Citation
Kyk-over-Al

Material Information

Title:
Kyk-over-Al
Uniform Title:
Bim
Portion of title:
Kyk over Al
Portion of title:
Kyk
Portion of title:
Kykoveral
Creator:
British Guiana Writers' Association
Kykoveral (Guyana)
Place of Publication:
Georgetown Guyana
Publisher:
s.n.
Publication Date:
Frequency:
Two no. a year
semiannual
regular
Language:
English
Physical Description:
v. : ; 23 cm.

Subjects

Subjects / Keywords:
Guyanese literature -- Periodicals ( lcsh )
Caribbean literature (English) -- Periodicals ( lcsh )
Genre:
review ( marcgt )
periodical ( marcgt )
serial ( sobekcm )
Spatial Coverage:
Guyana

Notes

Dates or Sequential Designation:
Began in 1945?
Dates or Sequential Designation:
-49/50 (June 2000).
Numbering Peculiarities:
Publication suspended, 19 -1983.
Issuing Body:
Issued by: British Guiana Writers' Association, 1945-19 ; Kykoveral, 1985-
General Note:
Vol. for Apr. 1986 called also golden edition that includes anthology of selections from nos. 1-28 (1945-1961).
General Note:
Description based on: No. 30 (Dec. 1984); title from cover.

Record Information

Source Institution:
University of Florida
Rights Management:
All applicable rights reserved by the source institution and holding location.
Resource Identifier:
12755014 ( OCLC )
86649830 ( LCCN )
1012-5094 ( ISSN )

UFDC Membership

Aggregations:
Digital Library of the Caribbean

Downloads

This item has the following downloads:


Full Text








































-




KYK # 44















... Art requires talent real talent and not mere literacy in any
medium. I see no substitute for passion, internally generated, and
hard work.

Martin Carter




KYK # 44


FRIENDS OF KYK-OVER-AL NO. 44

A great many individuals and organizations have contributed to the success of
KYK-OVER-AL since it was relaunched in December, 1984. Now we owe a very
special debt of appreciation to the following for their support of this special issue No.
44. Their vigorous assistance, so readily offered, in strengthening an important part
of the cultural tradition of Guyana and the West Indies deserves the thanks of the
whole community.

Guyana Bank for Trade & Industry
Guyana Stores
Demerara Distillers
Banks DIH
Brass Aluminum & Cast Iron Foundry
Shell Antilles
Caribbean Molasses Company
Associated Industries
Guyana Fertilizers
Bank of Nova Scotia
National Bank of Industry & Commerce

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:-
IAN McDONALD (Editor), do Guysuco, 22 Church Street, Georgetown, Guyana.
In the UK please apply to:- F.H. THOMASSON, 38 Carlton Mews, Wells,
Somerset, BA5 1SG.
In Canada and the United States please apply to:-
AILEEN MORGAN, 219 Woodsworth Road, North York, Ontario M2L 2T5.

Subscriptions per issue (including postage)
G$400 EC$15 4 US$7 CAN$8

The Editor 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 (C) 1993. No reproduction by any means, except for short extracts for
review purposes, may be made without the permission of the Editor.

ISSN 1012-5094


Layout and Typesetting of Kyk-Over-Al #44 by Red Thread Women's Press
in cooperation with Asraf Alli




KYK # 44


Acknowledgements : KYK 44


The Editors wish to express sincere appreciation to:

Stanley Greaves for the pen and ink portrait of Martin Carter
The Heritage Society for permission to reproduce its "Heritage
Cards" series.
Abraham Poole for recourse to the Booker News archives
Asraf Alli for typesetting
Joan Gilkes for assisting with proof reading
Bridget Welch for assisting with inputting of data from manuscripts
The staff and volunteers of Red Thread Women's Press
&
Especially Martin Carter for permission to include his
unpublished poems and prose in this volume.




KYK # 44





Kyk-Over-Al No. 44
May 1993

Co-Editors: Ian McDonald & Nigel Westmaas
Copy Editor: Vanda Radzik


Table Of Contents)



New Poem s by M artin Carter...... ............................... ......................1

Across the Editor's Desk............................................5

The Guyana Prize............... ........... .....................12

A M artin Carter Prose Sampler........................................................23

Bibliography of Martin Carter's Prose..................................152

Portfolio of Heritage Houses
Pen and Ink Drawings by Kenton Wyatt for The Heritage Society of
Guyana
#1 Red H ouse................... ............ ...............................42

#2 Georgetown YMCA......................................76

#3 Bovell House & Pharmacy............. ..........................92

#4 Sharpies' H ouse............................. .... ........ ...... 113

#5 The Palm s................................... ... ... ............ 127

#6 High Court Buildings................ ..... ..................... 132




KYK # 44


New Poems


THE CONJUNCTION

Very sudden is the sought conjunction.
Sought once over and found once over
and again, in the same sudden place.

It is where the hair grows.
It is where the hand goes.
It is the conjunction
of loin and the rare
possibility of a head
on the cushion of hair and love.

Indeed, I have always wanted
to climb upon a window sill
to climb and compete with the rain
falling down, and rising up.
And staying still, in the promissory
hope of passion's signature
and the returned wealth of a conjunction.

