemann,
London, 1985.
Omotoso, Kole, The Theatrical Into Theatre, New Beacon, London,
1981.
Walcott, Derek, "What The Twilight Says", Dream on Monkey
Mountain and Other Plays.
Wright, Richardson, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838.









CONTRIBUTORS


HAROLD BASCOM- Guyanese artist/illustrator, writer, and play-wright; his first
novel Apata was published by Heinemann in 1986; his plays The Barrel and T.V.
Alley have been produced in Guyana with great success.
AL CREIGHTON Jamaican by birth; writer on the theatre, producer and director;
lectures on drama at the University of Guyana; edits the arts page of Stabroek
News in Georgetown.
MAHADAI DAS Young Guyanese poet of great promise; M.A. (Philosophy),
University of Chicago; lives in the U.S.A.
MCDONALD DASH Prominent Guyanese journalist; play-wright and producer;
poet.
MICHAEL GILKES Guyanese poet, critic, and play-wright; author of the play
Couvade; lecturer in the English Faculty, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill;
at present attached to the Centre for Caribbean Studies, Warwick University.
JOHN GILMORE Barbadian historian and writer; editor of Banja, a magazine of
Barbadian life and culture, first published in April, 1987.
CECIL GRAY Noted Trinidadian writer and editor; senior lecturer in the Depart-
ment of Education, University of the West Indies, St Augustine.
WILSON HARRIS Guyanese by birth; among the most original thinkers and nov-
elists in modern literature; his numerous novels Include The Guyana Quartet
and The Eye of the Scarecrow; his novel Carnival won the 1987 Guyana Prize
for Fiction; his latest novel is The Infinite Rehearsal.
JANE KING HIPPOLYTE St Lucian writer; she and her husband, Kendel
Hippolyte, run "The Lighthouse" theatre in St Lucia.
GILLIANHOWIE Trinidadian by birth; now a housewife and teacher in Antigua;
"Annie" is her first published work.
TONYKELLMAN Barbados poet and short story writer; his collection of poems
includes: The Black Madonna and Other Poems (1975), In Depths of Burning
Light (1982), The Broken Sun (1984).
RAS MICHAEL Guyanese performance poet and story teller; has published
collections of his work including'Black Chant and Church and State.
ROOPLAL MONAR Guyanese poet and short story writer, Peepal Tree Press has
published a collection of short stories, Backdam People, and a volume of poems,
Koker; a further collection of stories, High House and Radio, and a novel,
Jhanjhat, are due to be published in 1988.
PAM MORDECAI Jamaican poet; radio and television producer; editor ofCarib-
bean Journal of Education; author of books for children.
HEMRAJ MUNIRAM Guyanese journalist and short story writer.
SASENARINE PERSAUD Guyanese author of short stories and poems; work not
yet collected; two novels recently accepted for publication by Peepal Tree Press.
CORDONROHLEHR Guyanese by birth; lecturer and literary critic; noted for his
encyclopaedic knowledge of the calypso and his writings on the subject; Reader
in English Literature, University of the West Indies, St Augustine.






















































































Printed by Guyana National Printers Limited

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38 JUNE, 1988

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FRIENDS OF KYK-OVER-AL A great many individuals and organisations have contributed to the success ofKyk-Over-Al since it was relaunched in December. 1984. We owe a very special debt of appreciation to the following for their support of this issue No. 38 and the forthcoming issue No 39. Their vigorous assistance so readily offered in strengthening an important part of Guyana's cultural tradition deserves the thanks ofthe whole community. Associated Industries Banks 0 .1. H. Bauxite Industry Development Company C. Czamikow Inc (New York) C.K. Newbridge (Guyana) T. Geddes Grant Guyana FerWizer Guyana Liquor Corporation Guyana National Cooperative Bank Guyana Nati onal Trading Corporation Guyana Pharmaceutical Corporation Guyana Resource Corporation Guyana Stores Guyana Sugar Corporation Guyana and Trinidad Mutual Insurance Handin-Hand Mutual Fire Insurance Laparkan (Agent for Canon Copiers and FaX Machines) National Bank of Industry and Commerce Re 'public Bank Sir Shridath Ramphal (Commonwealth Secretary General) The cost of printing and distrlbutlng a literary magazine is very heavy. P lease help us to strengthen Kyk-Over-Al by sending your subscriptions to either of the Joint Editors as follows: A.J. SEYMOUR. 23 North Rd. Bourda. Georgetown. Guyana IAN McDONALD. c/o GUYSUCO. 22 Church St. Georgetown. Guyana In the U.K. please apply to: F.H. THOMASSON. 9. Webster Close. Maidenhead. Berkshire SL6 4NJ SubSCriptions per issue (including postage) : G$40 EC$15 US$7 The Editors would welcome the submission of poems. 'short stories. articles and reviews to consider for publication. Publication of course cannot be guaranteed and because of expense it will not be possible to return manuscripts. Submissions may be a ccompanied by illustrations and photographs of authors. suitable for black-and-white reproduction. Copyright 1988. No reproduction by any means. except for short extracts for review purposes. without pennission of the Editors.

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KYK 38 -Edited by A.J. Seymour and Ian McDonald JUNE 1988 TABLE OF CONTENTS 150 Anniversary of East Indians in Guyana Across the Editors' Desk Six Mythical Figures of Guyana Harold Bascom The Guyana Prize Feature Address: ''Trophy and Catastrophe" Gordon Rohlehr Comments Arising from the Prize Award Wilson Harris Poetry Hamlet Prince of Darkness Michael Gilkes Woodbine Michael Gilkes Intercity Dub for Jean Jane King Hippolyte Visit Sasenarine Persaud Plus Pam Mordecai Exeunt Pam Mordecai The Satin Princess Ian McDonald "Hangman" Cory Ian McDonald Carnival Flag Woman Cecil Gray Paradise Tony Kellman For Maria de Borges Mahadai Das Folk Song AJ. Seymour To the Family Home Awaiting Repair AJ. Seymour Manhattan Noonday McDonald Dash Fiction and Articles Street Loving, Loving Streets HemraJ Muniram Cookman Rooplal Monar Wiltshire Car Dead-Ras Michael Nature Study John Gilmore Annie Gillian Howie Reviews 'The Infinite Rehearsal" by Wilson Harris Michael Gilkes "Caribbean Theatre" by Ken Corsbie AI Creighton Contributors 2 3 10 13 24 36 36 37 43 45 45 54 54 58 58 68 83 84 85 40 46 60 64 77 88 93

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150th ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARRIVAL OF EAST INDIANS IN GUYANA Celebration by the Guyana Commemoration Commission Kyk-Over-Al is happy to join the Guyana Commemoration Commission in observing the 150th Anniversary of the Arrival of East Indians in Guyana. This magazine has played its part over the years in publishing the work of Caribbean writers of East Indian origin and in recording East Indian strands in the pattern of Guyanese and West Indian cultural life. A number of special events have been organised to mark this Significant anniversary in May. These include a 3 -day conference at the Pegasus Hotel; Book. Photographic. and other Exhibitions; and a variety of cultural activities and displays. India will be sending a large party of artistes. academics. and other representatives to participate in the celebration. A number of publications to mark the 150thAnniversary are being produced. including a reprint of Peter Ruhoman's "History of East Indians in Guyana" and a new anthology of poetry and prose. East Indians. surviving and rising above indenture. as Africans survived and rose above slavery. have become an important part of our social. economic and cultural mosaic. Of the nearly 5 million people of the Commonwealth Caribbean East Indians comprise over 20 per cent of the population. Their contribution to literature. scholarship. and art in Guyana and the whole region is of great and growing importance. Their presence in politics. trade unions. business. art. religion. architecture. dress and customs has added immeasurably to the richness of Caribbean culture. At the same time. the lives and attitudes of East Indians in their new home-land have been signtficantly transformed. The occasion of the 150th Anniversary of their arrival will provide a valuable opportunity to examine the rich contribution made by East Indians and assess their transformed presence within the West Indian society and culture. 2

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ACROSS THE EDITORS' DESK THE GUYANA PRIZE A literary highlight for the whole region was the Guyana Prize Awards ceremony which took place at the National Cultural Centre In Georgetown on December 8th 1987. In this Issue ofKyk we carry both Dr Gordon Rohlehr's outstanding feature address and Wilson Harris's deeply considered thoughts on the occasion. At the ceremony President Desmond Hoyte made the awards to the prizewinners. It was, the President said later, an occasion "typically Guyanese, dignified yet full of liveliness and humour". He also saw It becoming "an important landmark In our national evolution". The editors of Kyk agree with that. In a radio programme aired on the day Itself this view was expressed: ''Tonight the winners of the first-ever Guyana Prize will be announced and the awards will be presented to the prizewinners. A sense of history tells us that this is a moment that will be treasured In the future annals of Guyana and the wider West Indies. Long after anniversaries which now seem Important have been forgotten the first awards of the Guyana Prize will be remembered. This is the first time In Guyana and the English-speaking West Indies that literature and writers have been given such substantial recognition In their own homeland. The awards themselves are of significant value but. more than that, the Guyana Prize, and the publicity and ceremonies which surround It. proclaim the vital role which writers have 3 played and should play In society. Other countries have greatly honoured our writers. Now we begin to honour them ourselves. President Hoyte, In announcing the Prize In February, summed up the Intention simply but memora bly: "We must give stature and status to our makers of words as we do to our makers of things". Material success is important to a nation, Just as money is im portant to a man. The saying Is not that man does not live by bread, the saying Is that man does not live by bread alone. And 5t Paul did not say that money Is the root of evil, he said love of money is the root of evil. However, mate rial success and money cannot In themselves be worthy ends. Dante said it well In the ninth book of lbe Paradiso": "You were not born to live the lives of brutes But beauty to pursue and knowledge high". After alI, what is material success for? It cannot be for its own sake because then a stuffed pig would be the most realIsed creature on earth. Human beings must always ask themselves Tolstoy's question: "What do men live by?" The achievement of Guyanese and West Indian writers in the last 25 years is remarkable by any standard. The works of our liter ary people have risen above the petty politics and the endemic economic problems which have plagued the region. Long after the contradictions and difficulties of

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our postcolonial societies have been forgotten the books produced by our writers will have found a permanen t place among the valuable, enduring works of man. Countries in the region have been amazingly indifferent to the writers of universal significance whom we have produced and indifferent also to the art ofwriUng itself. It is as if we continued to produce our great cricketers and yet despised and belittled the game of cricket itself. If for no other reason than a shrewd awareness of the international kudos that comes with outstanding literary and intellectual achievement one would have thought that the authorities would have fallen over themselves to find and foster our writing talent. That has not been the case. But now we have a start, perhaps a symbol, of something different and better in the Guyana Prize. It is absolutely vital that a nation should foster and honour its writers. The good writer devotes his energy to searching for truth. And in the love of truth, straight and unvarnished, lies not only the hope but the safety of a nation. 'The people need p oetry", the great Russian poet. O sip Mandelstam, wrote "to keep them awake forever". The good writer, the true writer, as Cyril Connolly said in "Enemies of Promise", "helps to unmask those pretenders which accompany all human plans for improvement: the love of power and money, the short-sighte d acquisitive pas sions, the legacies of injustice and ignorance, the tiger instinct for fighting, the ape-like desire to go with the crowd A writer must be a lie-detector who exposes falla cies in words and ideals befor e half the world is killed for them." The great writer, the great artist of any sort, as the French novelist Andre Gide Insisted, must bear a wound "That wound which we must never allow to heal but which always remains painful and bleed ing, the gash made by contact with hideous reality." In a small but significant and symbolic way, the Guyana Prize begins to recognise the unsung, deeplying, passionate, life-giving work that writers perform in a nation. For that reason tonight's cermony will indeed represen t an authentic, vital piece of this nation's history in the making." A FLOWERING OF WEST INDIAN JOURNALS? The anguished cry has often been heard, at least in Guyana, that there are only the most meagre outlets for West Indian writers, literary critics and scholars to express themselves at home and abroad. The claim is certainly true if the amount of raw talent and potential is measure: against the available vehicles for expressing that talent and potentiC'l .1. It is even more certainly true if one considers the matter in terms of opportunities to publish book-length, beautifully produced, widely distributed works locally and regionally. Gordon Rohlehr, in his address at the Guyana Prize Awards ceremony, lamented the continuing, inexcusable lack of a full-fledged CARICOM publishing house. However, as one surveys the scene regionally, it begins to dawn 4

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on one that the outlets for literary and cultural and academic expression are growing in number. quality. and range all the time. How far is this known by even writers. much less ordinary West Indian laymen? Let us see. There are the old -established Bim in Barbados. Kyk-Over-Al in Guyana (revived in December. 1984. after a long absence!. and The New Voices in Trinidad all of them obviously meeting a badly felt need for literary expression. if the amount of material submitted to us In Kyk is anything to go by. The Caribbean Quarterly continues to play its vital part. But. apart from these. there are a number of other Journals which now grace the literary. cultural and academic scene. all but one of them very new. These are noted below. Indeed. given the state ofisolatlon from each other in which Carl corn countries customarily live. there may well be other Interesting publications we are not even aware exist. Jamaica Journal This. of course. is not a new comer. It has been coming out for 20 years. It is now published quarterly. Jamaica Journal Is a magnificent. beautifully illustrated magazine that deserves a wide audience throughout the West Indies and indeed further afield It is a marvellous example of what a well -balanced. scholarly yet very readable magazine of lit erature. the arts. historical research. national history and soci ety In general should aim to be. We remember reading in it once an article on the life and art of Banja Banja is new. The first issue carne out in April. 1987. It is published twice a year by the National Cultural Foundation of Barbados and Is edited by John Gilmore. The first issue (the second issue has not yet reached us) contains poems. short stories. reviews and a number of splendid articles on Barbadian history. art. "speech in the 19th Century". and "rare and Journal of West Indian Literature Louise Bennett which alone was worth five years' subSCription Jamaica Journal Is edited .by Olive Senior (distinguished winner of the 1987 Commonwealth PrIze for Fiction) and is published on behalf of the Institute of Jamaica. Correspondence should be addressed to: IOJ Publications Limited. 2A Sutherrnere Road. Kingston 10. Jamaica. You should order it trnmediately. The subscription. if you can arrange the foreign currency. Is J$ 50 or US $15 annually (4 issues). endangered species" in that is land. This "magazine of Barbadian life and culture" is beauti fully produced and printed. It carries a full quota of excellent photographs and illustrations. The annual subscrlptloon (2 issues) is Barbados $18.00. You should write to: The Editor. Banja. National Cultural Foundation. West Terrace. St. James. Barbados. JWIL is a new academiC ments of English of the University magazine which began publica-of the West Indies. It is edited by tion in October, 1986. It is a twice -Mark McWatt. The two issues we yearly publication of the Depart-have seen are of outstanding. 5

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scholarly quality -not perhaps suitable for the ordinary layman, bu t certainly for the bend. t of anyone at all interested in West Indian literature past, present, and fu ture. Its aim is expressed in the following: "The editors invite the submission of articles that are the result of scholarly research in the literature of the English-speaking Caribbean. The editors will also consider for publication articles on the literature of the non-English-speaking Caribbean, pro vided such articles are written in The Caribb\:an Writer Volume 1, Number 1 of The Caribbean Writer, published In St. Croix, came out In spring, 1987. Itis amagnilkenUy, expen sively produced magazine of 100 p;)ges devoted entirely to poetry, short stories and reviews. The artwork and printing are superb. If this continues it will clearly be an extremely important outlet for West Indian poets and writers of fiction. The Introduction to the first issue, by the President of the University of the Virgin Islands, reads as follows: "Recognising the widespread interest in creative writing and the paucity of local outlets for such writing, the Caribbean Research Institute has expanded its focus in order to meet this community need. The University of the Virgin Islands, thus, proudly presents the premiere issue of The Caribbean Writer. Literary magazines have traditionally played a vital role in fostering writing talent, and that Is certainly one of our goals in sponsoring this new venture. Our hope 6 English and have a clear relevance to the themes and concerns of Caribbean literature in English or are ofa comparative nature, comparing Caribbean literature in another language with that in English. JWIL will also publish book reviews". The annual subscription (two issues) is US$15.00. You should write to: The Editor, Journal of West Indian Literature, Department of English, University of the West Indies, P.O.Box 64, Bridgetown Barbados. is also that the existence of a high quality literary magazine based close to will Inspire new writers toward literary endeavour and that ultimately the audience for good literature will grow and prosper. I look forward to ten or twenty years hence when we will point with pride to established writers who were first published in these pages. The University is indeed pleased to make such a valuable contribution to the Caribbean community through this landmark publication." The Editor is Erika J Smilow itz and the Advisory Board includes well-known West Indian literary figures such as Derek Walcott, Mervyn Morris, Olive Senior, Alwyn Bully, and John Figueroa. Editorial and subSCrip tion correspondence should be sent to: Caribbean Research Institute, University of the Virgin Islands, RR02, Box 10,000, Kingshill Post Office. st. Croix, VI 00850.

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Caribbean Affairs The introductory issue of this magazine was published for the first quarter of 1988. It is to come out four times a year. published by the Trinidad Express Newspapers. The magazine concentrates on politics and economics. The standard is very high. In the flTst issue, among other pieces. all of great interest. there are excellent articles by Michael Manley on "The Integration Movement". Anthony Maingot on "U.S. Strategy in Nicaragua". Raoul Pantin on AN.R. Robinson. Alister McIntyre on "Developing Tourism". David de Caires on "Guyana After Burnham". LloydSearwaron "Decision-Making in Foreign AtTairs", and Gordon Lewis on "The Imperialist Ideology and Mentality". There is also a thought-provoldng article. "Caribbean Booktalk". by Wayne Brown. that should be the subject of much discussion in the Faculties of English at all Universities in the region. Keith Smith. in his thoughtful introductory article. "Birth of the Journal". sets out what we can look forward to in the magazine in the following terms: "In Caribbean Affairs. readers will find some of Keynes' "eco -nomic and political thinkers". but the ditTerence is that their ideas come from their own laboratory and are rooted in the Caribbean experience from Brazil. Suriname and the Guianas in the South to MexiCO. the Bahamas and Cuba in the North This is not to say. however, that their thinking has not been informed by the Euro-American intellectual tradi tion. When we consider the whole history of the Caribbean to insinuate anything of the kind would be naive. blind and lacking in good manners. But what we are presenting he!"e for the first time in a single journal are examples of that new Caribbean intellectual tradition placed in the service of all Caribbean peoples -English, French. Spanish. Dutch and Poor tuguese-spealdng -who have long struggled for a place of dignity in their own countries. for self-determination and self-respect and for the honour and enrichment o f their brothers and sisters." Caribbean Affairs is edited by Owen Baptiste. The subscription is Tr$80 or US$20 anually (four issues). You should write to: Caribbean Affairs. P O Box 1252. Port of Spain. Trinidad. There are certainly other publications of great interest. There is Antilla in Trinidad . the journal of the Faculty of Arts at U.W I.. St Augustine. It seems to come out irregularly but the three issues we have seen contain excellent literary investigation. scholarly articles. stimulating reviews and penetrating historical research. Ken Ramchand heads the Editorial Committee. Then in Guyana there is Kaie (the National History and Arts Council journal).which comes out irregularly but contains a good variety of academic and literary work of interest in Guyana and the Wider region. And we have seen one copy of a magazine called Prince published in Antigua whose editors have brought out five issues up to June. 1987. and which contains some very interesting writing from that island. There must be others. If just the publications we have noticed here were regularly and 7

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widely available in the region surely no one could complain of lack of home-grown literary and intellectual fare. The problem. however. may be two fold. First. there is the "endurance" problem. Will many of these publications last any length of time? A glossy. good-looking. well produced and interesting first few issues only whets the appetite. If the magazine fizzles out after a couple of years. or less. that induces cynicism and reinforces the sort of self-dou bt which is already too prevalent in the region. Secondly. and even more importantly. how wide is the regional readership of these magazines? How many subscriptions to Jamaica Journal are there in Guyana? In at least some of the territories access to such publications is just about non-existent. The huge bureaucratic difficulties involved in remitting subscriptions and in some cases the absolute lackofforeign exchange. the deplorable state ofintraCARICOM mail services. the almost complete absence ofproperJyorganised means of distributing and selling books and magazines on anything but a tiny scale -these are reasons why the circulation of magazines like those mentioned here probably number in the tens rather than the hundreds in most territories in CARICOM other than the one in which each is published. And. of course. the consequent lack of a growing circulation all too easily leads to disillusion and a short life -span for the brave new venture. Until a way can be found to establish a smoother. qUicker. and wider spread of cultural exchange and distribution throughout the region. the odds are that the magazines we so enthUSiastically launch will con tinue to make infinitely less impact on West Indians than the quality and range of their contents deserve. The even greater odds then are that such ventures will sooner rather than later fade away for want of a more universal audience. It barnes one completely why the CARICOM Secretariat. so often frustrated at the political. economiC. and commercial l evel. does not tum more of its attention to a field so ripe for refonn and so conducive to furthering at the deepest level the ideal of West Indian unity. DR A J SEYMOUR. CCH Ian McDonald writes: Kyk-Over-Al. as well as its only begetter. is honoured by the award to AJS of the Cacique Crown of Honour i n the 1988 Guyana Re public Day Honours list. It is an honour most richly deserved by this outstandingly dedicated and creative Guyanese and West Indian man of letters and learning. AJS founded Kyk in 1945 and edited It singlehandedly during its palmiest and most influential period until 1961. Since the magaZine was revived in December 1984. he has continued indefatigably as Joint editor. It is an amazing. unique. contribution simply as editor. For more than 50 years AJS has contributed to the cultural scene in a myriad of ways. In my Introduction toAJS at 70. published to mark his 70th birthday four years ago {and still available from K!Jk -C$50 b!J 8

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mail). I tried to catch something of h i s incalculable pioneering e ffor t : "His life at one very important level is a record of 50 years of d edicated work in literature. He began in an era when everything was still to be done. Indeed. it maybe that pioneers have to attempt too much. When young Seymour in the early 1930s seriously began to think what contribution he might make to life and letters in his homeland. consider how much needed to be done. how many moulds required breaking. how many initiatives needed to be taken. The Empire had not yet begun to fade. The status of his country was colonial, the mentality dependent. the heritage imperial. the culture derivative. Think of the varied challenges that must have faced a young man of sense and sensibility in those times. It must have almost seemed too much. There were poems to write whose themes were Guyanese and Caribbean and whose imagery was tropical and experienced. not temperatf. and second-hand. There was a whole new world of deeply felt historkal experience to open up. There was new thinking to be done in half a dozen fields. Critical work had to be informed by different themes and original perspectives. So many fresh starts had to be made. A whole new context had to be prepared for the coming generations. The work that is done at the beginning of anything. like the foundations of a great building sunk beneath the earth. is least seen but is the most important part. Seymour as designer and architect of post colonial structures of thought and art and writing in Guyana and the Caribbean is still to be fully assessed and properly acclaimed." THE PRODUCTION OF KYK NO. 38 This is the second issue ofKyk to be printed by offset, from laserprinted camera-ready copy prepared by electronic "desktop publishing" methods. We are learning this powerful new technology somewhat by trial and error. as readers of No. 37 will have noticed from its too-small type. We apologise to those who found ithard to read. and to contributors whose work was done less than justice. Each succeeding issue should show improvement as we become more familiar with electronic page layout and laser printing. We have already gained in the speed of production. and are particularly delighted that the offset process allows us to feature visual art such as the striking work of Harold Bascom in this issue. Potential contributors of art pieces will we hope. take note. 9

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NOTES ON SIX MYTHICAL FIGURES OF GUYANA by Harold A Bascom MOON GAZER (page 12 and cover) The Moongazer is a giant spindly-legged white phantom that stands with legs astride trenches, roads, or even houses. Its main preoccupation Is said to be just gazing in a fixed pose at the full moon In the middle of the night sky. Seeing the apparition in its majesties is the sole reason for its popularized horror. BACOO (page 23) The Bacoo is a midget demon having power to shower its owner with riches untold, that is, proViding the owner grants the demon the things it demands in return for its services. The Bacoo is said to be satisfied with an endless supply of bananas and milk. The Bacoo enraged is rumoured to be very vindictive. It is said that the demon will shower houses with pelted bricks. No one ever sees where the bricks come from in such Incidents. The Bacoo is known to bring the owner poverty and misfortune. The Bacoo on the rampage can only be caught and imprisoned in a botUe by an able spiritist. Once the bottie is corked and thrown away (best in rivers). the reign of the demon-tormentor is over, until someone unsuspectingly finds that bottie and uncorks it. The Bacoo also manifests itself in the form of snakes. OL'HIGUE (page 35) Ol'Hlgue is a skinless vampire. It Is said to be a woman who has the ability to shed her outer skin. change her form into a flying ball offire that can dwindle to a speck of light that can enter a house by way of even a keyhole. Once Inside the house, the Ol'Higue will proceed -once undisturbed to suck the blood of a victim. Awareness of Ol'Higue vbltS is said to begin by observing that a once chubby healthy child or adult is growing thinner and thinner -paler and paler by the day. The most extreme form of affliction for the victim ends in death. The OI'Higue is most times an old woman, hence the name. But it is now said that this form of local vampire can be (in seeming roadwalking innocence) a middle aged woman of beauty, or a pretty teen-aged girl. JOMBIE (page 57) Jombie (Jombee) is the name given to the ghost of a Guyanese deceased. The Jombie, though, Is not likened to the ghost of popular fiction It Is not a whispy thing. In Guyanese ghost stories. the Jombie is most times only realized to be a ghost when the Jombie itself declares itself one. Until the declaration, the unsuspecting living-person thinks the Jombie is a flesh and blood human being. The popular story is told of the late-walking guiiarist who meets a man on the public road. The man tells the guitarist that h e can play 10

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the guitar also. And. borrowing the instrumen t. the man begins to strum and pick beautiful melodies. Says the owner of the instrument: "Man .. you can masterly play guitarl" Says the player in repiy: "Ah man ... you ent hear nothingyet...You see when I was alive I used to play sweeter than thisl" Jombies are also nasal speakers. They also are known to laugh through their nostrils hence someone speaking in nasal tones ought to be watched closely. then sprinkled with holy water to remove doubts. BUSH DIE-DIE (page 76) Bush Die Die is a bush spirit. Some people say that Bush OieDie is the end result of an Amerindian wizard's transformation from his purely human form. In Guyana. Bush Die-Die is popularized as a horrid freaky thing that is found in the hinterland forests. MASACOURAMAN (page 87) Masacouraman Is a manlike water monster. popularized by pork-knockers of Guyana. This thing is very dangerous to man, since it makes humans part of Its diet. Masacouraman is said to be very hairy and much larger than a man. It lives below the waters of hinterland rivers. lakes. and creeks. It is the Guyanese Loch Ness monster but much more menacing. The original drawings. which m easure 16in by 21 in w e r e execute d by Harold Bascom in pen and ink in 1 979. and are now h eld in the colle ct io n oJMichae l Cox. a Director oJ Arts Guyana Ltd. Th e y are r eproduce d by kind p ennission oj M icha e l Cox and the artist. 11

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12

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GUYANA PRIZE FEATURE ADDRESS 'TROPHY AND CATASTROPHE' by GORDON ROHLEHR Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency the President. Ministers of Go vernment, members of the Diplomatic Corps, friends and fellow-travellers In this vale of tears and laughter: I would like first of all to say my sincere thanks for the honour which you have conferred on me by inviting me to address such a gathering on such an occasion. The establishment of the Guyana Prize for Literature in such hard times as these is an act of peculiar grace, equalled only by that first memorable Carifesta of 1972, which was also a Guyanese Initiative. It Isn't often -with all due respects to the Commonwealth Prize, the Booker Award or the W.H.Smlth Award -that the Caribbean writer finds a serious sponsor. Even in the area of research, It is generally easier to find a sponsor for research into our chaotic politics or our foundering economies, than into our remarkably vibrant literature. Thus, both creative writer and academic suffer in a situation where it is not unusual for publication to lag behind creation for ten years or more. During the 1950s and 1960s Caribbean writing attracted the British publishing houses. It was new and passionate and signalled the eruption into visibility of the colonial person who, if he had never quite accepted his servitude, had at the same time never quite articulated his deepest and most burning necessity in a fiction and language that was unmistakably his own. Part of the Interest of the British publisher no doubt lay in the fact that a relatively easy market existed for writing that was new and strange. There was, also, a curious pride and proprietorship; for this new writing was seen as demonstrating the flexibility of the English language. Despite the astringent satire which It directed at colonial education, the new literature was taken as proof of the vtrtues of that education which, against all odds, had taught inarticulate Caliban to speak. One has only to read those inane reviews that used to appear in the West India Committee Circular, the journal of the old Sugar Interest, to realise that our literature was being promoted as a quaint curiosity, or as a marketable commodity whose meaning did not. and could not possibly, matter. At a 1971 conference, I heard more than one of our writers remark that it was only with the advent of West Indian critics and r eviewe r s s u c h as Edward Kamau Brathwaite who wrote lon g essays in Bim since 1957, that they gained a sense of what their work meant to the community for whom it was intended. After the novelty of the 1950 to 1965 period had worn off and Reid, Mittelholzer, Lamming, Selvon, Naipaul, Salkey, Hearne, Harris and Walcott had been established as our most important voices, the willing sponsorship of British publishing houses was, it seems to me, taCitly reduced. One waited for a second wave of writers to follow in the wake 13

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of the first. But this did not happen for several reasons. First of all, the writers of the flfties had said most of what it was possible to say about the folk life, politics and landscape of small impoverished societies. Secondly, the early elation had begun to encounter the hard realities of self-government and independence, and an already serious vision had darkened conSiderably by the mid-sixties. Thirdly, and most important: new writers were finding it Increasingly more difficult to get published, the publishers being more concerned with the easier task of promoting already established voices, than with risking money and energy on the encouragement of fresh talent. If we think of the writers who emerged between 1965 and 1970, we d find that Jean Rhys was a survivor from nearly four decades earlier: Edward Kamau Brathwaite had been publishing poems in Bim since 1948 and was, like Walcott, only three years younger than Lamming: Michael Anthony and Earl Lovelace were among the few to be given exposure and encouragement in the immediate post-Independence period: while poets such as Denis Scott and Mervyn Morris, who had developed their own styles, would have to await the emergence of those brave little West Indian publishing houses, New Beacon and Bogle L'Ouverture, who in U1e post-1970 period have borne the brunt of the new publishing. I must have at least one hundred poets in slim collections, which have been either self-published or are the results of the efforts of Savacou, Bim, Karia Press or the Extra-Mural Department of UWI. While the presence oflocal and foreign -basec;1 Caribbean publishers is a sign of independence, there is a limit to the exposure which the small publisher can give to a writer. Sometimes an entire genre suffered from an inadequacy of promotion, as was the case with drama, which after the series of one-act plays published by the UWI Extra-Mural Department from the late flfties to the mid-sixties, went in to a slump un til the seventies, when the Walcott plays began to appear. Walcott's main publisher now is not British, but American. Relief of a sort came with the short-lived Allison and Busby, who republished Lamming and C.L.R.James, and promoted the novels of Roy Heath. Relief of a sort has also corne from Casa de las Americas, the Cuban publishing house, which In 1976 extended their annual literary competition to include writers from the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyanese writers such as Noel Williams, Angus Richmond, Harry Naraln and John Agard have won the Casa prize. Edward Kamau Brathwaite has won it twice, once for Black & a collection of poems, and in 1986 for Roots, a collection of essays. Very recently, through the agency mainly of West Indian publishers, we've seen the healthy and exciting emergence of several women writers such as Merle Collins, Grace Nichols, Erna Brodber, Velma Pollard, Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Christine Craig, Pamela Morde cai, Jean Goulbourne, Jean Blnta Breeze and Opal Palmer. I think, indeed, that It is safe to predict that our most significant voices for the next two decades will be female. There are several reasons for this. First: the time demands It. Allover the world women have been corning Into visibility, and redefining tn ways as significant as their male COU:1.ter14

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parts, the fundamental reality of human existence. Caribbean women are part of this universal redefinition, this transformation of reality. Second: the emergence of women writers in the Caribbean indicates that the other half of Caribbean sensibility is seeking fulfilment through selfexpression. If the male writers sought their liberation of spirit in the face of rigid colonial structures, the female writers seek theirs in the face of equally rigid patriarchal ones. The third reason why our next wave of writers may well be women, lies in the contempt for things of the sensibility which our societies have unconsciously bred in the minds of young men. Young men have absorbed a notion of development based on the idea of science and technology, to the exclusion of the Arts. It is quite normal in a class of, say, sixty literature students at UWI, to find only three males. While there is no necessary or inevitable correspondence between studying literature as an academic discipline and becoming a creative writer, it Is still true to conclude that over the last fifteen years far more women have been exposed to a wider range of literature than their male counterparts. Given this exposure and the already described need for self-definition, the w();nen will be carrying the major burden of our writing in the near future. Popular artistic forms such as the Calypso, Reggae and the emerging "Dub" poetry, are still largely dominated by young men. The Calypso, contrary to some opinions, Is neither dying nor deteriorating. If there are fewer narrative calypsoes, there are more celebratory ones. The Calypso today also contains a range of political recall as well as an analytic grasp of the political moment that Is equal to, tfnot greater than, what obtained in the age of Atilla. It provides us with an index of popular attitudes to an increasingly bewildering social experience, and has had to wrestle with growing problems of madness (Terror's "Madness", 1974), drug addiction (Duke, Sparrow, Explainer, Singing Francine among others have all sung on this theme), unemployment, corruption and vagrancy. The darkening social experience since Independence has changed the nature of calypso laughter which, In the process of adjusting to bewildering paradox, has become a very complex thing. Chalkdust"s "Learn to Laugh" advocates bitter mirth. It disturbs precisely because It unmasks the source of laughter, revealing it as chaos, bitterness and helplessness: as well as its function: masking, evasion and dereliction of the Intolerable responsibility for setting the situation right. The language of some calypsoes has returned to the slngalong simplicity of the old-time kalinda chants, while that of those singers who have accepted a burden of self-definition, has become more metaphorical, more dense, and more capable of expressing a wider range of feeling. But calypsonlans, like most other creative artists, face extreme problems when it comes to having their records produced. The young singer, like the young writer, may find that there Is no one who is prepared to Invest in an unknown voice. Or an investor may not offer fair terms. Tales of the exploitation of singers can fill a book. Plagiarism for commercial gain has been a major concern. Subtle or overt political 15

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censorship has existed in some Caribbean territories. Such censorship places an additional pressure on the singer. whose revenues are inevitably affected when his songs aren t played on the radio. A paradoxical situation is often created. where one sector of the community blames Singers for composing trivial party songs. while another sector damns them for telling too much depressing political truth. It should be clear. then. that all categories o f artists need help of some sort. There is pressing need not only for awards such as the Guyana Prize for Literature. but also for a CARICOM Publishing House. which should belong equally to the public and private sectors In the Caribbean. and which. utilising the infrastructure that already exists In abundance throughout these territories. should publish school books. literary. academic and historical texts. as well as the burgeoning music of the region. There is no reason why. equipped with skilled panels of editorial advisers in each discipline. panels drawn. as CXC panels are. from all over the region. such a CARICOM Publishing House should not be able to select work that has merit and qUality; work that is vital to our perception of self and possibility ; work. too. that is informed by that critical Intelligence which will be necessary for our self-knowledge and our location of the Caribbean self In the world and In the cosmos. Such a CARICOM Publishing House can become a means whereby we may ingather our wandering wits. or. to use Martin Carter' s arresting image: collect our scattered skeleton. No regional cultural policy will emerge without something like it. We need institutions that are more permanent than Carifesta. which. Indeed. will give us something to celebrate whenever Carifesta comes around. A CARICOM Publishing House should also serve to stem the annual outflow from the region o f millions of dollars. which is what we as a region pay foreign publishing houses. by presenting them with our captive primary and high school markets. The act ofwrtting poetry. prose or drama is. now that we know the extent to which science and technology are controlled by the metropole. one ofthe most crucial necessities and possible frontiers for development in the Caribbean. We cannot control the price of oil; we cannot control. try as we may. the price of bauxite; nor can we con trol the American quota for sugar. But we can control our exploration and presentation of ourselves. The Arts are probably the only area In which sovere ignty Is possible ; though even here the burden autonomous statement Is exacting as frightening a toll as the region-wide collapse of our econo mies. This Is so not only because of the difficulties artists experience in getting their work published. but also because of the difficult conditions in which the average citizens of these territories have bee!"! existing for some time. At times these conditions objectity themselves. crystallize them selves. as it were. into moments of terrible atrOCity. that have wrung from the poet and novelist and playwright outcry after outcry. Since Independence. we've had in the Caribbean guerillas and gundowns. the Malik affair in Trinidad w ith Its gruesome lettuce-patch murders of the Trinidadian Skerritt and the Englishwoman. Gail Ann Benson. Guyana 16

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became unwittingly involved in that drama when Malik, who was married to a Guyanese, chose this landscape as the stage for his final act of folly: an attempt to walk from Berbice to Brazil. We all know the literature that grew out ofthat catastrophe: Vidia Naipaul's lucid essay, "The Killings in Trinidad", and his stark best-selling novel. Guerillas, which became very popular in North America, a country so much engaged in the conversion of fact into tlction, that many people there can no longer distinguish between the two. Trinidad, which is very similar to America in this respect, converted the Malik alTair into the Carnival Ole Mas Band, BENSON UNDER HEDGES Jamaica has since Independence been conducting its fixed dialectic of gunmen; its unending, fratricidal conllict has concretised itself in acts such as that of gunmen feeding children and mothers to the flames in Orange Lane; old ladies burned to death in Eventide; and, worst of all, the sacrificial waste of the 1980 elections when well over five hundred people were killed. This scenario is being re-enacted in far more gruesome terms in Haiti, to whose assistance Jamaica, pre-schooled in similar atrocity, has self-righteously rushed. The Jamaican tragedy has given rise to several poems. One has only to read Brathwaite's Kingston poems such as Spring-blade", "Starvation", "Dread", Wings ofa Dove", "Sun Song" and Kingston in the Kingdom of this World" to see how this tragedy has affected the expression of one of the region s leading writers. The Orange Lane fire is directly alluded to in his "Poem for Waiter Rodney" where he makes the connection between two atrocities, twinning the cities of Kingston and Georgetown. Recognizing in contemporary Jamaica patterns and structures of mind as old as the slave plantation, Brathwaite has shown in some detail how what he calls "the return of the status crow" has produced "the resurrection of the dread". The poems of Denis Scott. B:-ian Meeks or Kendel Hippolyte, Scott's play Dog, the r eggae songs of Marley and the recently murdered Peter Tosh, the Dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka, Jean Binta Breeze and Mikey Smith, who coundn't believe that children were being deliberately thrown into the Orange Lane fire, but was himself soon to be stoned to death by people who disagreed with his political views:-all provide us with a range of artistic responses to Jamaican atrocity, and define the bleak spiritual landscape out of which many Caribbean writers operate. One of the duties of the Caribbean State should be to provide the citizen and artist with the necessary space within which he can operate, even when the citizen and artist see through and beyond the structures and devices of the State. Where such space does not exist, literature creates it through protest. or through the imaginative territory which it liberates in quest of living-room for the spirit. The creative voice in the Caribbean has always challenged the political reality or unreality, fostered by ideologues for or against the prevailing political order. When this happens, the creative voice may find itself confronted by the ignorant machinery of an oppression which, when It is not fostered directly by the State, may be taCitly permitted to happen because ofthe indifference or neglect of the State. The word may then find itself in chains. 17

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Edward Kamau Brathwaite's "Kingston in the Kingdom of this World" dramatises the outcry of the voice against such imprisonment. The poem's voice is simultaneously that of a Christ figure awaiting trial and crucifIXion; that of the artist. whose authority of sunlight, vision, music, dance and the illuminating power of the imagination is pitted against the incarceration of the State; and that oflhe Dogon Nummo. the primal creative word and voice and spirit of Afri c a. rotting in a Jamaican jail. I'JI read this poem now for Mikey Smith. for WaIter Rodney. for Martin Carter and for George Lamming. allowing as you may have noticed. the living and the dead proportional representation. Kingston in the Kingdom of this World The wind blows on the hillside and i suffer the little children I remember the lilies of the field and fish swim In their shoals of silence our flung nets are high wet clouds. drifting with this reed i make music with this pen i remember the word with these lips i can remember the beginning of the world between these bars Is this sudden lock-up where there is only the darkness of dog-bark where I cannot make windmills of my hands where i cannot run down the hill-path of faith where 1 cannot suffer the little children a man may have marched with armies he may have crossed the jordan and the red sea he may have stoned down the walls of jericho here where the frogs creak where there is only the croak of starlight he Is reduced he is reduced he is reduced to a bundle of rags a broken stick that will never whistle through fingers tops into the music of flutes that will never fling nets white sails crossing gospel was a great wind freedom of savannas gospel was a great mouth telling thunder of heroes gospel was a cool touch wann v.1th tile sunlight like 18

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water in claypots, healing this reduction wilts the flower weakens the water coarsens the lips fists at the bars, shake rattle and hammers at the locks suffer the little children suffer the rose gardens suffer the dark clouds howling for bread suffer the dead fish poisoned in the lake my authority was sunllght: the man who arose from the dead called me saviour his eyes had known moons older than Juplters my authority was windmills: choirs singing of the flowers of rivers your authority is these chains that strangle my wrists your authority is the red whip that circles my head your authority is the white eye of interrogator's terror: siren price fix the law of undarkness the dreadness of the avalanches of unJudgement it Is you who roll down boulders when I say word it is you who cry wolf when loITer the peace of wood doves it is you who olTer up the silence of dead leaves i would callout but the guards do not llsten i would callout but the dew out there on the grass cannot glisten i would callout but my lost children cannot unshackle their shadows of silver here i am reduced to this hole of my head where i cannot cut wood where i cannot eat bread where I cannot break fish with the multitudes my authority was foot stamp upon the ground the curves the palms the dancers my authority was nyambura: inching closer embroideries of fingers silver earrings: balancers and 19

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i am reduced i am reduced i am reduced to these black eyes this beaten face these bleaching lips blearing obscenitities i am reduced i am reduced i am reduced to this damp to this dark to this driven rag awaiting the water of sunlight aWaiting the lilies to spring up out of the iron awaiting your eyes 0 my little children aWaiting Guyana has matched the rest of the Caribbean in atrocity. We had the mind-blowing Jim Jones AfIair being enacted in the Guyana forest of the night. involving a handful of white masters of the religious word and nine hundred black slaves to it. This atrocity has produced about a dozen prose accounts. including one from Shiva Naipaul who. imitating his elder brother as he usually did. also squeezed a novel out of the catastrophe. There were also two or three American movies. one of which was Significantly entitled not an American. but The Guyana Tragedy Popular response in Guyana was provided by two songs. one by Nicky Porter and the other by the 1Tade Winds. who summarized the Jim Jones catastrophe with the couplet: He tell them to think and they thinking So he tell them to drink and they drinking What the Caribbean mind cant comprehend. it converts into a macabre carnival of humour. behind which still lurks the cadaver of evaded catastrophe. Here the 1Tade Winds are. perhaps unconsciously. establishing the link between centralised propaganda. mind-control and self-destruction. and suggesting a lesson pertinent not only to the Jim Jones commune. who were in any case no longer capable of learning it. but to the Guyanese nation as a whole. Guyana can also boast the death of Walter Rodneywhich.ltke the Grenada fiasco three years later -(Grenada is already an American movie) -was a devastating body blow to an entire generation; the literal reduction to ashes of passion. energy. commitment. courage. laughter and intelligence. That death has evoked an entire anthology of poems. as well as collections of papers from conferences and seminars on the meaning of the life's work of an outstanding historian. Caribbean and international personality. who could not find a Job at the University of Guyana. even when the History Department there was being headed by 20