Martin Carter (1989)


-1-




KYK # 44


HORSES

My shoe has fallen off
And the sole of the foot pleads.
As both of my hands.
Why is it I do love horses?
And their hooves
And their very free flanks.
It is because they climb the sky
And are at one with God.

Martin Carter (1989)


-2-




KYK # 44


NO EASY THING


I must repeat that which I have declared
even to hide it from your urgent heart:
No easy thing is it to speak of love
Nor to be silent when it all consumes!

You do not know how everywhere I go
You go with me clasped in my memory:
One night I dreamed we walked beside the sea
And tasted freedom underneath the moon.

Do not be late needed and wanted love
What's withheld blights both love itself and us:
As well as blame your hair for blowing wind
As me for breathing, living, loving you.

Martin Carter
(circa 1970s)


-3-




KYK # 44


THE POEMS MAN

Look, look, she cried, the poems man,
running across the frail bridge
of her innocence. Into what house
will she go? Into what guilt will
that bridge lead? I
the man she called out at
and she, hardly twelve
meet in the middle, she going
her way; I coming from mine:
The middle where we meet
is not the place to stop.

Martin Carter
(circa 1960s)


-4-




KYK # 44


ACROSS THE EDITOR'S DESK

A Martin Carter Prose Sampler

This special issue of Kyk-Over-Al is deeply indebted to Nigel Westmaas
for his dedicated work of research and editing in preparing this special issue
devoted principally to prose works by Martin Carter. Mr.Westmaas has spent
countless hours delving into the archives to find, so far, ninety nine examples
of Martin Carter's prose. Of these he has chosen forty as a sample to appear
in this issue. If it had not been for Mr. Westmaas' work and his initiative this
invaluable evidence of another dimension in the creative life of a great poet
would hardly have come to light. He has rendered a great service to Guyanese
and West Indian literature and scholarship.
This issue also owes a considerable debt to Vanda Radzik of Red Thread.
She is responsible for the design and layout of this issue, for organising the
illustrations, and in general for shepherding the issue through all its prepara-
tory stages into print. The seriousness of her commitment is exceeded only by
the quality of her work.


Derek Walcott's Nobel Prize

When I heard the news that Derek Walcott had won the Nobel prize for
literature I sat down and wrote the following out of profound delight:

All West Indians will be celebrating DerekWalcott's winning of
the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is an immense honour by far the
world's most prestigious literary prize. It is a measure of Walcott's
stature as a poet that not only does the Prize honour him, but he also
greatly honours the Prize. It is also a measure of the strength of our
literature that there were two other West Indians contending closely
for the world's greatest literary honour V.S. Naipaul of Trinidad &
Tobago and Guyana's Wilson Harris. But Walcott has won and all
West Indians should celebrate. It is the literary equivalent of being
world champions in cricket. I felt jubilant this morning when I heard




KYK # 44


the news and the sun seemed brighter than normal and the trees
greener. And I spared a thought, as I heard the news, forWalcott's old
mentors, Frank Collymore of Barbados and Arthur Seymour of
Guyana, who way back in the 1940s gave Walcott his first chance in
their magazines. They must be drinking a toast now in the Elysian
fields.
It is astonishing to think that Derek Walcott has been writing and
publishing poems since the 1940s. His work seems so immortally
young. I remember when I was a schoolboy reading in BIM the
poems As John to Patmos and A City's Death by Fire, written when
he was still in his teens, and knew as I knew it also when I saw Frank
Worrell late cut Lance Pierre at the Queen's Park Oval that here was
genius.

As John to Patmos, in each love-leaping air,
0 slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear
What I swear now, as John did:
To praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead.

Over the years which have since cascaded through all our
histories he has created for us a special poetic domain, "independent
of the tradition he inherited, yet not altogether orphaned from it." He
belongs to us and to the world through his absolute mastery of words
which has increased and increased and increased the singing lines
emerging, as it was said of Mozart's music, as if an artery was cut and
the flow of the life-blood could not be stopped.
In 1992 Derek Walcott, from small St. Lucia, has become a
towering figure in world literature. Joseph Brodsky, the Russian
Nobel Laureate, has called him the best poet writing in English.
There has been awed acclaim, worldwide, for his full-length narra-
tive poem Omeros; "filtering all sorts of titanic sorrows through a
limpid and ferocious intellect." Walcott himself says of Omeros:

I wrote it primarily for the Caribbean. For me it was
an act of gratitude for St. Lucia, the people, the weather,
the life I have lived there.

And thus, as ithas always been, genius finds universality in lives
and places remote from any mainstream or central points of history.
What will he do next to astonish us? As Edward Baugh of
Jamaica said not long ago, we cannot guess what port his poetic craft
will put into next we must leave him voyaging still, the words of


-6-




KYK # 44


Shabine, the red-nigger mariner-poet of The Schooner Flight beat-
ing in our ears:

I have only one theme:
The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart.

Permission has been sought from the Nobel Foundation to reproduce
Derek Walcott's Nobel lecture in a future issue of Kyk-Over-Al. In a way
every issue of Kyk-Over-Al which has gone before will have been waiting for
such an event.


Poetry and the President

Politics is for now, literature lasts forever but even so we cannot resist
taking note of the elections held on 5th October, 1992, which were vouched
for as essentially honest by a large assembly of observers and which therefore
brought to office at last a Government agreed by all to be popularly returned
and democratically based.
A few days after his inauguration the President, Dr. Cheddi Jagan,
surprised many by finding time to attend readings on October 15th, World
Poetry Day. The following records that event:

World Poetry Day, 15th October, was celebrated in Georgetown
with readings given by a number of Guyanese poets at the Playhouse,
a small theatre in the heart of Georgetown. The opportunity was
taken also to read from the works of Derek Walcott whose winning
of the 1992 Noel Prize for Literature has been greatly acclaimed in
Guyana as no doubt it has been in the rest of the West Indies.
The theatre was packed for the occasion with not enough seats
available and people standing in the aisles and wings. In the last few
years there has been an increasing number of poetry readings in
Georgetown and the numbers attending have been growing impres-
sively.
Dr. Cheddi Jagan, sworn in as President of Guyana only a ew
days previously, paid a surprise visit to the Playhouse to attend the
readings. He was given a warm and appreciative welcome. He was
accompanied by the new Minister of Education and Cultural Devel-
opment, Dr. Dale Bisnauth. It was an unexpected boost from
officialdom for those who love literature and the arts.

Among those reading were young playwright/actress/singer Paloma


-7-




KYK# 44


Mohamed, performance poet Ras Michael and story-teller Michael Khan,
poet and novelist Ian McDonald, distinguished critic and playwright Dr.
Michael Gilkes and poet and playwright Churaumanie Bissundyal. In honour
of Derek Walcott, Dr. Gilkes gave a memorable reading from Walcott's great
poem. The Schooner Flight with its famous line challenging all West Indians
to choose what they will be:

and either I'm nobody, or I am a nation.

When President Jagan was leaving a young lady approached and touched
him on the arm. "Mr. President, thank you for coming. I hope you can release
the creative energy of all of us in Guyana." The President turned and looked
a little surprised. Then he smiled and nodded. It was a good moment on a good
evening.


What is a Poet?

In Stephen Gill's excellent biography of William Wordsworth (Oxford
University Press, 1990), there is a passage which brings home vividly the
source and purpose of poetry at its best.
In the Spring of 1802 he prepared a new copy for the Preface to
the Lyrical Ballads, third edition, changing the 1800 one so substan-
tially the two Prefaces ought always to be treated as separate. He
wrote at length on metre and put in an Appendix a defence of his
assertions about "that what is usually called poetic diction." More
remarkable than either of these additions, however, is the answer
Wordsworth gives to his own question: "what is meant by the word
Poet? What is a Poet?"

He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with
more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a
greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul
than are supposed to be common among mankind; a manpleased with
his ownpassions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men
in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar
volitionsandpassions as manifested in the goings-on ofthe Universe,
and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them...

Unlike the biographer or the historian, the poet need acknowl-
edge only one overriding imperative that he should give pleasure.
But "this necessity of producing immediate pleasure is not a degra-


-8-




KYK # 44


dation of the Poet's art:"

It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the
universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere, because it is not
formal, but indirect: it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the
world in the spirit of love:further, it is a homage paid to the native
and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of
pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.

Finally, with the grandeur matched only by Shelly in his Defence of
Poetry, Wordsworth defines his "sublime notion" of Poetry as the "breath and
finer spirit of all knowledge" and of the Poet as:

The rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and pre-
server, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite
of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws
and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things
violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowl-
edge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole
earth, and over all time. The objects of the Poet's thoughts are
everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his
favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an
atmosphere ofsensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first
and last of all knowledge it is as immortal as the heart of man.

This is a glorious affirmation, but an astonishing one to make at
the close of the Enlightenment and of the first phase of the Industrial
Revolution. Scientists and engineers, philosophers and political
thinkers, philanthropists and social activists had transformed every
aspect of life from cups and saucers to concepts of Deity, and yet it
is poetry which Wordsworth declares" the most philosophic of all
writing." This is more than a declaration of the importance of humane
learning, more than an assertion of the imagination against the
pressure of a sceptical, scientific, or utilitarian ethos. Wordsworth
confers upon the poet the roles of chronicler and preserver, of
comforter and moral guide, of prophet and mediator. His reference
to the "divine spirit" of the poet is not a lazy one. To the author of The
Dunciad such exalted affirmations would have seemed ravings.
Johnson, who defined the poet as "An inventor; an author of fiction;
a writer of poems; one who writes in measure", would have thought
them nonsense, probably blasphemous nonsense. Even readers
accustomed to place poetry at the highest of the literary arts and


-9-




KYK # 44


familiar with the many eighteenth-century disquisitions on the
theory of poetry could not have been prepared for the sublime and
comprehensive credo Wordsworth published in June 1802.