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an American alcoholic. of whom the kindest thing that one can say is that he was colourless and nondescript. That this could happen under a regime which four years earlier had had the generosity. scope and vision to inaugurate Carifesta. is perhaps the most astounding paradox to have been produced in a country of astounding paradoxes. Moving as all these elegies to Rodney undoubtedly are. I'd have preferred other poems and Rodney alive. I'd even have preferred him to have rejected what Linton KwesiJohnson termed weight". and obeyed the advice which Wordsworth McAndrew offered him in a 1976 poem. written in reaction to his being denied the job at U. G. Mc Andrew at that time had already intuited a sort of doom. and advised Rodney to leave a country which could or would not find use for either his academic excellence or political commitment. Mc Andrew himself. by far Guyana's best and most active folklor ist. who almost single-handedly provided a forum for scores of new Guyanese short stories. unearthed the customs. sayings and practices of Guyanese from all comers of the land. took his own advice and left Guyana. The warehouse manager where he first sought work in New Jersey gave him a simple arithmetic test which he clearly expected him to fail. When Mac returned after a few minutes. the manager exclaimed in the mixture of amazement and contempt with which Prospero is sometimes grudgingly forced to acknowledge Caliban as a being capable of intelligence : "Geel He got them all rightl" Our national talent has been to make the real man into a small man. As the voice in "Kingston in the Kingdom of this World" laments: he is reduced. He is reduced. Tonight, we are celebrating the sponsoring of LUerature by State and School. It is worth reminding both State and School of the strain under which writers exist. particularly when they are politically critical of the State. In Trinidad five poets were among the 1970 detainees. and Jack Kelshall. whom Guyanese of the early sixties might well remember. became a poet after he was wrongfully imprisoned in the 1970s. Martin Carter had. of course. experienced this under the British nearly two decades earlier. Under such stasis. such unchange. some writers have chosen the amnesia of alcohol. Others. like Mittelholzer. Leroy Calliste. Eric Roach. the painter and folklorist Harold Simmons. and the poet and teacher Neville Robinson committed suicide by rope. poison. the knife or fire. It is a dangerous thing. often a fatal thing. to even possess sensibUity in such an age. where there are so many ways that a person can be destroyed. We live in societies in the Caribbean where the price of a certain type of clarity is sudden death; where the price of a certain type of commitment is certain arrest; of a certain quality offeeling is possible selfimmolation. The grimness of the age has affected the styles and modes of functioning of both the State and the individual. If many individual sensibUities have succumbed to despair or become fixed in automa.tic attitudes of protest and resistance. the State has tended to ossify into rigid authoritarian attitudes. which are really the mask of a fundamental impotence. 21

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Surveying West Indian societies since Independence. one is forced to conclude that we remain colonial in how authority reacts to critical challenge; that certain aspects of our consciousnes s have become paralysed in ancient attitudes of crippledom; that. sadly. it has proven easier to mummify entire nations than the individual corpse. Our neocolonial situation of simultaneous freedom and mental enchainment is one of deep and perplexing paradox. In Trinidad l ast year it was possible for black policemen to unleash an unp rovoked at.ta c k on black people demonstrating against the anti-black racism of South Africa's apartheid State. The same Trinidad moved a vote In the United Nations to enforce sanctions against South Africa Faced with such inconSistency. deeply rooted in our colonial past and blossoming daily in our neocolonial present. the mind of artist and c r itic alike seeks naturally to express and explore paradox. I have. consequentiy. named this address "Trophy and Catastro phe". If the catastrophe refers to these societies in which we now live and breathe and have what remains of our being. the trophy refers to the Guyana Prize for Literature which. Your Excellency. you have with such imagination and generOSity inaugurated. I am proud to be identified with this effort and this occasion. and to congratulate the winners in each category. I hope the prize is only the beginning of a new dispensation for writers, and that the graCiousness which Inspired Its Inauguration will also infonn the political future of the Guyanese people. Thank You. 22

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GUYANA PRIZE ADDRESS by WILSON HARRIS In responding to the award of the 1987 Guyana Prize for Best Book of FtctiDnfor his MCarnival"' Wilson Hams gave an address at the ceremony held at the National Cultural Centre on December 8th. 1987. Subsequently he expanded on this address in the fonn of fwther comments contributed to Kyk-Over-AL Your Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen, before I move into my address may I be permitted to coin a phrase from the unpalatable wisdom of the Gods Mlmaginative writers bite the hand that feeds them". This ancient legend possesses obscure roots but one tends to think it relates to an age when men and women stood in awe of the furies. Art Is rooted in creative conscience and the bite of the furies that tlle mythmaking writer himself endures brings a cutting edge into every serious address he or she makes in the name of imaginative truth. May I now thank the Judges ofthe prize committee who have, I am sure, worked conscientiously and thoughtfully in the matter of these awards which are, I believe, the first of their kind in the Caribbean as a whole. This occasion signals and confirms the.necessity for a serious examination of issues of creativity and cross-cultural innovation. Ed ward Kamau Brathwaite has stated in his new book X/SELF that MCarlbbean culture has been cruelly neglected both by the Car ibbean itself and by the rest of the world" In such a context of Mcruel neglect" these prizes may have a remedial edge and they transcend the honour conferred on individuals. Imaginative writers may take some comfort from the proceedings. They are members now of a profession of the arts it seems though let them never forget such status has been long and painfully achieved within an indifferent if not philistine mental climate. My gifted colleagues Fred D'Aguiar, Janice Shinebourne and Marc Matthews belong to a later generation, but we share across the generations one prlme feature. That feature is an adventure into arts of memory. Apart from the obvious application of the theme of remembered places, persons, etc., there is a trememdous momentum and value in arts of memory seen from another standpoint. Such arts are closely linked to a force of tradition that has been virturally eclipsed for centuries in Guyana and the Americas. And the paradox Is that communities such as Guyana and the Carlbbean may, if they understand themselves pro foundly, playa significant part in the revival of such lost traditions. A brief word about this. Arts of memory are peculiarly associated with grotesque Imageries. The grotesque in this context signifies a bizarre, even unpreposssesstng, constellation that nature sometimes wears through which however a door opens, so to speak, into concen trated processes of creativity and beauty and ecstasy at the heart of being. Take the anancy /spider grotesquerie. I do not need to dwell on 24

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its bearing nor the nature of the trickster. on the one hand. the saviour on the other. Then there is Quetzalcoatl of ancient Mexico whose Guyanese cousin is the eternal child of the boneflute. Yurokon. QuetzalcoatJ signifies an evolutionary metaphysic in the marriage of the fabulous bird (quetzal) and the legendary snake (CoatI). Quetzalcoatl assists us now in modem times from the shadowy workshop of the Gods that he still inhabits to penetrate one of the most formidable of European myths -that of FAUST -and to re-interpret it. bring a new density into It. from an original and partly non-European position. It Is only recently that European scholars began to revive the bearing that the grotesque image possesses in arts of memory upon the greatest of European writers Dante and Shakespeare. The enigma of such tradition Is its deepseated application to a universal humanity In all extremity. all disabilities of nature through which the spirit of creative moment still triumphs. The emphasis In such tradition upon the grotesque that we find in medieval books was not a cult of despair (as was once thought to be the case) buta classical memory procedure through which a reader was energised to Identuy with layers of beyond a particular boundary of sensation. All this bears on the Third World. on its potential for awakening into a new literacy of the imagination. The great predicament. the economic sorrows. the destitution of the Third World. obsesses the mass-media press today in Europe and the United States. That press makes no bones about the grotesqueries offate In many societies. Should not all this energise us to place renewed emphasis on cultural. philosophic. enviromental thresholds Into arts of memory? Guyana sometimes appears as a marginal society to the Caribbean and in South America. But it Is here -in such apparently marginal societies around the globe -that supreme importance attaches to creative conscience. to the freedom of the person. to the conduct of politics. the conduct of democracy. to innovation. to arts of the imagination. For all these bear on the value of survival. and on the most important and troubling questions that plague our divided and ghettofixed civilisation. What has marginal being to offer the world at the heart of extremity. not heart of darkness. but heart of extremity? What is true value? What is true spirit? Such questions are of intense and burning moment. Because they arise most telllngly within apparently marginal communities they raise a momentous paradox. T.S. Eliot has impliCitly expressed a hope for the revival of allegory. I think he had European writers 1n mind. But such revival -as an art of memory -may be more relevant to societies living on edge. so to speak. and which need to plumb resources of.lnner confidence in addressing the difficult problems they face. Modem allegory revives in new ways the inner guide; it stresses how real are our intuitive powers to interrogate the building blocks of a civilisation and to breach or cleave a perverse addiction to authoritarianism in Third World regimes or to authoritarian realism In narrative fiction. 25

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Men have walked on the moon. The extraordinaty swaddling clothes they wore like clowns bouncing in a circus have become little more than hollow puppetry to the computerised and insensible body of an age And yet seen with another eye by suffering Mankind they bring home the marginality of a stellar universe by which we are all fascinated. In such marginality we dream of new centres of seHknowledge rooted in the densities of space and time A rich parable for men and women who have long been subject to the traumas of the conditioned mind, the colonised mind, the obsessive colonising mind. How to transform such traumas into cross-cultural innovation is an issue that must loom, I feel. with greater and greater pertinence and urgency as we move towards the 21st century. The difficulties that encompass this country are many and serious but the fabric ofthese difficulties possesses varying and troubling dimensions throughout the modern world. These difficulties may be disguised or hidden from view in prosperous societies. In essence they are difficulties to do with an age in profoundest transition. Guyana has deep roots in many cultures. This could be its greatest memory resource, strength and hope. GROTESQUE IMAGERIES AND INTUITIVE POWERS I feel I may best expand on issues I raised in my acceptance speech at the National Cultural Centre on December 8, 1987, by commenting on two elements in the address. The first relates to imageries" and their bearing on the recovery of apparently lost traditions and arts of memory. Frances Yates, an outstanding English scholar, has written with illumination in this area though confessing to the major difficulties involved in salvaging an art of memory so long in eclipse. In brief the grotesque image is a kind of short -hand that energises a society to recall and act upon a corridor of associations in a body of imaginative work. Thus in Shakespearean theatre in the sixteenth century memory images of a very peculiar nature were part and parcel of the equipment of poet, playwright, actor and audience. Through such impetus and momentum there came into playa diversity of connection with the distant past even as that diversity came peculiarly and paradoxi cally alive in the original mind of the present. All this enriches I believe the authenticity of the collective unconscious of which C.G. Jung wrote. The contours of imagination one may trace in what I have just been saying are native I feel to the Caribbean and to Central and South America. I referred to Anancy and to Quetzalcoatl in my address. Anancy is a spider-grotesque that energises the imagination to map hidden or frail interrelationships in nature even as it points through the Middle Passage into Africa. It embraces new American content in explicating the body of the trickster, on one hand, the subtleties and trtals of the saviour on the other. 26

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Quetzalcoatl assists us t o break a narrow confine or boundary situation. It is a metaphysic of evolution with roots that lie deep in buried cultures. Walter Roth has pointed to a bridg e of associations (which I sought to explore imaginatively in my critical book The Womb of Space published by Greenwood Press, USA) linking Quetzalcoatl, Kuku lcan Huracan (h u rricane) and Yurokon (the Guyanese child of the boneflute). Yurokon therefore belongs to the family of Quetzalcoatl and may even, who knows, be antecedent to QuetzalcoaU in the workshop of the gods and the obscurity of Carib blood. One sees in all these connections -as one turns them in t o multifaceted approaches to the mystery of psyche -complex and subtle links between music and theatre, art and language, nature and culture. In the same way one may explore the Indian goddess Kali. Kali you may remember is a godd ess from whom many anns and hands sprout in a most disconcerting manner. There are notable uses of the Anancy theme in Caribbean writers such as Salkey, Mais, Selvon, Jean Rhys, Brathwaite, Carew. Major examples in North American literature are Melville s The Confidence Man and Ralph Ellison s Invisible Man in which Rhinehart is a sinister equivalent of Anancy. The grotesque image therefore is a paradoxical fonnation that unlocks the strangest capacity for ecstasy and beauty born of evolutions of the unconscious into a new consciousness even as it unfolds caveats or warnings of the manipulated personality who alas may become the manipulator of others. May I now turn to the other element of which I spoke in my address. namely. intuitive powers. This is a far-reaching issue that I may best illumine through a talk given at the Commonwealth Institute. London. in the autumn of 1986. Validation of Fiction: a Personal View of Imaginative Truth The world in which we live sometimes appears to border upon a theatre of demonic comedy. and to reveal a tissue of absurdities, not to speak of disinfonnation. if! may quote the current Jargon. But when one looks deep into the fabric of creation one may discern there, I think. the outlines of genuine hope. however apparently frail. Deeply nourished one may be by a vision of consciousness. a vision of hope. but it Is clear that complacency would be gross folly. There Is no short cut to solutions of famine. to the pollution of the gl0be, to authOritarianism and rigged elections in the so-called third world, to nuclear peril, to violence, to drug addiction. etc. Yet creative solutions do exist, and such solutions hinge, I believe In signiflcant part on a profound literacy of the imagination. I shall define. as this address proceeds. what I mean by literacy of the ImaglJlation. First. however. before touching on such a complex conception we need to take account of standard or common-or-garden literacy and illiteracy Surely the disturbing scenario of illiteracy In many societies around the globe must engage the conscience of writers everywhere No conference devoted to literature can ignore this. In the 27

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Times Higher Educational Supplement I came across a brief summary of a report published in the United States recently: Virtually every young American adult can sign his or her name and nearly 95% can read at a level normally expected of8-yearolds. That is the good news. This places America at the head of the world's literacy league table. the report says. But there is also bad news. The National Assessment of Educational Progress which produced the report after testing 3.600 adults between the ages of 21 and 25 found that. although about 95% could read a simple newspaper article. fewer than 40% understood it. Just 20% could use a bus timetable to get from one place to another. Only 38% could work out the cost of a meal by reading the menu and 43% had trouble following directions on a map. When asked to Interpret a 4-line poem by Emily Dickinson fewer the 10% could do so. Now as you know. poets such as Derek Walcott and the Negritude poet Cesaire are far more difficult than Emily Dickinson! The report. which cost $2 million. predicts that the illiteracy rate will rise during the next decade unless action Is taken to help the growing minority populations. Among Blacks who took part in the survey just 10% could understand a newspaper article. 2% could interpret a bus schedule and even fewer were able to utilize unit pricing in a supermarket. Hispanics did a little better but still scored lower than whites. So. that is the situation that affects our society and it would seem to me to be bad news for democracy. Now. in my judgment illiteracy and semi-literacy possess paradoxes we need to explore. We need to approach the matter from many angles to stimulate a breakthrough from habit or function that may chain an individual Into passive acceptance of his role or function. This Is a matter which addressed me intimately in the Guyanas when I used to travel along the coasUands and when I.led engineering and surveying expeditions into the interior. There were occasions when one would have a crew of about 25 or 30 and many of those could just manage to write their names on the pay sheet. Some could read an article In a newspaper. Now I knew those men extremely well and we had a good relationship. I grew over the years to understand their problems and their potentialities. They performed admirably and intelligently within their specific function but appeared lacking in curiosity about the cosmos (if! may so put it) in which they dwelt. the complex rainforest. the river, the night sky that seemed intimate and close in the black dark of a landscape unlit by electricity. It wasn't that they didn't respond to all this but I felt such response -had they confessed to it -would have been a measure of weakness. I was reminded of people who fear their dreams and therefore say they never dream. They were defined on my paysheet as chainmen, staffmen, bushmen, boatmen, woodmen, axemen, etc. (and that in a way was an eloquen t testimony to the ways in which they were psychologically bound or chained). It happened that one of the crew came into my camp and saw an 28

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anthology of English and American poetry. He opened it and read, by chance, it seemed: Tyger tyger burning bright In the forests of the night He found this Incomprehensible and commented 'tigers do not burn.' We had seen leopards and tigers in the forest. Furthermore he did not understand what for!!sts of the night' could mean. My first impulse was to tell him that it was a difficult poem and perhaps he should leave it alone. And then I was struck by an illustration that I felt might help him to relate (Q Blake's imagery. I had with me a book on pre-columbian art and I turned to the ancient calendar which as you know was completed just before the conquest of ancient Mexico. I explained to him that it was a calendar that should be read in conjunction with certain codices or signals that bear on astronomy, legend, astrology, etc. And then I said to him suddenly 'those lines could have been written by a Mexican poet. He replied 'how could that be? Did you not say that Blake was an English poet? I explained that the codices to which I had referred place unusual emphasis on the tiger-imagery and that such imagery was a major element in the calendar. I explained that the Aztecs believed that the cosmos was governed by certain leaping tigers or jaguars -these were suns, curious suns and that vast aeons of time would move or give way to new dimensions with the appearance of a new sun or tiger. This was a rough, perhaps crude way of explaining a remarkable myth but it helped to throw a new light, as it were, into Blake's lines. I went on to suggest that if he looked around Into the sky and the river and the rainforest and the interwoven tapestry of the landscape he would gain a threshold into the meaning of 'forests of the night.' For that tapestry enhanced the constellations, the stars which came so close to the tops of the trees at night above the clearing we had cut in the forest. We were camped not far above a waterfall. Take a stroll and look into the waterfall. You will see the lights streaking through, striped reflections like a tiger leaping through. And remember that the tiger is one of the most ancient myths and symbols of the South Americas. The tiger is also a kind of drum I would say. The stripes upon it can be related to the drum of genesis from which a certain music erupts. All this bears upon a cross-cultural dialogue in Blake's lines with ancient Mexico and South America. Blake would have been unconscious of this bu t here one perceives the mystery of the universal imagination as it discloses itself in all sorts of cross-cultural connections and tapestries.' I had no idea what bearing this would have on his perception of things but in subsequent conversations it became clear to me that he had begun to look at the world around him in a re-v!sionary way and that the concept about which I had spoken had done much to loosen the frame in which he was confined as though that frame were ordained by fate or history. So it was that I came to perceive the matter of tlliteracy and semiliteracy in a new and startling light that was to address me years later in 29

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re-visionary strategies I employed in writing fiction. Obviously there were ways to deal with illiteracy that invest in the mechanics of the alphabet. But one wonders do such teaching mechanics genuinely breach the psychology of UUteracy that has its roots in the hierarchy of functions and a subconscious alliance with that hierarchy through frames or roles determined by the rigidity of cultures? The universal imagination if it has any value or meaning has its roots in subconscious and unconscious strata that disclose them selves profoundly within re-visionary strategies through intuitive clues Lhat appear in a text one creates. That text moves or works in concert with other texts to create a multi-textual dialogue. Let me seek to illustrate what! mean through Carnival, one of my recent fictions. There were two epigraphs to Carnival. One is from Dante, The Divine Comedy the translation is by Laurence Binyon. I'll read that epigraph: Here all misglvtngs must thy mind reject, Here cowardice must die and be no more. We are come to the place I told thee to expect. His hand on mine, to uphold my falterlngs, He led me on into the secret things. Now that epigraph was deliberately chosen. On the other hand there's an epigraph from Norman O. Brown's book Love'. Body. I had completed Carnival when I started reading this book. sort of glancing through it, and came upon a passage which startled me because it appeared to validate the imagination-strategy I pursued in Carnival. I use the word 'validate' to imply proof as well. I am suggesting that imaginative fiction may be proven or validated. This is not a dogmatic assertion. It is a personal view, it is something I discovered. It seems to me that the imaglnative writer especially when he diverges from conventional realism -may find his or her strategy validated by live fossils in the soil of tradition of which he may know nothing at all. Such live fossils or archetypal myth break into the narrative on which he is working, take on a different form as if a subtle evolution is occurring in unconscious strata of memory that erupt into the conscious mind. One can see the outline of the ancient, live fossil-myth but it is charged with different edges, different implications, different complications. One revises one's drafts by scanning these closely. One comes upon what I tend to call 'intuitive clues' which appear to have been planted by another hand. It is as if a daemon navigates within the imageries in the text. And that navigation assumes startling force. You look at these intuitive clues and then you revise through them you concentrate with all the energy at your command on the draft as if it is alive, a living text. I would imagine this strategy was known to the ancient Greeks and indeed to the anCient Arawaks of South America. The ancient Greeks believed that their sculptures would come alive as they sculpted. As they broke Into marble or stone or whatever materials with which they worked they saw outlines and features planted, it would seem, by another hand a hand that arose 30

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from unconscious or subconscious selves or self. In that way the sculpture spoke to them. And they revised, changed, altered, drew different complJcations into the work as it came alive. The ancient Arawaks likewise sculpted the cherry tree and it came alive. The same principle I would imagine operated. Thus cultures far removed in time and space were lrvolved in a cross-cultural loom or medium of creativity. May I return to the very first Une of the epigraph drawn from Love'. Body: The wanderings of the soul after death are pre-natal adventures, a Journey by water in a ship which is itself a goddess, to the gates of rebirth. I was instantly struck because I recognized an important strand in the strategy here which had been running through the novel. but which one needed to read as one consulted all the images in the canvas of the novel to see how one image played back on another so that you began to see the strategy appearing as if it is a subtle complex evolution of the validating myth. It is not a static deSign it is a constantly moving shifting design, the outUnes are there, changing. One can recognise, as it were, one's dialogue with an ancient world of which one knew nothing but which lay burled in the unconscious. Let us remember that Caribbean literature (which is a new literature but which has its paradOxical roots in ancient legaCies, in ancient Europe, in ancient Africa, ancient India, and above all in the ancient world of the Americas, the pre-Columbian world) possesses strata in a universal unconscious. Anyway let us look at that line again: The wanderings of the soul after deatb are pre-natal adventures, a Journey by water in a ship which is itself a goddess, to the gates of rebirth. Let us take one of the first indications of that strategy. It appears in Carnival when Masters runs into his house. Masters is the Dantesque gUide. He has died but returns t o guide Jonathan WeyI. the major character. Masters comes from the grave to unveil his childhood to Jonathan Weyl. He tells Jonathan something abou t his adventures on the sea shore and how he ran.into the house ran away from a s inister figure He arrives in the house -he is in the house now: H i s trapped sobbing breath had ceased and he moved gingerly (as he had crawled gingerly like a king crab on the foreshore) toward his parents' room The door was very slightly ajar. He was about to rap or push when he glimpsed something through the slit of space. It was his mother' s tears that he saw, tears that masked her and suddenly made her into the mother of a god in the play of Carnival. She was sitting at a mirror and her tears were refiected In the glass. (Carnival, Faber and Faber, Lon don, 1985 p 26) So there you get your frrst clue to do with the mother of a god. The passage I have read speaks of a goddess. So you have your first intimations of a mother of a god. The passage goes on: She did not turn. He did not disclose he was there. He felt 31