Publications

Publications of interest to West Indians are received across this desk in
an unending flow. They all deserve notice and many of them deserve
substantial commentary and review. One of the weaknesses of West Indian
literary life is the dearth of carefully considered and finely wrought reviews
of individual books and magazines of importance. Where would these appear
with any regularity? When will we graduate to anything beginning to approach
the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Times
Literary Supplement or even the better weekend supplements in the Metro-
politan newspapers?
Here is a sample of the scores of interesting West Indian publications
received recently which we would have wished to have reviewed with the
substance and style they deserve.
The 50th anniversary issue of BIM, edited in chief by John Wickham.
This, surely, is compulsory purchase for any self-respecting West Indian's
library.
Anyone at all interested in West Indian art and literature must make the
effort to get hold of copies of the Callalloo special issues, Volume 15 Nos. 2
and 3, on the literature and culture of Haiti. Callalloo is a journal of African
American and African arts and letters edited by Charles Rowell (Department
of English, Wilson Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903,
USA) and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. These two issues
there are really two full-scale books are superlatively produced and full of
astonishing creative endeavour. Look what treasures are near at hand and we
hardly know them.
Wasafiri No. 16, Autumn 1992, is a special issue of this magazine,
published by ATCAL Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African,
Asian and Associated Literatures and edited by Susheila Nasta (P.O. Box
195, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7XB, UK) devoted to the Caribbean. The issue
is "dedicated to the wealth of excellent writing that continues to come out of
the Caribbean." Amidst a great deal more, this issue includes extremely
interesting interviews with Kamau Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Jamaica
Kincaid, Ramchand's article Columbus in Chains, Michael Gilkes writing on
the poetry of Robert Lee, and Fred D'Aguiar's long and extraordinary poem
1492.
One of the most important books we received is undoubtedly Anne


-10-




KYK # 44


Walmsley's The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966-72 (New Beacon Books,
1992). There is an excellent review of it by Stewart Brown in Wasafiri No.
16, and we wholeheartedly concur with his concluding remark : "For
everyone engaged in the study of contemporary Caribbean culture in its
broadest sense this book is an invaluable and indispensable source."
Poetry in the Caribbean is vibrantly alive if one is to judge by what must
surely be a record number of anthologies appearing recently.
Issue No. 14, Spring 1991, of the Graham House Review (Published by
the Colgate University Press, Box 5000, Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y
13346, USA) is a special issue featuring recent poetry from the West Indies,
guest-edited by Kenneth Ramchand.
Crossing Water, published in 1992 by The Greenfield Review Press (2
Middle Grove Road, Greenfield Centre, N.Y 12833, USA) and edited by
Anthony Kellman, is a very fine collection of contemporary poetry from the
English-speaking Caribbean.
The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry published in 1992 by
Heinemann (Halley Court, Jordan Hill, Oxford, OX2 8EJ, UK) and edited by
Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald. The editors in their Introduction, writing
about their attempt to meet the publisher's brief to make a selection from
"simply the best", had this to say:

After all the worrying and wrangling over the selection, we do
believe that this anthology offers its readers a real sense of the
energy, variety and accomplishment of contemporary West Indian
poetry.

Issue No. 9 of Offerings, edited and published by Kampta Karran (Bel
Vue Pilot Scheme, West Bank Demerara, Guyana) is a valuable "Celebration
of Guyanese East Indian Poets 1901 1991." It is an anthology of the poems
of 83 different poets of diverse backgrounds and from very different eras. It
is an extremely useful introduction to the poetry of East Indians in Guyana,
whose work is often neglected in writing about West Indian literature.
Perhaps my favourite among all the anthologies which have crossed this
desk in recent times is the Special issue, Volume 35, No. 4, Summer 1992, of
The Literary Review (285 Madison Avenue, Madison N.J. 0794" USA),
devoted to the poetry of women poets of the Caribbean (all, not just the
English-speaking, Caribbean). The issue is guest-edited by Pam Mordecai and
Betty Wilson and they have done a wonderful job. All the poets in this
collection havehad (some are now dead) a home in the Caribbean.. Their work
jumps from these pages cascadingly alive with beauty and sadness and vivid
involvement with life at the grass roots.


-11-




KYK # 44





The Guyana Prize

Feature Address:
His Excellency Dr. Cheddi Jagan
President of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana

Distinguished Guests, Chairman of the Committee for the Guyana Prize
for Literature, Guyanese Writers, Chancellor of the University, Vice-Chan-
cellor, Faculty Heads and Staff Members of the Diplomatic Corps, Leader of
the Opposition, Overseas Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.
This evening I am enormously honoured to be here and to address you on
this important occasion of the Third Award Ceremony of the Guyana Prize for
Literature.
As we arrive at the threshold of change in our homeland, after a long and
arduous struggle, our most urgent question is: what resources can we draw on
in the rebuilding of our country, in the remoulding of the values and
perceptions necessary for the task ahead and in the fostering of a truly national
consciousness. There is a new dawn in our sky and how can we, as a people,
seize upon the possibilities it offers? How do we aspire to debunk our past
experiences and embark upon new beginnings?
Today, in Guyana, a land rich in natural resources, the stark paradox is
the undeniable presence of poverty among the vast majority of our people, not
just economic poverty, but intellectual and spiritual impoverishment, the
deprivation and depravation of our young women, generations of human
potential wasted through oppression, repression and lack of opportunity at
various levels. Translated into facts and figures, today, in this country, at the
most fundamental level, only one out of every seven students can obtain a good
grade in English at the CXC examinations, while only one in every six can pass
mathematics with an acceptable grade, and so on. Infant mortality rate is at
an unprecedented high, the highest in the region, standing at forty-five out of
every thousand, while disease (such as malaria) is devastating our rural and
aboriginal populations. Our present daily minimum wage is approximately
one US dollar per day; all the while the country has been haemorrhaging from
a brain drain by virtue of the exodus of our vital human resource.
We have to find the road to self-recovery from the onslaught of colonial-
ism, from our more recent experiences and from the cultural penetration
brought to us through the little TV boxes in our living rooms. We have to get
in touch with ourselves as people and plumb the depths of our consciousness
to find our native strengths, reject the discourses thathave labelled us as racial


-12-




KYK # 44


and cultural stereotypes and seek freedom from the shackles of our past. As
one regional writer said, where there is nothing, there is everything to create.
What is the role of the Guyanese writer in this pledge we havejust taken?
What is the relevance of art in the pursuit of daily life?...This is why I am
pleased to be here today to share this moment with the writers whose works
have been submitted for the Guyana Prize for Literature because the Guyanese
writer has a major role to play in the rebuilding of our society. Together with
the capacity for thought and reason, man's most valuable, powerful asset is
his imagination and, consequently, his creative application of knowledge and
his creative reconciliation of land and landscape. George Lamming, speaking
at CARIFESTA 1982, on the importance of the creative imagination, said: "it
functions as a civilizing andhumanising force in process of struggle. It offers
an experience through which feeling is educated...The education of feeling
must be at the heart of any struggle for liberation."
For the past forty years I have been close to the working man. Based on
this affinity I want to relay an observation which I think our writers may find
it necessary to consider. People engaged in the arts must see themselves as part
of the development process and relate to all other sections of the population.
This morning, Ian McDonald, over Viewpoint, said this exercise is not for the
purpose toproduce the best literaturein the world- it is an exercise to enhance
our abilities to communicate. I agree. We have to communicate in such a way
that at the end of the day all your creativity would have been purposeful. All
your work should be able to reflect itself in the daily lives of actual people.
This is why it is most important for our young students, in the most
formative years of psycho-social growth and the acquiring of self-knowledge,
to gain a good grounding of the issues addressed in imaginative writing.
Education is not just giving each child a free place in school. It is the material
that comes out of that crucible that forms the fabric of our society, the
perceptions that are born in that process, the inculcation of positive values, to
promote, above all, honesty in human relationships and the ability to recognize
and address, rather than to be clouded by, situations which are inimical to
personal, national and regional growth. Very often, the most perceptive
insights into the human condition are contained in fiction and it is through its
literary parallels and analogies that we can recognize the quirks of human
nature and society and come to terms with our own identity problems; we can
learn how to rid ourselves of inherited and inbred prejudices in our common
pursuit of one destiny.
For those who will be awarded prizes tonight, my warmest congratula-
tions to you and, at all events, I want to encourage our writers who have not
won prizes, not be discouraged but to continue to be the voice, the vision and
the conscience of our people. You have a pivotal role to play in the revolution
of consciousness now crucial to the rebuilding of this country. Itis imperative


-13-




KYK # 44


that we allow our imagination to seek new creative possibilities of the El
Dorado dream. I applaud the spirit of your undertakings and re-assert the
promise made in the PPP/Civic Manifesto that this government will give even
more for the development of the creative abilities of our people.
I thank you.


The Judges' Report : Mark McWatt

Chairman, Your Excellency the President of Guyana Honourable Prime
Minister, Honourable Mr. Desmond Hoyte, Ministers of Government, Mem-
bers of the Diplomatic Corps, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is an honour and a privilege to be here tonight to participate in this
celebration of the Literary arts and recognition of those whose literary talent,
skill and careful craft have caused them to be singled out among Guyanese
writers for this year's award of the Guyana Prize.
I am also grateful for the opportunity to present this report on behalf of
my distinguished fellow judges. These were Dr. Denis Williams, Guyanese
author, artist and anthropologist and Director of the Walter Roth Museum; Dr.
Carolyn Cooper, senior lecturer in English at the Mona, Jamaica campus of
the University of the West Indies; Mr. Alim Hosein, lecturer in English at the
University of Guyana and Dr. Stewart Brown, senior lecturer at the Institute
of West African studies at the University of Birmingham. Unfortunately Dr.
Carolyn Cooper could not attend the adjudicating sessions in person, but we
were able to have discussions with her, via telephone, at her home in Mona,
Jamaica. Despite these long-distance consultations the work of the judges
proceeded with despatch and we were able to reach unanimous decisions
about short-lists and eventual winners without lengthy or embattled debate.
On behalf of the Judges I must express our gratitude to the chairman of the
management committee of the Guyana prize, Vice Chancellor Professor
Dennis Craig, for providing all that was necessary for the smooth progress of
the judging exercise.
The Guyana prize has grown in stature and recognition over recent years
and is viewed with wistfulness or perhaps even envy particularly by young
writers in other parts of the Caribbean. This confirms the value of the prize for
the Guyanese writer and society and vindicates the original decision to
institute it at a time of scarce resources. Mindful of all this the judges were
determined to preserve the criterion of excellence as they approached the
forty-three entries in this the third series of awards of the Guyana Prize.
Forty-three entries in the three genres of poetry, drama and prose fiction:
It was a lot of reading! But very rewarding reading; for a Guyanese it was an
exercise of recognition or self-recognition. Having to read these works in a