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nevertheless that she knew; he felt as she touched her glass breasts in the mirror that she knew he was Inside her. halfway between a wall of glass and a cavity of flesh. that she knew he was looking through her Into a kind of fIre that mingled with her tears. (p.27) Now there you have this strange encounter or implicit dialogue between Masters and the foetus in the womb. He sees himself as a foetus In a womb. You get your pre-natal adventure. your pre-natal text of which the epigraph speaks. May I remind you "The wanderings ofthe soul after death are pre-natal adventures ... You have your pre-natal text. you have the wanderings of the soul, the dead Masters who comes back. One is now immersed In the intuitive imagination at a certain depth. In a way you can see that Dante. when he chose his gUides. did not do so arbitrarily. We are aware now that we know very little about the traditions which Informed Dante and Shakespeare. Frances Yates has made an effort to salvage those traditions. But what I seem to learn is that Dante's guides are intuitive. real. guides who came up out of his unconscious. subconscious; spoke to him and therefore linked him to the past. What I am saying here is that one is now involved in a situation in which the guide. who is substantial to the fiction and appears to help in the revision as one concentrates very deeply on what one is doing. begins to unveil a series of adventures. so to speak. such as I have been describing within a re-visionary strategy. That re-visionary strategy breaks the uniform mould of realism. No realist document would speak of conversing with the foetus in the womb. Thus the realist text is broken and it is as !fyou have entered a realm of multiple texts. There is another text secreted elsewhere which addresses one. a text one tends to eclipse. Now. one must remember that many of those men I spoke of. the men with whom I travelled In the Interior. lived In a world where so many things had been eclipsed. so many things lost. Even though they worked In the forest they know very little about the people who had passed this way. Now let us resume our analysis of the passage I read. We have the flesh and the glass. The passage speaks of glass breasts In the mirror. of a wall of glass and cavity of flesh. That is an important clue which will assist us in the next quotation from Carnival: Queen Jennifer stepped out of a shower. out of a waterfall. out of the ocean. into the bedroom. I was lying half-asleep. half awake on her bed. She handcuffed me to her body as to the mast of a ship. (p.95) Now. look back at the epigraph a Journey by water in a ship which is itself a goddess. So 'she handcuffs me to her body as to the mast of a ship.' So we have another element coming in. in which you can see the design of the ancient myth though with different edges and complications. The third quotation that I would like to glance at is the following: The storm hit the vessel at last. The glass sides of the ship darkened. 32

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Now note that 'glass' comes in here. We have seen the glass earlier, the glass breasts In the mirror, the cavity of flesh and the glass: The glass sides of the ship darkened and It was as If I saw It now, I saw the sea, in Masters' eyes [Masters Is the guide, the dead guide) The sea was black and white fire ran along the ridges and valleys of space. I held to my dreamsupport for bleak life and yet this was my leap into Purgatory all over again, purgation through the terror of beauty. (p.91) So there we have our ship. What Is astonishing is that in revising the work with complex concentration, in sensing the force of the intultive guide, one begins to elaborate a strategy, which, If you read the novel carefully, one would see, in the very first line of the epigraph from Love 'iii Body. But It appears, as I said, in a subtle evolved form It has different edges, different complications, different values. Nevertheless you can see the outlines there. So that the force of the thing makes It seem that one is in dialogue with the past and yet one has an original voice. One is sus tained by the pas t and yet one _las an original voice. One Is in dialogue with something very ancient, and yet one has an original voice Now the last part of the epigraph from Love's Body 'the gates of rebirth'. That comes at the very end of the novel in which I actually quote a line from The Divine Comedy, but I'll Just read the last part: "Whether she Is Masters' child or not-, said Amaryllis, taking my hand with one of hers and holding the child to her breast with the other, she runs in parallel with all wasted lives to be redeemed in time. And in that splrlt she is his child She is our child. We killed our parents, remember, in Carnival logic even as they, besieged by fear, fear of a blasted future, were tempted to destroy us. And now in mutual heart. mutual uncertainty across generations, across seas and spaces, as to who is divine parent. who human child, who will parent the future, who Inherit the future, we sun'ender ourselves to each other. The love that moves the sun and the other star13lThis Is the Dante line, so there Is another text Inserted there deliberately, but yet coming in as part of the multiple texts, the multltextual fiction) The love that moves the sun and the other stars moves us now, my dearest husband, my dearest Jonathan, to respond with originality to each other's Carnival seas of Innocence and guilt, each other's Carnival skies of blindness and vision" (pp.171 172) And there you have the impliCit gateway into rebirth. This is not the first time I have discovered I discovered It in The Guyana Quartet but long after the novels were published a validating or proving premise. In Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness I discovered it there too but after this novel had been submitted and virtually published. Carnival was the closest I came to arriving almost Immediately upon a validating myth and I was able to use that epigraph from Love's Body. The point I am making is that revision is a much more complex matter than people 33

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think. Revision is Iwt just correcting the grammar or the syntax. It's a matter of coming into attunement with a profound concept of creativity rooted in live fossil and archetypal myth. It has to do with the way one scans the draft, picks up elements in the draft, of which one is uncon scious, unconscious of planting them there. I have discussed this with students In the United States in my creative writing classes. That is how I drew them into revising their work. And students are sometimes dumbfounded when I say "But look. you've put that there. There it is Now what can you make of it? Look at it, and let's see if you can revise through it." And as the student revises, as the writer revises, an unpredictable stratep,y begins to appear. It calls for immense concentrations because one is running against the grain of one's time, which is authoritarian realism. Or if not that, some kind of nihilism, or if not that, carefully calculated things to do with sex and violen c e, etc. One is really immersed in a strategy in which one pays the clo sest attention to the language of the buried imagination erupting into consciousness. You listen to the radio or the newspapers and there are people all the time saying: Oh we're looking for a form of words which will allow x and y to come together" and the form of words is always dismissed as some kind of irrelevance. But language is world It may be that one may never discover how a strategy one pursues can be proven or validated because one may never come upon the validating premise. And critics rarely approach imaginative work in this way. Yet my hopes remain profound and rich because I believe when fiction can be proven or validated by live myth, living fossil-strata, the confidence of the humanities mt.:st rest on something other than fashion or some other complacent ideology. Unless a society Is prepared to revise complexly the various levels on which it exists, to move with depth and to see that the creative arts are a profound phenomenon and as important as science and that we need very careful concentration on the Issues of the imagination -(we don't want pundits on the television who discuss a novel as ifit is junk food) -then illiteraCies of the imagination will become endemic, virtually incurable. But I cannot bel!eve that a best-seller age, a mass-media age, is destined to eclipse creativity as a meaningful paradox born of age old truths and the spirit of innovation and originality. 34

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OlL'lHIHOUE 35

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MICHAEL GILKES HAMLET, PRINCE OF DARKNESS ('What. hath this thing appeared again?,) By night in this enchanted wood a Jewelled toad comes down to drink its own reflection in the stream. Bubbled eyes. tender as love. reflect the curvature of earth. the moon's bright beam. Its squat, humped body settles on a rock to dream. By day the wattled toad becomes a thing of dread: its slimy back and mottled head are odious. obscene. The princess hurries from her bed t o wake the sleeping queen. Alas! To know what I know! To see what I have seen!" WOODBINE In those slow burning days qUietude held passion. Flambouyantes. brooding in heat hung out red parasols. dropping cool shadows on back and head. Sunlight splin-tered East Street canal. Noiseless we lay. bent pin-hooks baited with bread. angling for sunflsh A lizard. noosed in grass. threshing itself to death. was common play. Boys will be boys. But there was that insistent thing in our flesh that tore when we ran in the night dizzy with freedom; that made us gorge green mangoes. starapples. sweet bursting sapodillas. taught us to store pleasure without thought of price 36

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At Mrs Cash-tinhelro's we mixed mauby and compress dark syrup marbling the ice. Remember Mary-brukiron, legendary whore, empress of vice? Where now Is Lengery, that towering skeleton whom we would jeer? And there was plump and married Oona who gave our Big John his first sweet taste, I think, of sin, to our vicarious delight and fear. Innocence. always precarious in those days. vanished that night. Children at play. We pulled life by the root every new day. Old Baije. mute. vengeful woodsman could scare us away from the great Tamarind tree. but not [rom knowledge o[ its sweet and sour fruit. ,JANE KING HIPPOLYTE INTERCITY DUB FOR JEAN Brixton groans -From the horror of the hard weight O[ history Where the whites flagellate in their ancestry And the blacks hold the stone And they press it to their hearts And London Is a hell in many many parts. But your voice rings true From the edge of hell Cause the music is the love And you sing it so well. And I travel through lhe country On the Intercity train And the wealher may be bad But the sperm of the rain Wriggles hope. scribbles hope Cross the windows o[ the train And the autumn countryside 37

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Has a green life still And the rain-speno says It will come again, it will It will come, it wUI come It will come again New rich life from the bitter And dark and driving r
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Like the music makes a bridge But there's JoY here too And I might not have seen it If I hadn't heard you. And I hope now I'll be writing This poem all my life For the black city world Where the word Is a knife That cuts through the love And divides up the life. For you saved me from a trap Just before I fell Cause the music is the love And you sing It so well. The Brtxton-battered sisters Hissed their bitterness and hate With their black man the oppressor And death the white race fate And they don't want to build No bridge no gate And I nearly turned away In pain and rage and fear Till I heard your voice Ringing clarion-clear And YOll burst like a flower From the sad sad soil And you blew like a breeze Round the shut-tight hall And you danced like a leaf And you sang like a bell You said Music reaches heaven And music changes hell Cause the music Is the love And you sing It so well. 39

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STREET LOVING, LOVING STREETS by HEM RAJ MUNlRAM I was about to retire for the night at my dwelling place at the South Street side of the Supreme Court building when Bullet started barking madly at something moving in the rain towards us. It turned out to be Naomi and her shivering puppy. They were soaked to the skin. and while Naomi wasnt shivering. she was visibly uncomfortable. I hushed Bullet. then rummaged up from my plastic onion bag an old shirt which I handed to Naomi. She relieved herself of the bundle she had slung on her shoulder and accepted the shirt. In a while she was dry. but for the dress she wore. "T ank yuh fa' leh me change. mistuh: she said. I straightened up t.lte box-boards that constitued a make-shift room for me on that cold pavement and discreetly turned away for her to change into dry clothing. Bullet was compassionately licking Naomi's puppy's mangy skin. apparently to provide warmth from his tongue. I did not object. Bullet had also suffered from mange when I discovered him by the Stabroek Market wharf a year ago. Naomi finished dressing and wrung the rain-water from her dress. I advised her to spread It out on one of my box-board walls. Naomi spent the night with me. during which she rested her head I n a tattered Bible wrapped in cellophane. She awoke next morning as I was feeding our two pets some pieces of tennis-rolls I had managed to gather from the waste drums in Slabroek Market the previous day. "Yuh is de bes' gentleman of dese streets. mistuh. Yuh ofTer me lodging pan yuh small bedding while you yuhself s it an' brace pan cold walls content as ever. Yuh ent even by fo' intafere wid me. like some hooligans does do. Yuh Is really a Good Samaritan. God bless yuh. mistuh. ft When we had finished packing our belongings in our respective bundles. we trudged to the old wharf at the head of Robb Street to cook our breakfast. as I do every morning and evening. We were early, for none of my companions who also lived on the streets elsewhere was there. as is customary. I put the two claybrlcks in place. so that they sandwiched the firewood I had saved up nearby. Having lit the fire. I then proceeded to place my butter can of water on the claybrlcks when I spotted Roland approaching us with fish in his hands. Roland Is a strange person. Long before the advent of our local Rastas. Roland has been sporting heavy dread-locks on his head. And Roland gads about Georgetown all day long with his pants front open so that his private parts are a lways exposed to the public view. Sometimes you would see Roland's face painted with coats of chalk-dust as he moves proudly about. But Roland is hel pful and generous. and wears a permanent smile; his face never expresses any negative emotions. So we fried Roland's fish. using some lard Naomi alTered us from 40

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a Nescafe bottle. That. coupled with boiled plantains and bush tea, comprised our break1ast. MMistuh, ah goin' by Bourda Mall fo' pass me time today aftah ah beg me day's livin g. Leh we meet dere dis midday, nuh? I does need some sens'ble company fo gafwid." I fel t honoured on hearing this from Naomi, and promised to meet her again. Roland, Naomi and myself then went our separate ways to earn our day's keep. That day at Bourda Mall turned out to be one of the best days of my life Sitting In the shade on a concrete bench and mercifully fanned by a cool breeze, Naomi again called me a gentleman. After learning that my full name was Benjamin Horatio Nelson, she asked me where I learned to speak Mproper English". Tears dripped down my face when I told her how I was once a Language Master at one of Georgetown's top high schools in the days of my youth; how I was jilted by a beautiful switch-board operator at the Telephone Exchange, then situated adjacent Donkey City; how I gravely sufTered a nervous breakdown as a result and lost my job; how I never got another job and was neglected by my parents; and how I was introduced to street life by Matthews. Naomi knew Matthews. After all, who would fail to notice the short, bearded character in his ever-present suit and pants with pockets bulging with papers of all sorts? Matthews Is still going strong. I am indebted to him for many things. He Is well -educated also, and spends almost all day reading newspapers at the National Library. Whenever we meet. he starts recounting all the events he thinks I should know about, having read not only our local newspapers, but also such foreign ones as the Trinidad Guardian and Barbados Advocate. Now and then he would pull out from his pocket a dog-eared copy of TIME or NEWSWEEK, donated to him by a lawyer whose office he frequents in Croal Street. He attributes his gratitude to the same lawyer for the suits, ties, trousers and shoes he usually wears. Matthews literally lives on reading; food Is his least concern, and this explains why he is seldom seen begging as we do. MDat man really gat stamina," Naomi remarked. MHe not only a book worm, but a book god." Naomi was right. Matthews would explain to you world affairs with such ease that even a seasoned politician would be amazed. Besides, there isn't a subject under the sun that Matthews doesn't know something about. You feel very enlightened when he talks to you, and it would be uncultured not to invite him for a morsel at meal time. Matthews Is my best friend, and as I recalled my past life for Naomi's benefit that day, she started crying. lucky God send yuh a bes' frien'. For donkey years is me an God alone bin treading dese Sinful streets. Not a soul to comfort me with sweet words but dis Bible in me bundle. Jonathan only come in me life de other day," she lamented as she tenderly caressed her mangy puppy. I Immediately proposed to Naomi that we live together, since contrary to her thinking, I was very lonely also. I told her how much I 41

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admired a religious woman like herself, and that our lives might be happy once we shed our loneliness and shared our responsibility for soliciting our daily bread. I wiped Naomi's tears away with my shirt tail, and she looked squarely into my eyes and said, "De Lord don't come, but he does send." Naomi and I decided that it would not be convenient to sleep beside the Supreme Court building anymore, for reasons of privacy, and she suggested the G .P. O. building pavement instead. I objected, on the grounds that Sajiwan resided there, and he would be a nuisance to us. Sajiwan is addicted to methylated spirit, and everytime he drinks he picks a quarrel with anyone nearby. She agreed, and we settled tentatively for a bushy vacant lot at the corner of Regent and Alexander Streets. With indescribable enthusiasm we related our good fortune to Roland, Matthews, Senseh and Saywack that evening when we assembled at the wharf for our dinner of metagee, prepared by Naomi. Everyone applauded, and agreed to the proposition that Naomi continue to cook every day. "She gat a n ice han'. Ah bite me tongue eatin' dis metagee, man." Senseh remarked. Roland gave an approving smile. Matthews shoved his hands into his bulky pockets and shook his head professorially. Saywack pOinted out that the occasion called for celebration. Again, everyone agreed, and promised to buy the best with his day's collection The next morning, Naomi and I woke up very early, and, after bathing a t the stand-pipe near the Fire Station, proceeded to the wharf, where she made me read no less than five psalms. I hadn't prayed since Noah was a boy. Now, Naomi cajoled me to practis e praying. Evening came. and when Naomi and I arrived at the wharf, Senseh and Saywack greeted us and motioned us to a bench which they had 'borrowed' from Vendors Arcade and then decorated. A massive slice of beef, wrapped in eddoe leaves, lay on the ground nearby. Matthews and Roland arrived shortly, flaunting a sizeable piece of cardboard, and brimming with smiles. Then Matthews, Santa Clauslike, pulled out a brand-new silver ring from his pocket. "Wheh alyuh t'ief dat?" Senseh demanded. "It's like this," explained Matthews, "we demonstrated allover this city today, and with the funds we collected, we bought this humble wedding ring." "Demonstrate wid what?" shouted Saywack. Roland confidently turned around the cardboard, on which was boldly written: BAN POVERIY MAKE US RICHI 42

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SASENARINE PERSAUD VISIT I Here away from the city I see no houses. For miles man and Na ture fuse irrevocably. Freckles bleat on rice fields Turned pasture. Dots moo and nibble grass Prick-pin-white Egrets Service cows and glean Plowed fields for specks Of food. or wisdom or love .. Down. around. se2 -chlng I see no timeNothing except endless webs Of love whistling through ages gone/Ungon e. VISIT II Nothing and everthing Rises from Dharti Mata. Riding this tractor through trails Bordered by black-sage. a combine Gathers golden rice and is lost in motion. Hardee plumed birds dive through limbs Of splashed green. (Glad for rare human presence) Flirting melodies louder than this tractor's throb. A flock of gaulings silently wheel Into the air ahead a magiC arc Lead the path and swerve smoothly Eastward. Everywhere Krtshn's Flute sings in my ear but it is Radha who chases this tractor. swallows it From everyside and allows its passage on your hair. VISIT III Dusk. my love. gathers your skirt Around my eyes And what a blessed vision Assails my sight. Dark clouds flaying the westward sky Are dotted red-The Sindhoor in your head. Drakes come home to roost Dipping from the sky. 43

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Gliding unto the soft surface Of the pond-Mating with moisture. Gentle ripples tug my crying toes o come, 0 come, my love! VISIT IV They stand in clustered solitude Honey -smooth-brown. Clean-black-spottedwhite, Coffee creamed, smooth. A flicker of tail at Irritant flies. A stamp of feet A chew of cud Above all a motionlessness; Meditation on the sky and beyond -The mysteries of loving. I feel them look down. deep Into themselves. I see no beef nor mutton or meat. I see us, our soul, our love holding fast to The seWing dusk on this delicious land. VISIT V (SURUJ PURAN) You slippered on the morning air, And there was a flicker of sunbeams. I searched and could not see I felt and could not feel Your eyes on mine and you In me. The Pandit expounded -The lady lost her pin In lightless house Went outside in brilliant Moonlight to find it Brought me down Into my dark self I delved And found the wisp of your smile EVERYWHERE 44

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PAMELA MORDECAI PLUS The plus eludes you: synchronic thread from thing to thing. as grains associate in sand as waters run to rivers. seas. as is bound in love to man so am I bondaged; it is time you learned these chains: and diachronic exlgence invoicing actions for account. withdrawal or receipt: you cannot, dear. pile debt o n debt against the sweet collateral of un-diminished wifely love. All charges get called in: the best Investments badly husbanded fall Into bankruptcy. And so I beg you not to spend your substance-a life walts for your tendering. EXEUNT the moon hung there bald as your head you said: its bed my sweet, or else goodby e. It seemed a pity. but that was no choice I tucked my tail under. as dogs repulsed and dancers do and turned and went. Exeunt. you and I. 45

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COOKMAN by ROOPLALL MONAR Ask any local cricketer from Leonora Estate to Blairmont Estate in Guyana who is this chap call Pandit. The cricketer would watch you straight in you face as if you stupid, click he tongue like turkey, inhale one draught fresh -air, and sigh as if he miss something precious. "Ha boy! Panditl Eh-eh, he is a specialist in cooking mutton curry: the cricketer would say, smacking he tongue as if the mutton curry in front he eye .. "Anytime ahwe cricket team going to play against Lusignan cricket team, by hooks or crooks, I bound to get in that team. Know why? Is Pandit self cooking the mutton curry and dalpurri for the two cricket team. He is LUSignan cricket team master cookman, you hear? Boy is a love to eat Pandit mutton curry while them two team retire fo lunch. Eheh, is like you get new life in you body. You could bowl more longer than Wesley Hall in the hot hot sun." Pandit rep gone so far that even them sport-loving whiteman and white women from Georgetown city who does attend presentation in Lusignan Community does be carried-away like a child seeing Father Christmas the moment Pandit succulent mutton curry drop in they mouth. If they ain't careful they could bite off they tongue. Them whiteman does sigh yeh yeh. the mutton curry gravee running down they lip. eye red and watery, the taste biting they tongue. Eh-eh, some eating mutton curry voracio u sly as if is the last time they seeing mutton curry. Some filling they stomach until they can't move, lost to know how mutton curry could be prepared in such a mouthwatering manner. The garlic and geerah still on you tongue. Is like reading good poetry one whiteman say. 'lhat Indian hand set to prepare mutton curry," Mr Douglas' d tell them chaps one Sunday afternoon in LUSignan Centre. This time Mr. Douglas come pissing drunk after he stuff down bowl after bowl of mutton curry. using he finger like fork. Then he lick them fingers as if them fmgers is mutton self, sucking it chu chu ... With all due respect them chaps had to lift off Mr Douglas from the chair that afternoon. Mr. Douglas is a big thing in Bookers. Was in the 1960s time. Bookers been own most of the sugar plantations in Guyana. All the while Mr. Douglas belching, b elching then he l et-go a fart. It sound like thunder. Mr. Douglas feel a great ease. Was ready to attack more mutton curry. This time Mr Douglas fart smell pure mutton curry. And you dare not laugh when Mr. Douglas fart. Mr. Douglas is a big thing. One bad word from he mouth and Lusignan cricket team come in shambles. A good word from he. and any member in the cricket team could get an office job. You only have to know to spell you name and add two and two .... In truth is Pandit mutton curry does take Mr. Douglas to Lusignan Community Centre whenever the cricket team invite another team t o play cricket. Them chaps say Mr. Douglas nave) string left in the 46

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Centre, in the kitchen, where Pandit does cook the mutton. know a whiteman who like mu tton curry like Mr. Douglas," them chaps does say. all whiteman been stay like Mr. Douglas ahwe Indian people coulda be far in dis country." One Sunday evening Lusignan cricket. team was celebrating victory. They'd wash Enmore cricket team for a song. Two to one. Them chaps say Enmore cricketers stuff so much mutton curry during the luncheon interval that they couldn't able to bowl when they land-in the ground. Then Lusignan star batsmen Hakim and Solo hitting the ball blam, bladam. Is sheer four and six. Them chaps say ifB.L Crombie was present he woulda turn commentator. And if you'd see sluggish fielding! Eh-eh, them Enmore players claim the ball was too quick for t.hey grasp. They been moving in the ground as if egg stick between they leg. They say the mutton curry get them drunk. They only belching and farting in the field, and they coulda empty-down mugs of ice -water. And the joke is, Enmore is a strong team. Them Lusignan spectators really taunt them bitch. more mutton curry. Stuff more ... While celebrating this victory the same evening Mr. Douglas shout, the mutton curry gravee dripping down he lip blop blop .. is the cookman?" Mr Douglas ask. commandingly just like how Estate manager barking at you. The Centre caretaker been believe he woulda fall down. You see Mr. Douglas voice d roar like cannon. This time the Lusignan cricketers serenading in the Centre hall. drinking and smoking, laughing he he he. And cricket history flying out they head. Eh-eh, is Hall and Griffith, Sobers and Kanhai, Godfrey Evans and Walley Grout! KenSington Oval. Lords, Bourda Green ... Is like the whole Wisden in them cricketers head. Meanwhile the caretaker task was to get Pandit for Mr. Douglas. The caretaker heart in he hand. Can't afford to vex Mr. Douglas. And where is this blasted man Pandit? the caretaker say. checking the Centre kitchen, the library. the film room and the store-room. Can't vex Mr. Douglas ... where de hell you been"? the caretaker ask soon a<; he spot Pandit, standing in the outside hall smoking, and watching the empty ground. what you mean"? Pandit ask in anticipation. to tell me the mutton curry done?" the big man self. Mr Douglas want see you," the caretaker talk. is important." Same time Pandit feel a chillyness run thru he spine. He heart beating bap bap ... Mr. Douglas! That big man! But is an order. Pandit had to go. Mr. Douglas is a big thing in Bookers. He out the Cigarette quick time and follow the caretaker. thinking how to answer the big man soon as the big man start talk to him in backra man English. Them words so crisp and cutting. you would believe is Dutch. And the big man self want see me. Soon as Pandit glimpse the big man in the Centre bar corridor he start tremble. 47

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"This is de cookman hass," the caretaker point at Pandit and say. Then he hurry to refill Mr. Douglas glass. Mr. Douglas eye'd red as if it tum bloodshot, and the words gurgling in he mouth, mix with spittle. You would believe he is in a different world. "Take a seat man," Mr. Douglas order Pandit. QUick time Pandit fmd a chair, still trembling. This time the cricketers and a handful of fans, still drinking and gaffing, guffawing like pigs. Some seated in chairs. Others with full glass in they hand saunter about. The atmosphere lively. The scent of brown rum and mutton curry rolling about like rainclouds. The caretaker and assistant busy. "Tell me the secret of your cooking. Why your mutton curry is so tasty?" Mr. Douglas ask persuasively, smacking he tongue, eyes flitting drunkenly. Mutton curry still settle on he lip. me na know bass," Pandlt say uneasily, the words choke in he throat. He could never make head -an tail of this backra man language never mind he working in Lusignan Estate for donkey years now ... how you don't know man?" Mr. Douglas question impatiently, eyeing at Pandit in friendliness. Pandit feel Mr. Douglas eye want bore he inside. 0 God! this is a big man and me can't displease he. But is what me going tell he? Is how me does do the mutton piece by piece til it done cook, eh? But me have to tell Mr. Douglas something. Then in a flash Pandit recall he baap ... fraid white people na matter you can't spell you name. Always get commonsense in you head. They would respect you fo that. . he baap, a darkskin Madrasi man from South India always drum them words in Pandlt ears. After pandit mumma'd drop dead with bronchitis he baap self bring he up, teaching he how to cook all them Indian dishes which he baap know. Pandit was about eight years old, attending the Estate school. not too far from the Sugar Factory. He baap'd never believe in much eddication. you get commonsense people going to respect you," he baap use to say in the dark logie near the fig tree. Them words stick in Pandit head like glue. Attending school make no sense to Pandit. Was jus t a formality as though he marking time. He feel more at home sling-shotting at birds, thiefing jamoon in cow pasture, playing marble, bathing in the canal where fine shrimp pricking you like needle,jumping like flying fish in the blackwater canal. And was a blessing in disguise that morning when teacherJodhan flog Pandit. A girl student complaint teacher Jodhan that Pandit curse she. Teacher Jodhan let -go bakers' dozen at Pandit behind. Pandit bawl for murder. The class watching at teacher J odhan wi th wide-eye. If a pin been drop you could hear. Pandit march out school with hurt in he eye, he behind biting as if ants crawling on it. When he show he baap he behind, he baap want overturn the logle. Passion turn into froth on he chillam-stain lip, he brown teeth grinding yap yap. "Teacha beat am me betta," he baap talk and fly out the logie, Pandit following. 48

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Teacher Jodhan want fly out the school window soon as he see Pandlt baap and Pandit walking straight at he class, the hackia stick In Pandlt baap hand. Pandit baap still grinding he teeth, froth leaking down he mouth now. But Is the hackia stick which cause teacher Jodhan to shake like cane-arrow. Teacher Jodhan know them sugar workers don't mince matters too much. And they na get head to reason. The fastest thing they could resort to Is the hackia soon as you eye-pass them, or want push you finger In they eye. Is quite a few bombastic teachers nearly get they head split-open like coconut. They'd pass P.T. and believe they know the world of teaching. That whipping a child could discipline he head to take education .. pounds shilling and pence ... Baba black sheep have you any wool. ... But was the other way around with sugar workers. The hacK1a stick does talk for them. If them bombastic teachers didn't request a quick transfer they skull woulda be fractured with hackia stick lash. And teacher J odhan know all the incidents that centred around the Infamous hackl&. Sugar workers love to use it. Teacher Jodhan eye been spell terror. The chalk slip thru he finger flups". and rebound on the floor blops. Then he watch at the window on the eastern school wall. IfPandlt baap only attempt to fire the hackia at he, he would make a quick dash like monkey, flying thru the window just like a cat with a stolen-fish In he mouth. Meanwhile the class come quiet like mice "Teacha teacha," Pandit baap advance In front the class and shout threateningly. Teacher Jodhan back-back, watching the hackia In Pandit baap hand. He eye Wide-open, averaging the spring he going to make to the window. "Teacha teacha," Pandit baap say, pointing he left finger at Jodhan, Inching'Inching at he. "Scratch am me betta name out school book. Scratch am." Then Pandit baap suck he teeth schuuu, tap he hackia on the floor, eye teacher Jodhan like one hungry lion, and walk out. "Scratch am" ... Pandit following. Teacher Jodhan sigh, then he wipe he face with he handkerchief and whisper: "Praise God. Never trust them coolie with hackia stick. This is the way how Pandit quit school. He start haunt the cow pasture, Cabbage Dam, Mule-stable, doing all the mischievious things which fly In he mind. While he baap In the cane fields working, Pandlt and one-two boys killing the whole day. But as the weeks turn Into months, months tum Into years, Pandit baap diligent like a school master does show Pandit piece by piece how to prepare potato curry, chicken curry, mutton curry. "If me drop am dead, you going know to feed you own belly," Pandit baap does advise Pandit in the logle kitchen, the spice, garlic, and massala want stille you nose. When Pandlt put-on long pants and believe heself a big man, and start work in Estate Mule gang, he'd know the art of preparing a tasty 49

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cuny. and was wanted by wedding-houses in the Estate as the chief cookman. And due to he cooking he start mix heself among drivers. bookkeeper. dispenser. and overseer. specially at wedding-houses. But the moment them overseer and the book-keeper and dispenser start talk in backra man Eng lish. Pandit slipping out the company. Them words too big for he. And if the overseer should tum and ask Pandit for his comment. is like asking a door post. Is how he could answer whe n he na understand A to Z? Talk in Pandit own mix madrasi and creolese tongue. and Pandit with you eye to eye. The only lirtue Pandit possess is he commonsense. He always keep he head cool like cucumber. But when Mr. Douglas question he. he make sure he watch Mr. Douglas lip before he answer. "Once you put correct geera and garlic and salt in curry. then you stir. then you taste. you bound to get correct taste." Pandit clear he throat and say. He want disappear. O Mr. Douglas shake he head. drain the glass of rum in he mouth. and declare: "I will get you a job as chef in a hotel. Think about it and let me know. Yes baas: Pandit reply and vanish out of the Centre. Hotel chen Ever see such eye -pass? Me going make mese1f one jackass when them big tourist and big shot clap they hand and order in backra man English to bring this dish and that dish. Eh-eh! Thinking about it the next evening Pandit feel confused. He was In his front verandah. regaling. He just bathe he skin after arriving from the canefields. Me damn happy. EH! Pandit remind heself. As a bull-boy in the backdam. the job paying well. Is a lot of overtime specially when loaded canepunt stuck in the canals and them bull and mule had to take rest three-four time before they pull in them punts at the Sugar Factory. And by then is midnight. Overtime payment. But not every night it happening. Beside. Pandit ge t he own house. built with a loan from the Estate. He wife still working as a weeder. He four children look healthy. Is what the ass me want with hotel job? He tell heselfthe third time. Me getting all the satisfaction cooking mutton cuny for them cricketer. That is me happiness .. And is true! Cooking in he blood. You know how much people does request Pandit presence the cook night at wedding-houses? The whole Scheme. Pandit does feel nice when he get the invitation. "Never mind me can't read an write. People respect me". he does tell he wife sometime. Commonsense beat eddication. he baap words does echo in he ears. And ifme didnt know to cook good mutton cuny people wou]da spit at me. True. is every kiss-me-ass bady want make you a damn fool when you can't read an write in this place. Good thing me apply me commonsense! eh ... But though cooking mutton cuny giving Pandit maximum satisfaction he still feel a bit empty. Unwanted. Feel left-out in certain conversation held by the street-comers. In order tc arrest this feelin g 50

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Pandit start see American cowboy films, picking up the language easyeasy. But when them hard back, sunburnt cowboy like Gary Cooper, Allan Rocky Lane, Broderick Crawford, talk in tough -guy, drawling voice, cigar stuck between they lip, Pandit does still believe them cowboy talking Dutch. But he does pick up the cowboy conversation step by step although he jawbone does crack whenever he utter them slangs. And if you say: "hey man come here," in heavy cowboy slang, Pandit quick to respond. True. Sometime Pandit would say: "hey man draw your gun .. action and slang i n typical cowboy style. But later he jaw does pain he as ifhe get tooth-ache ... But Pandit does feel nice. Is like climbing Mount Roraima. But he could never confront the Manager or the Overseer face to face, and talk to him in backra man English. Like something does hold back he tongue. He courage gone. Pandit love to see American cowboy films "Cooking and seeing picture is me only satisfaction in life: he does tell them chaps at wedding-houses. "Is God make it .so. Every man gat to find he own satisfaction in life If you use commonsense properly you going to feel nice in what you doing. If you don't use commonsense you explode. Think life is only work, eat and sleep? Ha boy! You have to know to make you self happy in this Scheme .. Watching cowboy films does elevate Pandit. He does feel like being in a different world. Hard and rugged. Is man against he f e llow man, the terrain mountainous, gunshots exploding all in you ears. Them with commonsense does survive. Is not strength. Is commonsense! Pandit does tell heself. Is just like the canefields. Hard. But commonsense beat all. Not the pundit and majee advice. Eh-e h! Them does tell people sheer piss one-two time. But he respect the pundit and majee. They know to read the books. But they na live properly. Pandit does feel like spit. Is only money, money they want. That is not religion? "Eh-eh, think pundit and majee could put food in you mouth", Pandi rd tell he wife one morning. "Learn fo think fo youself and use you commonsense. Life not easy ... Come a time in the country now when local politics was swinging people head l eft to right like soldier marching. Some people coulda give up they life for the P.P.P. the P N C. or the V .F. party. Who couldn't read and write get sense overnight. They would argue politics more than me and you who went far in school. Eh-eh, is Colonialism, Capitalism, Communism ... words rolling out they mOL:th like poetry. How England is a bitch. Take out all the country wealth. How it doesn't want to grant the country independence .... "Them English people think we still ah slave?" them people does talk in the streets, sucking they teeth schuu schuu ... "And Duncan Sandys taking all order from America. See kiss-me-ass eye-pass?" "Know how much C.I.A in this country? Why the hell they na left ahwe in peace?" them young boys does talk. They coulda kill theyself for the P.P.P. Meanwhile them black people does say this is not Africa This Is Guyana. Like England want bleed Guyana just how It bleed Africa? 51

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Cause big-big war among them black people over there. Whiteman and blackman at war. Like they want a next Kenya or South Africa. True to God. politics make people come wise overnight. The atmosphere always tense and expectant. It does want to explode like a cannon whenever them politicians done address people in the country areas and In Bourda Green. "Independence. Independence. Why the hell the Queen don't give the country Independence?" Then bladam like bullet one proclamation come from the Queen that the country. Guyana. on the mainland of South America. would be granted Its Independence soon after the general election in 1964. And which political party commands a majority of the voters. the leader of the same party would be Prime Minister. and usher the country in independ-ence. Eh-eh, you would believe is Carnival break out in the streets. Jubilation In the air. And everybody calling each other Comrade. Was 1962 before the big race riots. "When you too hasty to get something which you don't know about. you does landin hot-water." Pandit tell them boys one mid morning by the street-corner. Them sugar workers had a go slow exercise. One driver been curse one canecutter. Soon as the canecutter talk for he right. the driver tell the overseer to suspend he from work. The go-slow exercise was In support of the canecutter. "This independence thing na look too nice." Pandit add. "Jagan and Burnham should use more commonsense. Boy! When you playin g with fire you bound to get burn. Is that what really going to happen with Jagan and Burnham. They swell-headed. To run country is not plaything. But it had a set of young people. among them is the local cricketers. who like the British rule. Who want to keep they British passport. But soon as the country come independent you come Guyanese overnight. You getting Guyanese passport. When the set of young people hear that. them fart sametime. Think is joke! Who want Guyanese passport? Then the big emigration thing start. Them young people. sportsman and teachers, forsaking the country for England. Who want Guyanese passport? Even them who can't read and write like Baij. Soonyand Speedy. hustling to get British Passport to exit the bloody country. Was like a fever gripping the country. Is pure England. England in they head ... This time them politicians want cut each other throat. Say how Jagan going to sell the country to the Russians. How Burnham taking ahwe back to Africa. D'Aguiar to America. You would believe is a war break out between them politicians. Meanwhile was confusion and commotion among the country people. Worse yet when them men drink bush rum. Is only Burnham and Jagan in they mouth. and the coolie people and black people shoulda work together. "People getting damn stoopid nowadays." Pandit does talk. sad to 52

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see that them good cricketers too going away to England. "England running this country so nice. Independence going make It worse. Mark me word .... True! He would miss cooking mutton curry and dalpurri for them cricketers. Schuu schuu schuu ... and is how nice he does feel while them cricketers stuffing the mutton, calling fo Pandit, Pandit, smacking they tongue. Is like he fullfilling a calling, cooking mutton for them cricketers. And he love to watch the game. Suddenly one evening during the same period the Lusignan Cricket team Captain and vice-captain arrive at pandit house. "We taking you to England Pandit," the captain say. "You would do a hefty business with mutton curry and dalpurrt among the West Indians in London ... London! England! Pandit eye want pop out. Then he mind flash at the language. God! is there the backra man English born. Chu chu chu! Me just going to make meself a damn fool. Is everybody talking the backra man language in London. A chillyness invade pandlt Inside. He watch the Captain straight in he face and say: "All yuh go first, me going come later." The Captain believe. With the departure of the Captain and vice -captain to London the LUSignan Cricket team come In shambles. All the best players gone to England. Panditjob as cookman end. Pandit feel empty like one barrel. He couldn't catch he bearings. Eh-eh, three months later Pandit start play the tassa-drum at wedding-houses. Watching Pandit playing you believe he merge he entire soul in the drum as tf he whole body inslde the goatskin, eye closed as though in trance. When them chaps ask he why he playing the tassa-drum now, Pandit clear he throat and say: "When one door close, another door open. This country like that. Always have to find something to pass you spare time. Life is not work, eat, and sleep. Is something else. Use you commonsense and living get a purpose." 53

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IAN McDONAliJ THE SATIN PRINCESS In the drear mist of Long Island Sound I think of the Satin Princess. Hearing the cold clang of the fog-bells I see again her moon-walk on the river: All around her from the forest The warm breath of flowers. This clammy morning Pale as ice seem the ladies' Wrapped, colourless faces: Their breath puffs white And bitter are their eyes. I recall the warm breathing Of the far Princess. She dresses wiUl Jewels: The river fills with night, Immense Van Gogh stars Shine on her black bosom. This pallid, shining world Is bracing, bright. I know But ah God! I shrivel In this land Where life's laced tight And unburnished air congeals. The cold throws a spear Through hearts here Across half the earth The Satin Princess moves and loves. "HANGMAN" CORY When the launch sank off Fort Island People were drowning In the black mud Bawling out NOh God! Oh God!" God did not corne. It was like any day, Sun shining on Wind-rippled river, Except men were struggling and dying, Women and children choking In the mangrove roots. People were running on tne shore and calling NOh God! Oh God!" How God could corne? God can't mind everyone. But look at this now! Look at story! "Hangman" Cory arrive like God. Let me tell you "Hangman's" story. Nathaniel Cory once loved a lady She was a wanton lady, she used him badly. 54

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His mind stop work when he see her b eauty: He was a puppy-dog in her compa ny, People laug h at "kiss -she-footbottom" Cory. This wanton lady take another man one day, Open, brazen, she parade before Nathaniel Cory Laugh and say for all to hear clearly How this man was the sweetest man for she, How Cory never, never could satis1}r she. Nathaniel Cory stay quiet all the long day Night came and when the man lay with the lady Cory walked in open so, easily, terribly Lash both two with his sharp timber-axe fiercely Cut them in pieces like red melons on a tray. When judge-man say she provoke the jealousy And Cory get only five years off his liberty "No! No! No! No!" shouted Nathaniel Cory, "She be life my love, my beauty, I have to go to hell with she, my life, my b eauty. She only gone in front of me. Hang me by the neck to die gladly, Hang me high, high and quickly!" The people whispering make it legendary: It so he get the name of "Hangman" Cory. Off Fort Island that bright morning Was he who God send to save the people. People bawlin g on the black stelling for a saviour, They never expect to see "Hangman" Cory come. He live so quiet among them all the years, Minding a pumpkin patch behind the white Chapel, He smoke his thorn pipe, never say one word. There he stood on the black stelling like a God Bibi La Fontaine, ice -pick thin and hard, Fifty years trading plantain along the river coast, Recount what happen that bright morning in her life Launch just left the Fort to go Parika side, Deep inside boat-belly a thunder-sound was heard: Time flicker, in a second, in a cat-wink Boat gone bottom. How quick it was: She belched a warm beer she was drtnking, Before the belch belch good the boat capsize and gone. "Under I go the whole boat on top of me: Mud yell o w dim my eyes, cold log brace my heart. I see my little Fancy who die fifty years gone by, And then I see for sure is the monster death that come. And my mind saying why an old woman should struggle so, Let me go, and still I fighting not to go And there is Fancy, the little one, crying in my arms. A rough hand come and choke me round the neck 55

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And pull me where I done pin good in mud This man had come for me in the dark water. He find me like a miracle and take me safe ashore: Sun so bright. earth hard. I hear a singing bird. Never morning wind feel so sweet. you hear I give my word." "Hangman" dive and dive in the dark water. Everyone like they tum to stone but he: Women bawling and running and pointing trembly Big men shouting and doing nothing fooli s hly. Only "Hangman" Cory doing the work of God. And everytime he come up with another one As If God guide him In the mangrove mud. A score he save and still he went for more Coming up w it h weed -tendrils round his head And wound around his throat like gallow s rope He delivering up children from the river womb. His eyes staring red and cold and terrible. Not one word he said In all his glory These are the plain facts about "Hangman" Cory. His day of evil. his day of glory: He cut his beauty up like a red melon in the market; God send him one day to save the drowning people. Time will sort the meaning of all this out: The hunting moon will rise one last. appalling. time And he will come to rest like all men come to rest. Though years pass. men should know his story: NOh God! Oh God!" the people call and God send "Hangman" Cory 56

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CECIL GRAY CARNIVAL FLAG-WOMAN The room Is darkened, as befits the time; the dancers Jerk like Junkies up and down as passion disregards Its thin dlsgulse. The singers' voices pump with co;rrsened cries a carnal message of the carnival. But there Is one who prances sick of heart; whose whoops are rites of burtalln the dark. The balloons of her days that rose so high are curled up scraps of crlngelng rubber now trampled by those who revelled In her thighs. Fresh from her loins the murals that they painted portrayed her on her knees, where, like a child, she did not understand that men will talk of those they count as prey, nor thought of how they'll dance away with all her future tainted. The sticks of pleasure she at random tasted were paid for In a market where love dies; now fingers poke her name Into the slime and whispers dress her as the revels' clown. Around her feet streamers of faith lie wasted. She moves her body now In joyful style, wears meniment as costume for the night. as If her cloud of shame had taken fligh t It Is their smiling glances she defies and from her leaping sorrow turns her eyes. TONY KELLMAN PARADISE (For Winston) A pepper tree poxed with blight. A black cat curled like a vowel at your carpeted feet. Your new watercolours bright like pendants on the wall. Eight o'clock and all ain' t well. We talk, we talk ... and always the same conclusion. This Island Is a bad joke. 58