-14-




KYK # 44


relatively short span of time left a particularly vivid impression of people and
place, of the multiple textures of the lives lived in this country and, at the same
time, a confirmation of an undefinable, but definite common vision or quality
of mind what Jeffrey Robinson has called "the Guyaneseness of Guyana
Literature." In this sense the number and the variety of the entries indicate that
literature is alive and in robust good health here in Guyana; this is not to say,
however, that all entries were of the highest literary quality. There were a few
in each category that achieved excellence and could comfortably be short
listed; there were several which, while not making it into the short lists,
showed promise or potential or were good, solidly entertaining works of which
no author need be ashamed; but there were also several that were weak.
The genre with the largest number of weak entries was poetry, and it is
significant that this is also the genre in which there was the largest number of
entries which were "untested" in the sense that they were self-published works.
They had not undergone the trial by fire of public performance, as would have
been the case with most of the plays; nor were they subjected to the careful
scrutiny and possible revision attendant upon commercial publication. Some
collections were slight, some indulgent, some obscure; but the most common
fault in the weaker entries was the fact that they were insufficiently crafted-
not enough time and thought and work went into their production.
For support in this last point I turn to no less an authority on the making
of poetry than Derek Walcott the first West Indian writer to be awarded the
Nobel prize for Literature. The craft of writing has been an obsession with
Walcott since his youth in St Lucia at high school, and in a recent interview
he denounces the impatience with craft in the young writers of regions such
as ours:

...the most upsetting delusion that emerging literatures or
cultures have is that the word craft is an antagonistic concept... (it is)
in the apprenticeship stage you can really judge person as an artist.
There's no apprenticeship around, there's instant recognition, in-
stant belligerence, instant arrogance. It's very dangerous...people
don't realize how they're being trapped into a universal idea of what
the latest fashion should be.

These tough words from Walcott are not offered here as a stick with which
to beat the young writers of Guyana, but rather as an indication from someone
who should know of the dangers we court when we neglect to put in the full
quota of those lonely hours of unglamorous and repetitive spadework that are
necessary in the practice of all the creative arts. Unless he's convinced he's
transcribing the words of God, a writer must revise and revise, and resist the
seduction of his own written words. It is seldom the case that anything good


-15-





KYK # 44


is lost in the revision of a poem or a story; and even if he has to cut out a
favourite passage or scene, unless he's terminally ill, there's every chance he'll
be able to use it in a future poem, novel, play. A writer mustbe hard on himself:
Walcott served a long and arduous apprenticeship in order to become a poet
in English; this meant (in his own words): "nothing less than ranging over the
entire corpus of English poetry, learning the technical variety of different
epochs and movements..." Hard work, but look where it got him.
But I begin to run the risk of usurping the office of those who are here
tonight to make speeches about literature. My function is merely to report on
the judges' decisions, so let me turn to the short-lists.
The three collections of poetry short-listed were all different in focus and
texture; Season of Sometimes, by Marc Matthews is a mature and accom-
plished collection of the kind of highly wrought poems we expect of him, one
hears the distinctive voice of this great performer of poetry in these works of
wry and serious social comment. Courida Elegies by Sardar Asare is a
collection of poems on an impressive range of subjects and full of echoes of
different voices and languages. The poet has made use of his vast experience
of foreign lands and tongues to create a fabric composed of different textures
of lived experience. Not all the fragments cohere, however, in a unified vision
or aesthetic experience.
The third short-listed collection isEssequibo, by Ian McDonald, in which
one part of the Guyanese landscape, the lower reaches of the Essequibo River,
are hallowed and claimed by the creative imagination in some truly fine
poems. The river itself is a powerful, unifying presence in the collection and
becomes almost a character in several individual pieces. The riverain land-
scape is described with considerable evocative power in day and night and in
several of its different "moods". It bears historical vestiges of past settlement
and cultivation, suggestions of mystery and menace and the traffic of ordinary
humanity; it is the scene of heroic actions by fabled characters; it is the text
in which one reads the fate of a continent and its peoples. The voice in most
of these poems is quiet, but mature and unfaltering, and breathes a kind of
grandeur into the relationship between man and river.
The judges found that there was much to commend among the entries in
drama. It was quite clear and somewhat surprising for those of us who don't
live here that there is a robust and thriving popular theatre in Guyana, which,
despite the sameness of theme and subject, has reached, in the hands of some
playwrights, a great technical sophistication. Harold Bascom's Philbert and
Loraine was the best of the plays of this type, centred around the home and
complicated domestic relationships. The play is well-written and makes
excellent use of the resources of the theatre. A Pleasant Career, by Michael
Gilkes, is a play involving the life and fiction of Edgar Mittelholzer. Through
several interesting devices and techniques television interviews, childhood


- 16-




KYK # 44


conversations, ghostly presence, the enactment of scenes from the novels -
a compelling psychological portrait of Mittelholzer emerges, amidst multiple
echoes (for the cognoscenti) from the novels and the autobiography.
Children of Two Worlds, by Jay Bunyan is a hard-hitting play by a
Canada-based Guyanese playwright about identity crises that cause the
disintegration of a mixed-race family of Guyanese origin living in Toronto.
Though the play's tough language sometimes seems overdone and might ring
false to the Guyanese ear, it contributes to the impression of power and the
profound feeling that the play's conflicts evoke. The Eleventh Hour, by Harry
Narain, apart from being a suspense-filled thriller about a frantic attempt to
save a man convicted of murder in the last hours before his scheduled
execution, raises philosophical questions about the death penalty and about
parental neglect as the cause of criminal behaviour. The actual writing may
be crude in parts, but the plot and the superb sense of theatre recommend Harry
Narain as an important new playwright.
The works short-listed for fiction were Steadman and Joanna, a novel
by Beryl Gilmore set in 18th- century Surinam about a white European man
and the slave girl he married. The events of this very interesting and unusual
novel take place in the Corentyne/Canje area at the time when the foundations
of Guyanese history were being laid there. The Crying ofRainbirds, by Noel
Williams, is a collection of finely crafted stories presenting a jaundiced view
of life on a tourist-infested Caribbean Island. Guyanese fiction and several of
the writers that produce it continue to be well served by Peepal Tree Press,
which published Williams' novel as well as the next one on the short-list,
Janjhat, by Rooplal Monar. Monar, previous winner of the GuyanaPrize and
an acclaimed master of short fiction, is here venturing into the world of the
novel; his keen observation and mastery of dialect are much in evidence,
although the novel seems to give way to a sermon towards the end.
Finally, there is The Intended, by David Dabydeen, on one level a
marvellous tale of two places Guyana's Corentyne coast and the London of
the West Indian Immigrant; there are other levels, however, in this richly
suggestive novel: there is the complex question of origin and identity as the
Guyanese Indian protagonist finds himself in London among immigrants of
his own race, but from the sub-continent, and who speak languages he does
not understand. At the same time he is rejected by the English, whose
language, customs and racist hostility he understands only too well. The
Intended is a novel that is cunningly aware of contemporary literary theory
and all the shibboleths of post-colonialism and deconstruction, and, on one
level, is playing to this particular gallery. This is a very impressive achieve-
ment for a first novel.
Those are the short-lists anditmustbe stressed that each short-listed work
was judged to be worthy of receiving the prize in its particular category it


- 17-





KYK # 44


was simply a matter of choosing the best in each case. As it happened the
judges had no great difficulty in separating the prize-winners from the others.
In poetry it was the decision of the judges that there was no work that
merited the prize for first book of poetry, so there is only one prize awarded
in this category: I am delighted to announce that the Guyana prize for Poetry
goes to Ian McDonald for Essequibo.
Next, I announce with great pleasure that the Guyana prize for Drama is
awarded to Michael Gilkes for his play A Pleasant Career.
In fiction the judges again found that, once the winner of the Guyana Prize
for Fiction was decided, there remained no work of sufficient merit in the
category of first book of fiction to be awarded the prize. The judges felt,
however, that a case should be made for the award of a special prize for
historical fiction to be given to Beryl Gilroy for her interesting and original
novel, Steadman and Joanna. This case was made and agreed, and it is
therefore my pleasure to announce the award of a special prize to Beryl
Gilmore for Steadman and Joanna.
We come finally to the Guyana Prize for Fiction. It is a great honour for
me to declare the winner of the Guyana Prize for Fiction David Dabydeen for
The Intended.
Ladies and gentlemen, I feel greatly honoured to have been appointed
chairman of the judges; I was very impressed by the quality of the works that
were short-listed and I regret that it is not possible for all of them to be awarded
prizes. I am satisfied that the winners chosen are writers of the greatest
distinction, and I look forward to reading future works by them. I remind those
who did not win that now is the time to start writing the works that will be
entered for the next Guyana prize.
I thank you very much.