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Art, a social insignia, Is a sunken boat, The greater part of culture, farce and mimicry Only the scansion of the word keeps me from drowning, Only my lover's caress calms my tumult... Omnipresent gluttons bloated with greed assault your morality with their thirst for possessions. They swagger like untrained models lumbering down a catwalk. The background, a resplendent logo of sea and sun: the cruellest bitterest irony. Your return Is an aquarium snapper excited by the thought of salt-water, Unaware that lurking is a barbaric barracuda. In a society where without reasons originality is flushed into the sea, one must choose one's weapons carefully! That inner watercourse must be found as a lance to wield on this chaotic mound. The sunrise, cupola of silence, be your glaring shield! Claustrophobia, that inveterate terror, makes you wonder if exile's not a better niche, To survive here, Idealism must be fmnly leashed. It took Walcott fifty years to realize his error. The metropolis has its own brand of horror, there is the weather, the bullet, the dagger lurking in the underground (Did you say the palms are glistening spears? the khus-khus, knife-blades fanning round and round?) ... This land, as unchanging as a mirror, is still after all, my home; If I can live with foreign terror, I can live with my own. A pepper tree fleshed with lamp-light. A cat yawning like a vowel uncurling. Newly-hung oils bright like pendants on the wall Mid-night, and all ain't well. 59

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WILTSHIRE CAR DEAD by RAS MICHAEL Wiltshire car died. Wilt shire car just sputtered and died. The day that Wiltshire car died. Wiltshire just stand up there and let out one big s igh. Look is better to tell the truth. Wiltshire hang he head down and cried Wiltshire car broke its heart out and died and old Wiltshire stood there and cried that Saturday afternoon outside Lucius Rum Sho p. The car give two gasps and shudder and belch a black soot on a little girl dress up in ribbon bow and a new stockings. "Wiltshire I aint able with you an this old thing." Miss Margery said as she squeezed out breast after breast. then hold she breath and bruise she belly through the rear door. The other two passengers done gone through the other door and reach up the road hustling for Russell Street and reliable transportation. They aint even bother tell Wil tshire nothing. The two old women in the front seat start to complain through the op e n door that they tell Wiltshire to make sure he car was fit cause where they going find transport home? Wiltshire stand up and cried and the passersby and people drinking over at Lucius Rum Shop and the little girl that the car belch the black soot on. stood up and watched a white steam rise o.ut from under Wiltshire car bonnet. Then the car suddenly get tall as though it tip -t oe on Its chasls. Then It shuddered again. The little girl. people drinking :wer at Lucius Rum Shop and passersby stood up and watched Wiltshire car die It shuddered and danced. a dance to its own solemn rattle. Its lifeless wheels splayed outwards as it sank. Its body mere inches from the tar. Is all well and good to curse old Wiltshire about he car. True is a old time Vauxhall Velox and when the brakes taking too long to make the car stop. old Wiltshire does whistle a whistle and grip the wheel like to hold It back. all that is true. but what about Wiltshire part of it? The people say that the couple of springs l eft in the seats uses to tear they clothes. Teacher Morris say at top speed of fifteen miles per hour Willshire car make he go to school late three days straight. Wiltshire say he lucky. some people ain' t reach to work yet. they still waiting 'pon transportation. And when you look at it. m aybe Is not Wiltshire fault. Car parts were hard to get. As a matter of fact. foreign currency was hard to get to buy spare-parts. Foreign currency was the problem. And Wiltshire had currency problems. He barely eked out a existence collecting a dollar for his run from East and West Ruimveldt to Bourda Market. Foreign currency! Local currency was Wiltshire problem. That and the daily break-down and the road-side impromtu repair work-shops he established as the necessity arose. But really and truly things get much worse when everybody god -mother. grand-mother. sister and brother start to send and bring mini-bus in the country. You see what happen was that getting most essential things was 60

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difficult and the Government say that It got what they call foreign currency problems. Since then a whole portion of hustlers turn out to work on America Street and begin buying money up blackmarket and sell it all out blackmarket. They say the Government dldn' t like this since this same blackmarket money use to fmd it way into foreign country to buy needed essentials which traders sell at real high prices. A lot of these essentials was car-parts and Guyana didn't have enough car. It didn't have enough taxi. That is why so many people was always standing up on the road waving like ifthey going away tomorrow when the cars drive pass. Which is why Wiltshire feel shame. Wiltshire feel shame for all them people out there on SherliTStreet who was punishing for transportation whole day, every day while he was living quite well without burdensome responsibility. Wiltshire had retired and had a little money. He could live cool at his grand-son and his family. 'I have a little money,' Wiltshire say to himself. 'I could set up a transportation and help out the situation.' Truth was that Wiltshire was a truck driver with the Government before he had retired and he was used to malting friends quickly, especially women, through his Job Driving motor-car was the correct runnings, Wiltshire felt. There were dozens of worn en on Sheri1TStreet, nice young women. It wasn't that Wiltshire was a fresh old man. It was that he had this talent for making friends quickly, especially women. So Wiltshire seize the oppo-tunity. For example when Campbellville traffic slow down after lunch Wiltshire use to make a last trip up West and East Ruimveldt. Was a last trip for truth because whenever he hit East back road, anything could happen. Sometimes you use to see two/three passengers walking coming up and somebody would look out they window and say Wiltshire bruk-down.' But next day he gone again. He was a determined man. Was because he was a determined man that he set up the Vauxhall Velox that he did buy a couple years ago and repair it. He decide to use some of the little money he did put one side for old age and Invest it in second hand tyre and so. That Is why Wiltshire did stand up there and cry, that car did represent Wiltshire whole life saVings. Nobody didn't know or care where Wiltshire get he car parts or how he get them but one or two people did say they hear Wiltshire used to stop little children when they playing and e.xamine they playthings. One thing 1 know for sure I never see Wiltshire in no mechanic shop yet, even though Wiltshire car always used to park up on some parapet with Wiltshire under it. Wiltshire say Is rest it resting. Wiltshire did prefer the Housing Scheme run to the Carnpbellville one. Housing Scheme girls was di1Terent to the Campbe llville passengers. The Campbellville ones was mostly teacher or office girls or young bodies seeking other young bodies. But all of these was in the Housing Scheme run and more. More women. The kind that Wiltshire was comfortable with, big, broad and wuthless in conversation. Wiltshire did develop such a reputation that at one time they had people whodid rather 61

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stand up by Wiltshire car 'pon the roadside and wait till he either walk t o the Esso for more gasolene, roll one of he smooth tyred wheels to a VUlccllltzlng shop or squinn out from under the engine, than to travel with any o ther car. And sanleway, Wiltsh ire had he special passengers. People u sed to stand up 'pon the road and tell them Tapir drivers whenever they pull and shout "Georgetown/Housing Scheme", "We waiting for Wiltshire." Wiltshire car itselfwas prejudiced, it didn't mind who i t pick up as long as the passenger had money and did like a good gaff and a laugh. Of course it did prefer women more since was women who did really know 'bout everybody story. Wiltshire car used to well and en j oy the gOSSip and laughter and when it tired, it just used to break do wn. Wiltshire car use to get plenty competition at first from them Tapirs. Was Tapirs all about, picking up East Coast passengers, running up South, Sussex Street, Housing Scheme, and then slowly, slowly they bow out one by one, which is whyWlltshire old car wasn't worried even when the first mini-buses s tart run Campbellville route. The Tapirs them did start to stop run. Wiltshire car was as unconcerned as when they did first join the business. Wiltshire old car p roper use to enjoy heselfwhenever he was out on the road, running and picking up all them girls, even pulling up he brakes right in front of them big Tata Buses and taking away they passengers once is a woman. Nobody couldn't say Wiltshire car wasn't a good hustler. However, Wiltshire car, though it was looking for a dollar Just as much as Wiltshire, use to pride itself that it was more sweet-man than Wiltshire, with the girls. It use to laugh a t them modem motor-car cause they wasn't as hard as he. 'Look at them how they soft' Wiltshire old car say. 'Is years since I come here on the road and look how me body still black and hard and shine.' Wlltshire old car was vain. But then sudde nly so things change up and get different again. At first was second hand clothes, st1lllooking new but was second hand clothes that people in America did already wear. After that people start ge t in on the latest fashion and even the old girls them start wearing stone-wash Jeans and bobby-socks with sneakers. After-a-while one set of motor-scooter come in the country and poor peo p le start ride them. By the time the mini-bus them land everybody was l ooldng nice. Plenty people stop travel with Wlltshire car. I mean afterall, if you got on a new stone-wash and you going to market with attache case, well then you can't look to travel in no old Vauxhall Velox. It got to be something more new, like a Hiace mini-bus with tape deck and passengers so that you could look out the window and play important by pretending you ain't see nobody. A lot of people in Campbellville start to do Just that and soon time come that Wiltshire nor Wiltshire old car wasn't getting they usual kind of customer. Wiltshire change he route to the Housing Scheme. Every morning that the car wasn't sick. Wiltshire and the car down at Regent and Bourda Street hustling passengers for East and West. They use to cut through Charlotte catch Camp street, bounce over 62

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Sussex and take Russell through to West backroad with sUiT tantalize and laugh echoing all through the city. As a matter of fact they use to blow two horn whenever they drive pass Lucius Rum Shop 'pon Camp Street to let the people in there know that they happy too. Wiltshire car was so happy that it use to roll up it light bulb and rev up it engine whenever it passing a woman with a chassis it atlmire. When more mini -bus come they start to run South. Lazzo did send down plenty. 1hen more mini-bus come and they even start to run East and West. Wiltshire old car take in with bad feelings that same Friday morning when a mini-bus pull up right in they car park and the conductor shout out "East and West RUlmveldt" Old Wiltshire take on. Whole day Wiltshire use to be smiling and laughing, now Wiltshire grumbling and fretting and forgetting people change. One by one the passengers get less. Wiltshire old car ain't say nothing. It start to work more hard. No softy, softy' now come' minibus from America ain't gon make it look small. gon take It eyes and pass it. 'Is only because Burnham dead,' it grumble to itself. 'or they won't of be here.' For two months straight Wiltshire car ain't breakdown. ItjosUe with all the new mini-buses for the passengers. It didn' t even checking for young girls no more and one exceptionally busy Saturday morning, Wiltshire car even touch a top speed of twenty miles per hour, but things couldn't go on so forever. Well Wiltshire hear like if a big choir singing 'What A Friend We Have In Jesus' and like if the whole sound big up in the skies and the whole outside world. He get a sudden feeling like if God upstairs watching down at he and the car and he raise he hand up and look over he shoulder, right up in the sky just over the incinerator 'pon Princess Street where the Government use to throw way old car and old truck, Wiltshire imagine he see a big cloud like a face watching down at them. Every body, the passersby, the little girl with the ribbon bow and even the people at Lucius come out and watch up in the sky like Wiltshire but they ain't see nothing. Only Wiltshire did see. 'Is because Burnham dead,' Wiltshire say. Nobody never see Wiltshire again. We hear that he was living at the Dharam Sala poor house opposite the burial ground where the City Council did throwaway the chassis of the old car. And every time I hear that hymn 'What A Friend We Have In Jesus' I does remember how Wiltshire ;.:ar dead, 63

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NATURE STUDY by JOHN GILMORE Stanley Maycock was fascinated by dinosaurs. He was sitting on the carpet looking at a big illustrated book all about them. which he had got out of the Children' s Department at the Public Library in Coleridge Street. "Mummy?" His mother was sprawled allover the sofa. in the middle of piles of sixth-form essays which she was marking. Some of them seemed velY long. and Stanley hoped he never had to do so much homework when he got older. "Mummy?" She grunted at him. without. looking up from her work. "Do you think it would be nice to have a brontosaurus as a pet?" "Dont be silly darling. We wouldnt have any place to put it. Stanley continued to pore over the book. Suddenly he picke d It up and took It over to his mother. "Look. it says here 'dinosaur' mean thunderlizard ... she corrected. interrupting him. ... so is a llzard a sorta dinosaur?" "I suppose you could say they were distant relatives." "You mean like how my Auntie Ethel who Isnt really my auntie is a relative?" "Sort of." "So you mean the lizard that lives behind the picture Is like a baby dinosaur?" "No. it Isnt. Now go away and let me get on with my work." At this point Melanie came In. "HI. mummy' Can me an' Glyne borrow the car?" "Lord have mercy' I spend half my life teaching English and I cant even get my own children to talk properly. No, you cannot bor :ow the car." "But. mummy. you know Glyne's a careful drlv tt'! "No teenager is a careful driver. Heaven knows what you'd be getting up to "We only want to go to the East Coast Road," said Melanie. getting plaintive. "No. I tellyou. WaIt-I need some peace and quiet. You can have the car if you take Stanley with you." "Mummy. do we have to'-"Yes," she said. the red-ink pen poised once more above essays scrawled in blue and black. ready to strike. Stanley sat in the back of the car as they headed out of Rock Dundo Park and up Lodge Hill, through Warrens, Jackson. Bridgefield and on In the direction of St.Andrew. His sister and her boyfriend talked the whole way. Stanley was not Included In the con versation, but 'le was quite happy staring out of the window. He could not rememb'; r seeing : 64

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this part ofthe island before. It was very different from the bustle of town and school, or the concrete boxes surrounded by neat lawns and welltrimmed hedges where he lived. There was field after field of sugar-cane, the first arrows of next year's crop waving in the breeze. And after Welchman Hall. as they began to drive downhill again, the canefields began to give way to vast open hillsides, covered in rough pasture, with here and there the line of a gully marked by a thick growth of trees. They came on to the flat towards Belleplaine and drove round to the East Coast Road. Clyne soon pulled the car off the road and parked it under some casuarina trees. They got out and walked along a path. Clyne and Melanie walked ahead, carrying the cooler between them. Stanley lagged behind, with the bundled up beach-towels. And suddenly he ran after them, waving a long leafy stalk he had pulled up, a five-petalled white flower at the end of it. "Melanie! Melanie! What this is?" "Stanley, I don't know! An' you shouldn' t go grabbin' up every plant you see -this one over here is a manchineel." "But. wait," said Clyne, pointing at a nearby bush, "sea-grape! An' It got ripe ones 'pon it too!" They put down the cooler and started picking the grapes. "Here. you can eat this." Melanie handed her brother a small. rather wrinkled, purplish fruit. Stanley looked at it questioningly. and then bit into it. It was sweet. but with a faint hint of salt. "Crunch up the seed an' see what it taste like." Clyne told him. He did so. and spat It out almost at once. "Man, it too bitterl" Melanie laughed. They walked on, and the path came out into an open space. A rich green plant. with bright yellow flowers close to the ground. covered much of the soil around them. Stanley's curiosity got the better of him and he asked what it was. "Carpet weed," said Clyne. About a hundred yards ahead. some cows were grazing. Stanley counted them. There were three black and white cows. and seven brown and white cows Beyond them was visible the edge of a flat body of water. "Is that the sea?" Stanley asked. "Boy. you really ask too much questions: Clyne said. "That ain' the sea, that Is Long Pond." He and Melanie turned and walked towards a low hill and then up its slope Stanley followed them. The hill was all made of sand, with strange plants growing on It. At the top he realized that the noise he had heard earlier was the sea roaring. There It was in front of them. crashing on to the beach below in torrents of white foam. In a way he had never seen when his mother took them swimming at Paradise. "Look. Clyne." said Melanie. "fat porksl" Part of the slope of the sand-dune was covered by a dense growth about twelve or fourteen inches high, stalks with large, almost oval leaves slanted up towards the cloudless sky. Clyne and Melanie gathered a couple of handfuls of the red blobs which appeared among the leaves. "Here She offered one to her brother. "Just suck It off the stone. 65

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The frul t was the size of a large marble. but dimpled and mottled in different shades of red, with bits of green in it as well Only when Stanley saw his sister was eating one herself did he try it. The flesh inside was white like cotton-wool. It felt funny in his mouth, but it was quite nice. "You like it?" "Yeah She gave him some more. "Dont eat too many, or they going tie up your tongue. They walked down again and skirted the pond. Coconut husks and old bottles littered the margin of sand and mud. Here there was a gap in the build-up of sand, and incoming waves, their force spent by the ten or fifteen feet from the edge of the surf, contributed a clear trickle to the murky water on the land siele. "Move fast, Glyne said. "Nowl" They got across with dry feet, between one wave and the next, their rubber flip-flops slapping the damp sand. Now they were on the other side of the pond, and Stanley could see it was only about twenty feet wide. Little brown-speckled birds with long beaks, long legs protruding from white bellies scuttled about on the mud. A plop caught his attention. Lookl" He caught Melanie's arm and she and Glyne turned round. Once again, three offour small fish leapt int o the air and made a silvery curve back into the pond water. "Hush your mouth an' come longl" was Melanie's comment. They walked along the beach, which stretched on and on in front of them, and was almost a hundred feet wide from the dunes to the sea. Here and there an empty plastic container, or an old aerosol can, or even a light bulb, showed the proximity of civilization but there was no one else in sight. They spread out the t owels and sat down. There was a big purple towel, and a green and w h ite striped t owel, and Stanley's towel had pictures on it of cats trying to catch fish Melanie pulled off the oversized white T-shirt she wore as a dress, revealing a long leggy golden-brown body in a black bikini. Glyne had on a pair of baggy beach-shorts and a shirt like the ones Magnum wore on the lV, except that the letters curling around the palm-trees and the surfer-topped waves spelt out "BARBADOS" instead of "HAWAII. He unbuttone d the shirt. Glyne was supposed to be white, but a tan made him almos t as brown as Melanie. Stanley wore navy shorts and a T -shirt with a picture of a pelican sitting on an old cannon. It said "MARGARITA I LA ISLA MAS BELLA DEL CARIBEI" His mother had bought it for him when the three ofthem h a d gone there for a holiday and shopping trip Just before last Christmas. Melanie opened the cooler which had i n ice and bottled soft drinks. The opener was inside as well, but attached to one ofthe handles by a long piece of string so that it couldn't escape. She opened one of the bottles and gave it to Stanley, and then took for herself and Glyne. Stanley had finished the fat porks and was glad of the drink. He drank it all and stuck the bottle upright in the sand. He moved off the towels 66

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and began to build a sandcastle. Nobody told him not t.o get sand on his clothes, and he had already finished the outline of the castle -a square with a turret at each corner -when he turned round, his ear caught by something Clyne and Melanie were whispering. They looked at him, and then, "We're going for a walk," said Melanie. "So you stop here till we get back. You can have another drink if you want one. Don' t move too far from these towels, and don't go near the sea. It too roug h. You hear me?" "Yeah said Stanley. Clyne and Melanie stood up. Melanie put back on the bigT-shirt and then they walked off, taking the purple towel with them. Stanley added another tower in the middle of the castle to serve as a keep. Then he carefully put extra sand all round the outside of the top of the castle walls and round the top of the towers to make battlements. He stood up, walking round the castle to look at it from all angles. He sucked his teeth and gave the castle a kick, demolishing one of the corner turrets. Then he set ofT down the beach towards the sea. Crabs ran away from him as he approached. Little crabs and bigger crabs, all with grey bodies supported on dirty white legs with a yellow tinge to them. Some dipped into their holes. One of the big ones headed purpos efully into the surf. The sea looked very rough and Stanley retraced his steps. Just below the high-water mark he spotted one of the small crabs. Its colouring was the same, but it was so small as to be almost transparent. He dived at it with both hands and caught it. "Shite! It bite me! He dropped it at once, and sought to crush it with a safely ensandalled foot, but it moved too fast for him. He continued back inland, past the towels and on t o the line of dunes. There were more fat porks growing here. Most of the fruit were green, but he found a few ripe ones ;md picked them. He explore d further, eating as he went up the dune. He saw a lon g trailing green vine with mauve flowe r s There was what looked like a path, and he followed it now moving down and sideways, away from the beach, but almost parallel to it. There were more dunes, and casuarinas grew here, deformed, rising as h igh as the top of the dunes and then bent inland by the wind. There were sea-grapes too, but bigger than the ones he had seen earlier, much taller than himself,with woody truhks grey like the crabs on the beach, the v eins crimson in their broad green leaves. Another kind of vine, its flowers a different kind of purple, and with broad, flat green pods, wound itself up into the casuarinas. Stanley stopped, thinking he heard something. There was a rustling sound, like somebody moving through the bush. "Melanie? Clyne?" The rustling continued, very close. "Melanie!" There was still no answer, though the sound seemed to be right next to him. He was about to call out again when he saw them. The rustling sound was right next to him. It was made by the crabs, hundreds of them. They were all bigger than the beach crabs, and these ones had blue-black bodies with legs and claws of an angry red. They moved about under the sea-grapes, and around the vines, and among the fat porks and over the carpet of brown needles cast by the 67

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casuartnas. They rotated their stalked eyes to stare at him in defiant challenge. and waved their claws at him like banners. Stanley ran. Stumbling in the loose sand. trtpping over vines. he ran. He lost a sandal. and stopped for it. but the rustling sound was all around him. and he kept on running. He ran up dunes and down dunes and along dunes. And he crashed into a space under some casuarina trees where Clyne and Melanie sat up on the purple towel. Chrtst! How you did get here?" said Clyne. Stanley paid him no attention. but rushed. sobbing. into his sister's arms. As she pressed him to her. ttying to comfort him. he realized. puzzled. uncomprehending. that her breasts were quite naked. MAHADAIDAS FOR MARIA de BORGES Death. black moon. high mark on night's blue canvas. Stumped shadow beneath the lynchingtree A star hangs over me. Dark sore. Is it death? Like a phantom honed into walls. I inhabit a city of steel. Between its iron teeth. mechanical. regular: in escalators. prtsonlike elevators. I am lifted indifferently. dropped like a stone. borne. like a Jumbie beneath stony earth. Shadowless. I descend deeply into nightmares of childhood: down to steel-lined metros. Lo summerheat that beats. insistent. at my temples. Down. down to carriages. 68

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grimy steel-boxes caging men like packhorses belng driven to a mill. Down to obsessions caged underground -down down down. Phantomlike I move in long narrow streets. Down Broadway. A single head of cattle exiled from gentle grazings of our pasture. From whence has this traveller come with his long hair. his lost eyes? I am a pair of hands. A pair of feet. Eyes without candle. Bird stricken. Shrunken globe. my JoYs. small circumference. My token is the same Little copper sliver moving me around. Little city token. Little metal xing. Expensive little sliver. Dear metal moon. Small perimeter of dreams. Small perimeter of dreams. II A death-broker awaits me. He counts his cash. Slight and weary. I stand. Tears trallln the dust. He takes all my jewels. He takes all my rings. He steals my rubies. my rope of pearls. He grabs my tiara. my bangles 69

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of silver. He gives me tokens to send me to his factory. send me to his store. cage me in his offices. keep me in his kitchens. At gunpoint. he steals rubies in my cheeks. my full curve of hip. He bestows me coppers -so I may buy a jacket for my shoulders from his huge garment-store. hose from his hosiery. wine from his cellars. so I may purchase a space for my bed. a closet for my clothing. a space for my child and a space for my spouse. He takes moons from my eyes. my fingers nimble gifts -he hands me rose colored glasses. hard rimmed. rectangular. I look through his spectacles. I see him better. Moons in my eyes lost but to me They have moved to another orbit larger than me. In private constellations. I only could see them. Wheeling in wide orbit now. all may espie them. They are wheeling round and round in a luminous light. Drearnl1ght ignites them. An inner lights. Music. cosmos. world: we are in harmony. I surrender my tiara of stars. He greedily grabs them. He returns 70

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cheap sparkle from his factories cheap glitter from his streets. I go there to buy things that appear like the real, spending my life in imitation, never knowing what's real. What is real is what I've given, Wha 1's real is a city token. What's real is the theft. I am a pair of hands. A pair of feet. III Death rides, high black moon over all my dreams. Secret rider across sky's low fields. Sacred shadow beneath the lynching-tree. Like blue aether, I move through streets of dreams. I go to the river s edge where the moon is real. To sea's edge where moon's dressed in silver. I stare at the stony stars. Waves of eternity wash over me. I have come to the river. I have come to the forest. Forest of Jade. Forest of emerald. Forest of clear streams in my head. I an flesh and blood. I breathe. I eat like a lion when hungry. I touch. I caress. I sigh upon another's neck. 71

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I am man, love. I am woman, love IV Tomorrow, I rise between dead thighs of another day. To be bridled, like a horse between the hours, a bit between my teeth, a bruising saddle on my back. Like a packcamel in desert terrain, I will ride, the load of existence upon my camel's huxr.p the print of my hoof In the sand ... but a wind can erase my mark, a gale blowing inland,or a storm. No hoofs Ink may be written on the sandy dust of this world, no hoof, cloven or human, to declare I was here: tha t I walked with another's pack upon my back, without water for days, my face bridled with leather. My shadow is here In the midday sun, my bridled shadow in the desert sand. V The black sun of death sinks into sky's atavistic dnme, where I stand, invisible to all but that black Judge, mocked by my nothingness. This phantom and I, :gnorant, shadowless, packcamel by day, creature of moon by night. Locked between U1ese hours' iron bars, 72

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sunlight is divested from me. I. who dream of being a riderless unicorn. at sea's edge where the moon is high. I. who should wear stars on my wrist. flowers on my forehead. I. who should sing like birds. and like them. fly. 1. who believe in emerald forests. sapphire skies. ruby rocks. silver seas; in opal skies. jade stems. sea-roses. rockplants of iVory curled within her seabreasts. her hairy forests J adegreen seaweeds making mermaids' ha ir by moonlight. I who believe in the magical moonrock. In faeries in dresses of aether. In the noble prince on a fine horse. In flowers which converse. In plants that whisper. I who believe in the jewelled existence: sunlight's gold upon each finger. diamond-spray waterfalls on rock. The mink coat upon the mink. The jewelled emeralds of the tiger's eyes. Rainbows after rain. VI I sailed upon a Persian rug of dreams. now sold In the marketplace. 73

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without my song. or name. Ah poems oftnvislble authors! How many years in the weaving. this pattern of dreams? Where. the tightwoven self buried beneath the counter? You spend ten thousand on my design. You spend flve. You admire my m otifs. Can you explain their weft. their warps? VII Death is a lonely shadow flickertng through the night. A lonely passage between birth and beyond. SeCI"':!t nightmare. o song o f my voicelessness. Song in the sand VIII Landscape of nightmares city of skyscrapers. treeless and flowerless city city without children. What has become of persian dreams. their neat emblemmatic borders. their central motifs? Bloody splatters stare at me. the steely knife twisted in the stomach. the bloodied machete wielded in hate. Guns smoke. Muggers 74

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and their hates await knife or bullet, or both. Victim reproduces victim by default. IX into the real world I come with my muscles pumped so you may drain me with my hands polished, shining, my fee t ready. int o the real world I come with the hurt i n the bone the a gony in the flesh the vacuous eyes of hours the feral teeth of the air. w ith my coffee and my coffeebreaks. with my madness at nine, my dash at five into the heat of subways, that fester in my brain. into mugging at gunpoint on a night I am most high. into the rape of the defenceless into the lies and into the theft. 75

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ANNIE by GILLIAN HOWIE Annie Benjamin nee Annie Sterling: Born May 1901 In English Harbour. Antlgua, Died 12th December 1986 in Cedar Grove, Antlgua. August 1983 Annie came today calling 'Maaa'. My whole family have a speCial place in their hearts for Annie 82 years old and still trundling her little cart from Cedar Grove to Hodges Bay. Her cart Is full of a variety of vegetables, most of them rotten. I'm sure Annie must get the cast otIs that other vendors cannot sell as she Is too old now to go down to the wharf to make her selectlon. Annie has been selling local fruit and vegetables In our area for well over twentyyears. Foryears she came with herdookey 'Harris' (Horace) and at one stage it was Annie,'Harns' and 'Harris's' foal. But eventually Harris became too much for Annie to manage and she was given or sold to family and Annie got her little cart. Annie lives on a pension of EC$35.00 a month paid to her as a war widow; her husband fought in the World War. She has no children of her own and all her brothers and sisters are dead. She had a piece of land In st. John's which she sold and bought a piece of land In Cedar Grove where she built a one room wooden house. Although she had no children she looked after many of her nieces and nephews. Her favourite niece, Mary, married young and had three children. Then Mary's husband decided to go to Aruba where he'd been offered a good job on an oil rig. Within a few days of his arrival in Aruba he was killed in an explOSion on the rig. Mary was notified but by the time she got a passport and got to Aruba her husband was already burled. While stlll in Aruba Mary's mother (Annie's sister) died in Antlgua of a heart attack. She came back to bury her mother. Some tlme later Mary re-married and had three children by her second husband. Tragedy struck again when her husband was killed in a car crash at Friars Hillieavlng her penniless with six children. It was then Annie gave Mary piece of her land at Cedar Grove and a two room wooden house was built on it for Mary and her six children. Annie also looked after Mary's brother (her nephew) who had become mentally ill after his mother died. However became worse and worse and was put into the mental home. Mary is now dead and her brother is out of the mental home and is claiming Annie's house and land as his own and is trylng to get Annie put into Fiennes Institute (the Old People's Home). In the last few years the Government built a two room concrete house for Annie to replace her one room wooden house which was on the verge of collapse and she is proud of her new house. There is no running 77

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water or electricity but Annie does not seem to miss these things as she has never had either and I doubt she would be able to pay water and electricity rates. Her water is stored In a ram barrel at the side of the house and cooking is done on her coal pot. June 18th, 1984 Annie came today. She no longer pushes the cart as it1s a long way for her to walk and some months ago we told her not to bring vegetables but please to visit regularly and we give her a monthly allowance. On the way here she picks different kinds of bush for her tea and always gets some limes from our lime tree when it's bearing. She was using an old piece of wood as a wa1k1ng stick and I replaced it with a nice smooth piece Skene had In his room. She told us that she has left her house to a nephew who lives in St. Maarten and who has promised to return and give her a good funeral when she dies. Annie often gives news of people in our area. While she was sitting having her drink of juice she told me that when she was walking past St. Hilaire's house she saw someone clearing the bush In front ofthe gate (the house has been overgrown and deserted for years) and wanted to ask him if he was st. Hil:lire's son "but mistress I too embarrass to ask the gentleman after what I did. You know one thing I fraid too bad is cattle and the way I walk bend over now I suddenly see two cattle hoof In front my eye so I hit out with my stick ... and shout "MOVE OFF! GET AWAY FROM MEl" When I look up I see a gentleman looking down at me. Like he wearing those shoes with a white piece of rubber across the front ... by this time I was laughing and Annie was laughing too. We found out later that the st. Hilaire's had just returned with their son and his wife and are busy putting the house back In shape. June 27th, 1984 Annie came today. She still has the good stick of Skene's I gave her. She told me she had seen the same gentleman by st. Hilaire's house and had apologised to him for the episode last week -"mistress I tell him I too sorry for the way I treated him but he must excuse me because I thought he was cattle." Sometime in late 1985 I started visiting Annie once a month bringing her the family allowance as the walk to our house had got too much for her. I would sit on her sofa (an old car seat) and we always had a chat. Annie loves to tell stories of her childhood. June, 28th 1986 Today I went to see Annie bringing some OITaltine and her monthly 78

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allowance. She told me this story from her childhood in Falmouth, English Harbour .... MMy mother die when I very young and my stepmother she don't treat us good at all so all the children leave home, but I too young to leave so I stay rtght there and my father don't pay no attention. One day my brother pay us a visit and when he go back to where he staying he tell my older brother 'You better go and take Annie away or she go die rtgh t where she is.' My brother came down to English Harbour and he take me back with him to my aunty who live by where the old cemetery used to be. A few of my brother.;; and sisters already were staying wiLh she. (The old cemetery 'Was by the entrance to Deep Water Harbour). Every morning before coal pot light Aunty get we down on we knee on the floor and she open the Bible and read to us. She tell we 'All of you who understand what! am reading -remember -and if you don't understandyet-listen-because this is the word of God I am reading.' And every night before we lay down we head we get down on knee again and listen as Aunty read God's word and try to remember. Also we say Our Father together. One day my father came to take me back with him to English Habour, but I do not want to go back and Aunty would not let him take me. She say I am not going from her house and my father tell she he going to bring Police for she. Well some time after that my father came back with two police to take me back with him. I hang onto Aunty dress while Police ask she question after question and then bring out a big book with lines and give Aun ty a pen and she have to wri te in plenty dlfferen t parts of thIs book. Then the Police tell my father that he cannot take me 'Because the child want to stay with she aunty and my aunty has signed on to take care of me. Well, time pass and one day when I reach about twelve years old, a m a n came up from English Harbour to tell us that my father Is dying and he wish to see his children to ask forgiveness before he dies. My aunt sit in front of me and she tell me that all this time she would not let my father have me because he treat me too bad, but now the time has come when I must go and see my father. She help me to dress in my church clothes and tell me the way to English Harbour is not difficult -that once I get to the gates ofSt. John's the road goes in a straight lJ.ne from there. I leave home about twelve o'clock. Sometimes I running, sometimes rwalking, and I reach English Harbour about flve o'clock My father was lying there in his house. His woman was not with him she was in the village talking with friends. He hold my hand and start to cry and ask if [was really Annie his daughter. I tell him yes. He say he wan t to ask my forgiveness and the forglvenesss of all hIs children for the way he treat us when we were very young 'Annie, do you forgIve me?' he ask. 'Yes father I forgive you,' I say to him. Then he sigh and roll over on his side and he say 'Annie, get n cloth and clean your father.' Poor man, I lift his shirt and I see his body covered 79

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in poops. I get a bowl, flliit with water from the barrel out-side and with a piece of cloth I find in the house I wash down his body and take away his shirt to wash. I stay with him until he die which was the next week." August 31st, 1986 Today I went to see Annie with her allowance and a few things oval tine, sardines, condensed milk, com beef, biscuits, limes and some dog food fmher dog. Annie has not been feeling well these past few weeks -the cloudy weather aJTects her arthritis. She says the Doctor gave her a prescription -but the Dispensary has no medicine at this time. Her great nephew came in to see her while I was there. His name is Gavin. I stayed with Annie for a while and Annie talked to me about her husband. Harry Benjamin was born in Sea View Farm. His mother and father were married but his father did not spend much time at home. When he was In his teens he got into trouble with his Church Minister, a Moravian, who was very strict with the young people and if he did not approve of the way they were behaving during the week he would admonish them in his Sunday sermon and sometimes they would have to stay in after service for a caning with 'the b i g stick'. The Church Minister was an Antiguan, born in New Winthropes and sent to Sea View Farm after he was ordained. Mrs Benjamin was very upset when her son was given a caning one Sunday and said "No one ever going to beat my picknee again, and packed a bag for him and sent him to work on the boats so that he could see the world. Harry went to sea and was in Panama when the 1st World War started. He was asked to join the British Anny and his mother received papers from the War Office asking pennlsslon for her son to sign on. She signed the papers and sent them back, feeling very proud of Harry. By then she was high up in the Moravian Church and everyone knew her as 'Ma Pinch'. So Hany Benjamin joined the British Anny and fought for them In the 1st World War. Annie had not yet met him. She was only seven teen in 1918 when Victory was declared and says she will never forget the day. They woke up to church bells ringing everywhere -clang a lang, clang a lang, and when they went outside they saw a car driving by with its hom blowing and a little while later another car with its hom blowing. "In those days there was only a very few cars in Antigua and no planes atallandyeton this day I think all the cars in Antigua drive into St. John's with hom blowing and all the while church bells ringing -clang a lang, clang a lang. Everybody gather In the streets to find out what is happening and then someone came running up the road shouting to all of us "WE DONE WIN TIiE WAR." and we all felt very excited and happy." The celebrations continued throughout the day and that night there was a b\g fireworks display on Otto's Hill (now Michael's Mount). 80

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Everyone had gathered to see the fireworks and the display started well with all eyes looking into the sky at the showers of stars -when suddenly a rocket misfired into the huge box containing all the fireworks and there was a loud explosion with all the rockets taking off in different directions. Many people were badly burnt. among them Annie. She spent a month in hospital and then \\(ent home. but it took her over a year to recover completely and the scars were with her for the rest of her life. It was a couple of years later that An nie met Harry Benjamin when he came back to Antigua and joined the Police Force. They fell in love and got married but she says Harry was not a good husband to her. A real roamer who lived out' with other women and did not support her in any way. Eventually she left him and went back to her aunt where she made a living by making coal pots and selling them. One day she got a messag e telling her to come to the hospital because her husband was ill. He' d had a stroke while riding on his donkey. Annie went to see him but says. "He was already travelling to death and could not recognise me." He died a few days later. Although he had a house and land it was taken over by his parents and Annie got nothing. His parents told Annie that he had 'drunk out' his house and land. November 21st. 1986 Annie is now bedridden and she is dying I feel depressed and sad over the poverty she has lived in all her life and the hardships she's endured. For someone like me who is accustomed to all the basic comforts oflife. living in the poverty of Annie would be worse than death. I doubt I would survive very long. To Annie who has known nothing better since birth that way of life was normal and as she got older and bough t her own piece of land and had her concrete house built for her by Government life did get better and Annie was proud of it. Annie is not a morose person and must have experienced many happy times but now when I visit her with some basic things to make life easier I still feel very helpless in this little house with no furniture except a bed. two small tables heaped up with odd bottles. pieces of cloth and this. that and the other, and the old car seat with broken springs. The walls are blackened from months of cooking inside the house on the coalpot -there are no curtains; an old tom dress covers part of the window. I know Annie does not want to move from the house she loves so much but she is now helpless and there is never anyone here when I visit and everything is soiled. I do not know where to start. I have given her neighbour Ruby some gifts for herself and asked her at the same time if she could visit Annie three times a day for me, just to give her a drink and light the kerosene lamp at night and we have sent a message to her family (nephews and nieces) to ask if we can bring in some members of the St.Vincent de Paul Society to help us clean the house and bathe Annie. 81

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I see a lot of soiled clothes piled up in different bundles on the floor but do not want to remove them in case among the different bundles may be some treasured possessions of Annie. November 24th. 1986 I visited Annie today to find there had been a complete transformation in her house. I could hardly believe my eyes. The house had been swept and scrubbed, all the soiled bundles of clothes had disappeared and now there was a lovely old hat/coat stand in the corner and hanging on it was an umbrella and a ladies coat. The old car seat was sWI against the wall but now it was covered with a clean bedspread and even had a cushion placed on it; against the other wall was one of Annie's small carved wooden tables with a tin of Ovaitine and an enamel cup on it. I went into Annie's room. Annie was lying on the bed on her side and did not seem to recongnise me. She was murmuring to herself. The bed (an old four-poster) had been made up with clean linen and a clean colton blanket (one that Mum gave Annie years ago) was tucked in over her feet. There was a clean pillow-case on the pillow. Annie herself looked washed and clean. For the first time there were curtains over the bedroom windows. The curtains were blowing in the breeze and sunlight came through the window and across the edge of the bed. Beside the bed was the other wooden table and on it was a thermos of hot oval tine and a covered water container with a clean enamel cup beSide it. I sat on the bed beside Annie and said a prayer of thanks while I held her hand and looked at our old friend. She seemed thirsty so I opened a packet of apple juice, put a straw in it and Annie drank almost all of it. She can no longer eat anything solid. I talked to Annie for a while and although Annie did not talk her eyes seemed to understand. I told her how much all her friends in Hodges Bay loved her and missed her and howwe all remembered her coming to us with 'Harris' and how each week we' d 100J.ced forward to her arrival and Annie smiled -the first smile I'd seen in a long time. I'd brought some limes with me as I remembered how Annie loved limes and always asked for lhem. When she saw the limes she pointed to them and then to her head, so I rubbed her head gently with one half of a lime. While I was still there Annie's great niece came in to check on her and her neighbour told me that Annie's parish priest was coming to give her .:ommunion the next day. Annie is Church of England. I never saw Annie again, but early in the morning of December 12th I dreamt that Mum had come with me tovlsltAnnie and with us had come a man who wa[ a stranger to me. I tried to see him clearly because in my dream I was puzzled as to why he was with us but his face always seemed turned away from me. Mum and I and this stranger went into the house and there, standing in front of us was Annie, dressed in a brigh 1. flowered dress and looking very well. Her face had filled out and she was smiling. Mum held my arm and said, 'Gillie, Annie is getting better'. Then Annie walked past us, through the front door, down the steps and started 82

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walklng down the road without looking back. I half woke up, turned over and said to myself, What a reliefAnnie is getting better'. On the day of the funeral I was ill with a very bad stomach pain and could not attend but heard that it was very well attended and the ne-;Jhew to whom she'd left the house had arrived from St. Maarten with two lovely wreaths and had made all the funeral arrangements and all her nieces and nephews were there. A.J.SEYMOUR FOLKSONG Supenaam water sweet, son But Supenaam water deep, son And you got to paddle more Or else you got to sleep, son The deep long sleep and sure. Itanime wate r strange, son And Itanime waters change, son Watch for the river roar. Itanime took a score, son And hungers still for more, son Itanime water danger, son Some people go ashore. Itanime rocks are sharp, son And Itanime waters dark, son Dark like a danger door. Let the Captain drop a trick, son The Belly -Boat rips so quick, son You drown in it for sure. Supenaam water sweet, son ltanime water sharp, son So once and never more. 83

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TO THE FAMILY HOME AWAITING REPAIR Oh, long narrow home heavy with living An age of memories people the walls Around your naked frame, Wann shell of love & crowding children Where the young girls In uniform Hats worn like horse guards Speech full of the school diction Cycle up to ask for who's at home. And the cool Trade Winds carry echoes Pavan for A Dead Princess Played on the Thorens Until it wore the grooves. The scent of roses In the slim garden Growing In the four-hour overhead sun Smell of bread from the oven Everything mingling in the Wind. The tales we told around the dining table Linking the luncheons with their spell (Sometimes the battlefield for table tennis). The statue of JT at the desk Image of the dedicated student. The stairs are torn away that quivered to the steps Impatient for games & parties but slow for school. So many came here tea-visiting professors, Exam students, poets, novelists, SCUlptors, A Chief Justice -a future Prime Mininster Once talked halfway through the night. Through a hole in the hooded verandah The bats spelt six o'clock evening patrol. And little children to the Kindergarden Wrestling their way into the hall of learning Chattering, tormenting the wild cherry-tree That always yields Its fruit. Oh, crowd your long years of memory Into a prayer for their future For all who lived & Loved & studied here. 84

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McDONALD DASH MANHATTAN NOONDAY I sat in my Calvin Kleins adjusted my Benetton sweater and contemplated Fifth Avenue Like a trapped touIist on a bench in Central Park S. Takes a hell of a lot of patience to live in New York Manhattan My island in the sun Up from the "E" train in Reeboks stepping sturdily at 53rd and Lex Pushing inward through the fabric of the Big City. Heading to Midtown and late for work past Charlie's Comer Hard by Florsheims and Bloomie's Moving aside to let old ladies with autographed vaIicoses through multitude of hot-dog-and-Haagen-Daazchocolate break half pound of David's cookies in Cucci handbags The big city pauses in the Manhattan noonday. PIince skirts swish by Standing by newstand perusing People Hustler Business Week Plunking dime and a quarter for a USA Today. The Big City throbs as Matrons waddle into Petrossian's for turtle-loaves 85

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at olympian prices Tell their story to their friends in the Hamptons Manhattan my island Dense Jungle of concrete and steel looking at Mr Trump's tower Black Up to the blue sky. Gazing across at Bergdorf Goodman's where price-asking is a presumption A 14th Street refrain Where is Herman's Sporting Goods? Ohl Down Third by FDR' S postal facility (how I love these New York words) gorging out of Cinema II After a spider woman kissed me New York New York in the noonday Cross over to West side in the M-28 Alight at the Henry Hudson To look in on old Mrs Nissenbaum large lady in small apt. And nasturtiums stand in the window sill Manhattan survivor's song My island in the Big City Puts on its Ferraris in the Noonday. 86

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"THE INFINITE REHEARSAL" by WILSON HARRIS A REVIEW by MICHAEL GILKES Wilson Harris's The Infinite Rehearsal is the most recent work in what is already a remarkable bildungsroman. It begins with a 'renegade' note from the protagonist, 'Robin Redbreast Glass,' complaining that: W H has stolen a march on me and put his name to my fictional autobiography. So be it. I do not. intend to sue him for my drowned rights. Call it character licence on his part. He and I are adversaries, as my book will show, but we share one thing in common, namely, an approach to the ruling concepts of civilization from the other side ... (p.vii) The note is a reminder that Harris, as author, refuses to be authoritarian in his approach to character or text, abandoning conventions of realism, authorial omniscience or artistic detachment. The author enters into the narrative, becoming a 'character' in his own fiction, admitting to his own biases. Later on in the book, Glass, who serves as the reflection (rather than simply a transparent device) of his author, challenges h i m on the accuracy of his facts : May I give you the facts?' said W.H 'I may be a character in your book but still .. .' 'Facts?' said 1. You -Robin Glass -your mother Alice, your aunt Miriam, and three children were drowned in June 1961, the afternoon of the earthquake. The boat Tiger over-turned at sea .. .' It's not true', 'I shouted. You know damn weIll was in bed with flu at aunt Miriam's. 'It was 1 .' said W.H. gently. You?' (pp. 47/48) The 'autobiography' touches intimately both author and charac ter. Aunt Miriam, who runs a children's school of drama in her home, Is drowned along with several children, when their boat capsizes in a storm during an outing. Alice Robin s mother (the father has long deserted), a litera te, intelligent and brave woman, is herself drowned attempting rescue. Robin, ill in bed at his aunt's home, h ears the news from his childhood friends, the orphans Peter and Emma, whom Alice had managed to save. From these slight ingredients, a visionary 'rehearsal' o f events takes place i n the child's fevered brain, deeply affecting his view of the real world. Catastrophe is converted into c r eative insight. Not only has the child been exposed (at aunt Miriam's) to a world of 'magical theatre' where 'the histories of the world' are re -enacted through 'the shoestring budget of childhood theatre' (p. 65) ; but he has also been influenced by stories of his eccentric, bookish grandfather who has 'rewritten' Goethe's Faust while 'pork-knocking' (prospecting for gold and diamonds) in the rainforests of his own 'Sacred Wood' where he dies of ben-beri on the day Robin is born, the same d a j the nuclear bomb is 88

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dropped on Hiroshima .... and history changed. revised itselfbackwards. never to be the same again.' (p,12) The awareness of childhood deprtvation and global turbulence (conveyed with great power and economy as the simulataneous trauma of childbirth and nuclear devastation) imbues Glass with the conviction that he has been charged by the Creative Spirtt (a 'revision of the ghost's charge to Hamlet. the glass of fashion'. to seek revenge) to embark upon the ceaseless rehearsal. ceaseless perfonnance of the play of truth.' in which the Self is 'fictionalised' as a means of locating the creative imagination within 'ageless author. ageless character.' (p.82) Like his grandfather. he becomes 'gravedigger/pork-knocker' in the 'Sacred Wood' (a rather more humble role than Eliot/Frazer's prtest/ poet): The graves I dug were librartes of myths of gold. silver. bone .. texts that broke a unlfonn narrative domination by the conquistadores of history in inserting themselves Into my book despite the apparent eclipse they endured. despite voicelessness or oblivion (p.2) Classical and modem texts of European civilization are subjected to a 'panning' by the author as 'pork-knocker' in 'a library of dreams'. and made to yield up their correspondences with other, 'lost' or unregarded cultures. The result is a novel -amalgam In which bits ofthe 'revised' texts are embedded within a rtch magma of crosscultural, universal significance. Tiresias, the seer, for example. now observes things from within a third world perspective. 'like a tourist under a black sky'. The other side of the Great Tradition appears. I saw the negative film of Thebes ... I saw Napoleon's negative crown and Alexander's sceptre and Captain Cat's tombstone floating with Alice's ring and with the stone from a Jamaican hillside ... It was an uncanny vortex. The flotsam and Jetsam of empires! (p.72/73) The idea officton as a continual rehearsal or 're-vision' of accepte d traditons (including the art of fiction itsell) was already present in Hams's early work. In a 1967 lecture he described it like this: It is as If within his work [the wrtterl sets out again and again across a certain territory ... of broken recollection in search of a community or species of fiction whose exis tence he begins to discern. ('The Wrtter and Society', in Tradition, The Writer and Society New Beacon 1967) That technique of'rehearsal' is at the root of all his work from The Palace of the Peacock (1960) onward, and the overwhelming concern is with avoiding the 'sovereign', absolute nature of Tradition. or the tyranny of 'hard fact'. His use of Classical myth and allegory, or of the European literary tradition, is part of a process of re-interpreting or 'retrieving' values that have become ossified, their links with other, so called 'prtmitive' cultures, lost. In the unlocking of those 'sovereign traditions, there is a release of potential energy for creative change ... my grandfather's Faust (which he wrote or brought to 89

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completion In the year I was born) possesses roots as much In the modem age as In the Columbian workshop of the gods and therefore addresses a European myth from a multifaceted and partly non-European standpoint. (p.7) Robin Redbreast Glass, In writing his 'autobiography', Is aware of this 'pre-natal text' which, like Goethe's lifelong work, mirrors Its author's own sense of involvement In a drama of conclousness In which final vision Is never achelved. Faust appears as a central text In the novel, but the figure of Faust, brought alongside the modern age, revises his perspectives: 'You know, Robin, ... I like to think of my surgery as a Window upon heaven. Except that heaven's changing. ... technology's changing. And quite frankly I'm not sure what investitures the devil now wears.' (p.64) In fact, Faust now sees with QuetzalcoaU eyes in which were entWined the marriage of heaven and earth' (p.64) The reference to the Aztec 'plumed serpent', the god unitng aetherial and earthly life, also conjures up Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. with its plea for a wedding of physical and spiritual 'contraries'. For Harris, as for William Blake (whose prophetic books with their airborne, energetic figures Harris's work often calls to mind), without contraries Is no progression; and the novel, both 'autobiography' and 'fiction,' is also organised on this principle. Glass, both fictional caracter and author, Is in dialogue with the 'Erdgeist' of a 'Faustian' world: Thus It was that I welcomed Ghost, conqulstadorial and victimised Ghost (was he male/female? I could not tell) when IT appeared on a beach in Old New Forest ... (p.l) The Faust/Mephisto dialogue is expanded, however, to Include political tyranny, ballotrigging In the 'third world', the refugee problem, the commerCialisation of Space, the Challenger dlsater, Chemobyl: Don't exaggerate. Chernobyl Is a dlsater complex In the Soviet Union. What has it got to do with the free West and the choices that lie before the electorates of the free West? 'Hush-hush d isaster, dateless day bearing' said Ghost. When Communist Rome burns an empire of souls inhales its ash. But no one sees the fire or the brute faery at our fingertlps ...... Cheap energy Is the opium of the masses, the new lotus.' (p.54) In his previous novel. Carnival (1985), Harris had used the allegorical densities of Dante's Divina Commedia as a 'text' through which his imaginative, cross-cultural vision ranges, picking up Mediaeval threads of meaning and connecting them to contemporary, but broken, lines of communication, rather like a lone linesman In a disaster area where most of the power lines are down. In this 'repair work,' postco lonial cultural fragmentation and the resultant masks of carnival are llnked with the social and political corruption and need for splritural'guidance in Dante's 14th century Europe. The 'guides' In Harris's novels are culturally heterogeneous, modem figures, but their 90

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roles are the same: t o re-establish the inner authority of unconditional lo v e in genuine revolutionary change. The last sentence of C arnival b e gins with the las t line of the Paradis o : The love that m oves the sun and the other stars.' ( ... l'amor che m o ve il s ol e e l'altre stelle .' ) The Infinite Rehea rsal. lik e C a rnival. like much of Harris s fic tio n is not so much a re -reading' a s a 're visioning' of European Myth (itself concerned w ith the retrieval o f Value). in order t o discover the deepe r springs of the e nabling Universal1'ruth that all myth contains. It was. Harris a r gues. the enshrining of the great myths as 'Soverei g n Tradition' w h ich. in a s ense. created the thlrd world and broke the line s of communication b etwe e n peoples and their cultures; a disruption that now appears on a glo bal scale. Goethe' s Faust serves as another G reat Myth which. s ince i t s origins lie even deeper. withi n an 'Ur-text' or myth of the d iv o r c e between R e ason and Emotion. may have resonances that sugg e s t and r e v e al: ... a play that i8 infmite rehearsal .. that approaches again and again a sensation of ultimate meaning residing within a deposit of g host s relating to the conqulstadorlal body as well as the victimised body of new and old worlds, new forests ol d forests. new stars and old constellations w ithi n the work-shop of the gods. (p.l) This is. i n fac t. a deSCription of Harris's own fictional prac ti c e wher e the writer sets out again and again across a certain territory . .'. b u t w itho u t any preco n c ei ved destination. open to 'rev isionary strate gies' avail a ble t o the c r eative imagination. Thi s I s what Goethe' s Faust m eans w hen he tell s the E rdgeist that he needs help in order t o leav e 'dabbling i n words' and seek t o discover 'what holds the world together. In Harris's novel. Ghost acts as Geist to Glass/Harris' s quest: I say r evlsonary strategie s to imply that as you write ... of the d ead or the unborn. bits of the wo rld's turbulent universal consciousness emb e d themselves in your book. D o you s e e ? (pA6) 'An d I revi s e a round these and through these. I see'. W.H. '/Glass replies. It is a method o f 'validation o f fiction '. going against the grain of conventional form and practice. the author becoming involved in the ficti on. foll owin g where the work (Geist) leads while also engaged in the writing Above all this is a novel about the prophetic nature of ficti o n as a means o f appreh ending the dilemmas of our post-c olonial civilization i n volvi n g traumatised Third Worlds' as well as bewildered 'First Worlds' The s p ectre o f w holeness' that underlies the strange. rambling narrative lies in the hidden dens ities of the texts themselves. where there Is a Visionary thread of meaning running through them into a seamless. cross -cultural garment. Extract s from T.S. Eliot. Walte r De la Mare. D ylan Thomas. W H.Auden. Wilfred Owen. R.L.Steven s o n Robert Bums. Karl Marx and S h akespeare appear at odd moments within the n a rrative. ofter altered s lig htly. the result o f cultural frisson. The texts Jostle each other. share i n each other' s m eanings: 91

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'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller, Knocking at the moonlit door. Belly to belly Back to back Ah don't give a damn Ah done dead a'ready. And I Tireslas have (oresufTered all I who sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead. At first sight, De La Mare's simple ballad. a relic of school days, and Eliot's classical allusions from The Waste Land seem to be joined by an unlikely bedfellow: the bawdy Caribbean folksong. 'Jumbie Jamboree'. But the folksong with its despairing echo of the cramped hold of the slave-ship. becomes a mediating comment on both De La Mare's Traveller, unaware of a 'host of phantom listeners', and the Waste Land with its expiatory message for a historical and cultural1radition In crisis. The Great Tradition was always (as Conrad saw) deeply Implicated in the Imperial Adventure which served to support that Tradition. The texts gatn a new 'tmmediacy of utterance' from their juxtaposition. Harris is making a plea for world sanity; for the compassionate understanding denied by crude polarisations of language and thought. The novel is part of a profoundly moral undertaking; an attempt to understand the apparent paradoxes of remarkable human achievement in science and art alongside the equally remarkable record of hunmn misery and deprivation. Instead of merely tnvesting in the 'human interest' of these paradoxes, Harris looks Within, at our own biases, our own failure to 'connect' because of an 'illiteracyofthe tmagtnation'which obscures the Itnk belween material progress and tncreasing violence in a world dominated by the stock-market mentality of'Bllllor.aire Death' (one of the allegorical figures which rise out of Aunt Miriam's children's theatre). The hope for the future is Emma, who, in becoming the first female Archbishop, witnesses to a new Divina Commedia: a 'Divine Communism,' a reversal of the bankruptcy of the human tmaginatlon which has led to the collective death-wish inherent in global violence, drugtrafficking, environmental rape and the spectre of nuclear destruction. It is to her that Glass/HarriS sets out on his final journey. (This article first appeared in Artrage. No. 18, Autumn, 1987. This magazine is published by the Minorities Arts Advisory Service, 2331 Tavistock Place. London WC1H 9SF, U.K.) 92

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"THEATRE IN THE CARIBBEAN" BY KE N CORSBIE A REVIEW by AL CREIGHTON The importance of a major publication on Caribbean Theatre at any time is considerable since the field is markedly underdeveloped in the area of published literature. The total collective of documentation, crttical works, analyses and even published plays is much too slim for a region that has produced so much theatre. Critical attention in this area, as well as publications generally, has certainly lagged well behind that g iven to poetry and fiction and, partly for this reason, any work of some merit is welcomt as a necessary advancement upon an unsatisfactory situation. A rough survey of the literature reveals books byJohnston (1972), Omotoso (1980), Hill (1972, 1982, ed.), while Wright (1938) remains a major source. Baugh and Morns, eds., (1986 Carib No 4 ) c ontains further valuable material and other works include Hill (1972, b; 1985), Gray (1968). Morns (1983), Creighton (1984), Anderson (1984), Walcot t (1971) and Noel, ed., (1985) The list is quite nearly exhausted by the above and so, an account of Caribbean theatre, such as Ken Corsbie's Theatre in the Caribbean (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1984; 58; vi pp.) written by one whose familiarity with his subject has spanned several years as actor and director, may be looked upon as being extremely valuable. But Corsbie' s work disappoints, falling short of expectations and turning out to be limited in achievement for many reasons; not because it confines Its aim, at best, to the middle forms in secondary school, but because its content is too often cursory treatments of very important issues, conversational rather than analytical, wants thoroughness in a number of areas of research, and is often erroneous. The book is merttortous and useful for its recognition of many areas in which theatre is alive in the Caribbean, and is particularly progressive in its acknowledgement of the oral arts in which Corsbie appears to be particularly interested. He very necessarily draws attention to the importance of orality and ofits traditions to the region's drama, but his definitions/ concepts of drama and theatre are rather too promiscuously all-embracing and his tendency is to describe phenomena that are merely marginally theatrical as drama without the often needed qualification. Starting probably frpm a broad notion of Mall the world's a stage" and all action of man as theatre/theatrical/dramatic, he proceeds with an all-embracing readiness to admit varied forms of spontaneity, probably reflecting a belief in the misconceived cliche that MCaribbean people are natural actors/(singers/dancers)". He asserts: The historical backgrounds of the islands with thetr mixtures of strong folk cultures and traditions, have blessed us with very expressive 93

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dialects and body languages. An assumption there is that something makes Caribbean dialects more effective and Mexpressive" than other languages, but any native speaker anywhere can claim equal efficiency in his language. What is true in the remark is that the backgrounds have indeed created rich material for theatrical forms, sources and inspiration, not that they have given rise to superior languages or gesture. Such stereotyped notions might also have led Corsbie into some of the errors in the work. He is careful enough to add that: natural talents and exciting roots are not enough to make excellent actors. It takes a good deal of hard work, intelligence and discipline .... many Caribbean actors ... have mastered the necessary skills But he never gets around to telling readers what the skills are or how they may be acquired/sharpened. Both are important since the book's aim is instruction at a fundamental level. He lists qualities possessed by some of the region's leading performers, perhaps in an attempt to fulfil that role, but all the attributes listed often remain physical/personal qualities; at best the raw material or what one sees in the fmished product. "A powerful voice", Mphysical and personal power and vitality", "a natural warmth", "tall handsome athletic physique" and Ma spontaneous sense of humour" seem to suggest natural physical gifts rather than skills that one can work at to acquire. This neither supports Corsbies own earlier argument nor leads us in the right direction. One still needs to know what makes Joy Ryan Mjust beautiful to watch in any role" or what gives Louise Bennett "attention-getting stage presence". The student is not told how to achieve any of these. The belief in 'natural talent' also affects the kinds of questions he poses at the ends of chapters, such as: Is there a student in your class who can always tell a good story? Are you a good actor yourseU? which is of limited usefulness in skills acquisition/development and keeps the emphasis on possession of natural ability. Corsbie misunderstands the art of dub poetry and is thus misleading as he ;j.sserts: Dub poetry could be easy. W ith a background of reggae rhythm from your class mates, just tell of something in your own life. That is hardly likely to produce poetry Far from being spontaneous/ex-tempo composition, dub poetry is a more complex craft Involving techniques of scribal structure and oral performance. Neither was American soul/funk "rap" a pioneering influence for dub poetry as he suggests. This form, which developed in the 1970's, pre-dates rap which reached its height at the beginning of the 1980's. Dub poetry is also vaguely related to OJ Dub performances with which Corsbie seems to 94

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confuse it but even DJ virtuosity dates back to the 1960s. Further. when Corsbie shows his consciousness of skills for which actors have to be trained he is, again, less than instructive, as in the question What techniques do you think are needed to be a good actor? Do you know any of your friends who have some of those skills? Perhaps they, too, will make top-class Caribbean actors some day. The answer to the first question is not quite that subjective. One cannot assume that a student without the necessary technical knowledge can think out these answers, but rather, he has to be taught them. For most of the book, one gets brief, introductory references to sources, dramatists and productions which rarely get beyond generalization and superficial deSCription. A wide range of subjects are approached without being addressed and, indeed, these are so varied that they could hardly have been properly covered in one book of this length and range. It is likely, though, that the book aims only to sensitize and to stimulate debate and further research through the questions it poses but does not answer. Corsbie is consistent in his very progressive approach to theatre and is fully aware of the vitality of oral traditions. But one is left with the impreusion of an insufficiency and thinness in the research and inattention to detail which led to many mis-quotes of lyrics and incorrect information about performers (for example, !he Rivers of Babylon" which is really a Melodians creation), as well as unscientific conclusions. A major strength of Theatre in the Caribbean is that it does not treat drama as a purely literary discipline but more progressively recognizes it as "action", paying due attention to its technical/practical aspects. Such an approach is superior to what usually happens in school/exam situations where drama is treated no differently to literature. Corsbie's design of activities and exercises at the end of each chapter f:>rces the introduction of those aspects of theatre into the school curriculum. It is understandable that stimuli are being provided for the students to think more about theatre and relate various relevant issues to it. Though sometimes a little short on real information, the style used is more beneficial than any attempt to proVide information through straight expository prose. REFERENCES Anderson, Paula Grace, "Two Can Play, West Indian Literature and its Social Context, Mark McWatt (ed.), V.W.I., Cave Hill, 1985. Baugh, Eddie and Morris, Mervyn (eds.). Carib No.4, WlACLALS, Kingston. 1986. Corsbie, Ken, Theatre in the Caribbean, Hodder and Stoughton, 95

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London, 1984. Creighton, AI, "Commoner and King: contrasting linguistic performances in the dialogue of the dispossessed", West Indian Literature and its Social Context, M. McWatt (ed.l U.W.I., Cave Hill, 1985. Gray, Cecil, "Folk Themes in West Indian Drama", Caribbean Quarterly, Sept. 1968. Hill, Errol. The Trinidad Carnival, University of Texas, Austin, 1972. Hill, Errol, "The Emergence of a National Drama in the Caribbean", Caribbean Quarterly. Dec. 1972. Hill, Errol (ed.l, Introduction to Plays for Today, Longman, Kingston, P.O.S. 1985. Johnston, Robert. The Theatre of Belize. Morris, Mervyn, Introduction to Trevor Rhone, Old Story Time and Other Plays. Noel. Keith, (ed.). Introduction to Plays for Playing. Heinemann, London, 1985. Omotoso, Kole, The Theatrical Into Theatre, New Beacon, London, 1981. Walcott. Derek, "What The Twilight Says", Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. Wright. Richardson, Revels in Jamaica, 1682-1838. 96

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CONTRIBUTORS HAROill BASCOM -Guyanese artist/illustrator, writer, and play-wright; his first novel Apata was published by Heinemann in 1986; his plays The Barrel and T.V. Alley have been produced in Guyana with great success. AL CREIGHTON -Jamaican by birth; writer on the theatre, producer and director; lectures on drama at the University of Guyana; edits the arts page ofStabroek News in Georgetown. MAHADAI DAS Young Guyanese poet of great promise; M.A. (Philosophy), University of Chicago; lives in the U.S.A. MCDONAllJ DASH Prominent Guyanese journalist; play-wright and producer; poet. MICHAEL GILKES -Guyanese poet, cIitic, and play-wright; author of the play Couvade; lecturer in the English Faculty, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill; at present attached to the Centre for CaIibbean Studies, Warwick University. JOHN GILMORE -Barbadian historian and writer; editor of Banj., a magazine of Barbad!an life and culture, first published in ApIiI. 1987. CECIL GRAY -Noted Trinidadian writer and editor; senior lecturer in the Depart ment of Education, University of the West Indies, St Augustine-. WILSON HARRIS -Guyanese by birth; among the most oIiglnal thinkers and nov elists in modern literature; his numerous novels include The Guyana Quartet and The Eye of the Scarecrow; his novel Carnival won the 1987 Guyana Prize for Fiction; his latest novel is The Infinite Rehearsal. JANE KING HIPPOLITE St Lucian writer; she and her husband, Kendel Hippolyte, run "The Lighthouse" theatre in St Lucia. GILLIAN HOWIE -Trinidadian by birth; now a housewife and teacher in Antigua; "Annie" is her first published work. 7DNY KELLMAN -Barbados poet and short story writer; his collection of poems includes: The Black Madonna and Other Poems (1975), In Depths of Burning Light (1982), The Broken Sun (1984) RAS MICHAEL -Guyanese performance poet and story teller; has published collections of his work including' Black Chant and Church and State. ROOPIAL MONAR -Guyanese poet and short story writer; Pee pal Tree Press has published a collection of short stories, Backdam People, and a volume of poems, Koker; a further collection of stoIies, High House and Radio, and a novel, Jhanjhat, are due to be published in 1988. PAM MORDECAI -Jamaican poet; radio and televislOn prodm; er; editor of Carlb bean Journal of Education; author of books for children. HEMRAJ MUNIRAM -Guyanese journalist and short story writer. SASENARINE PERSAUD -Guyanese author of short stories and poems; work not yet collected; two novels recently accepted for publlcation by Peepal Tree Press. GORDON ROHLEHR -Guyanese by birth; lecturer and literary critic; noted for his encyclopaedic knowledge of the calypso and his writings on the subject; Reader in English Literature, University of the West Indies, St Augustine.

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