ACCEPTANCE SPEECH: Michael Gilkes

Mr. Chairman, your Excellency, the President of Guyana, Ministers of
Government, Members of the Diplomatic Corps. Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
I feel deeply honoured tonight. Not only because it is always reassuring
to have one's work selected for a prize: a kind of public endorsement of one's
private vision, but also because it is the Guyana Prize.
As we've heard, there were nearly 50 entries. The number has grown every
year. The competition has certainly provided an important impetus a focus -
for the literary arts in Guyana.
Guyanese and their governments, in good times and bad, have demon-
strated a healthy regard for the arts. The works of our established writers and


-18-




KYK # 44


artists (Martin Carter, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew, Roy Heath, Aubrey Wil-
liams, Denis Williams, Ian McDonald, Stanley Greaves, Philip Moore, Ken
Corsbie, Henry Mootoo to name only some of the best known) are highly
respected and appreciated wherever in the world they are read, seen or
performed. But they do not exist in a vacuum: There is a thread of continuity
running through the arts. Today's younger Guyanese writers and artists
(whether they know it or not), owe something to the work done by other,
established figures. Those figures, in turn, owe something to the ground work
of earlypioneers like Edgar Mittelholzer, Arthur Seymour, Edward Burrowes,
Norman Cameron and others. The artist may be a lonely figure, but never a
loner, a Crusoe startled by strange footprints. He or she is part of a community
of souls: Art is a continuum.
So, in receiving a prize for my play on the life and fictions of Edgar
Mittelholzer, I feel that it is Mittelholzer's spirit, his uncompromising
commitment to his art, that is really being honoured. And that is as it should
be.
I'm especially happy that, in spite of Guyana's troubled political history,
our fall from admired standards of social, intellectual and economic life, a
high regard for the Arts of the Imagination has (like our Guyanese hospitality,
stubbornly survived. Guyana has always welcomed the arts, ever since those
early artists' associations the Assembly Rooms, the dramatic clubs, the
Theatre Guild, the Working People's art groups, the little magazines and
journals like Caribia, the Chronicle Xmas Annual (soon to be re-issued, I'm
glad to hear) and of course, Kyk-Over-Al. Through that first remarkable
Carifesta the brainchild of Mr. Forbes Burnham an event still talked about
(21 years later) with misty-eyed nostalgia by our Caricom cousins (and an
event still to be paid for it is wickedly rumoured by less friendly Regional
neighbours) to the present Guyana Prize, instituted by former President Mr.
Desmond Hoyte, who, I'm reliably informed, can quote Wilson Harris's
poetry, from memory a feat Harris scholars might well envy Guyana has
remained a country where the arts have always been respected, encouraged,
and enjoyed.
President Jagan and Mrs. Jagan have always been enthusiastic supporters
of the Arts. I still have a newspaper clipping of Mrs Jagan's critical review of
a Theatre Guild Production in the late 70s. Hers was easily the most informed,
the most lucid and the fairest of the reviews on that occasion. Recently, at a
public reading at the Playhouse on World Poetry Day, President Jagan paid
a surprise visit, well, it was unexpected, but no surprise to those of us who
know of his keen interest in the arts. There is a report of this visit in the latest
edition of our Regional newspaper, Caribbean Week, by Ian McDonald. This
is how it ends:
When President Jagan was leaving, a young lady approached


- 19-




KYK # 44


and touched him on the arm. "Mr. President, thank you for coming.
I hope you can release the creative energy ofall ofus." The President
turned and looked a little surprised. Then he smiled and nodded. It
was a good moment on a good evening.

This may be a good moment, on another good evening, to echo that young
lady's bold-faced but right request. And judging from our President's address
tonight, I think the answer is in the affirmative. But if there has been respect
for the Arts there has also been neglect. This splendid Cultural Centre, for
example, the envy of many of our richer Caricom neighbours, has fallen into
disrepair. This, and other cultural and theatre spaces urgently need mainte-
nance, equipment, major repair or re-construction. Without these, even the
most vigorous and dedicated management will remain a downhill struggle.
Any attempt to provide what's needed, whether privately or publicly funded
(or both) would, I suggest, be an important investment in ourhuman resources,
in the creative potential and development of young Guyanese in particular,
who to their immense credit have themselves helped to keep these cultural
centres alive in difficult times. A popular theatre has sprung up with all the
inevitable, attendant pleasures and problems that that implies. But the talent
and skills needed for the maintenance of high standards, for the training of
young people, for the release of their creative energies, already exists. A solid
framework; well-equipped, well-managed cultural and theatre spaces is all
that is needed.
I must, however, confess to a certain bias. I believe that the Theatre Arts
(Drama, Dance and Music), offer the widest scope for the development of a
use of personal confidence and social responsibility. A strong theatre
movement, supported with services (if not with subventions) would, I submit,
not only enhance our educational, cultural and social climate, but also
encourage personal and national pride through the training, development and
exercise of creative talent for social consciousness. Theatre is, after all, a
community art, requiring all the available skills, employing all the disciplines,
including literature, helping a society to understand itself.
The value of the Arts, as a whole, in promoting Regional thinking, is
inestimable. Even as talk of Regional integration grows louder the artists and
writers of the Region continue to demonstrate as they have for decades, the
reality of Regional Consciousness. Derek Walcott's Nobel Award is not only
the most prestigious prize available for literature it is also more importantly
- the clearest most public acknowledgment of the power and vision of the
Caribbean Consciousness.
For it is Derek's cross-cultural vision, his creole eye, his Janus style which
cuts across racial and cultural barriers an approach which marries classical
and creole, white and black, dialect and standard, craft and caring, that makes


-20-




KYK # 44


his work original and great. His is a heterogenous Caribbean identity (shared
by many of our remarkable artists and writers) which powers his work: the
result of a long apprenticeship andpatientmarinading in the cultural diversity
of the Caribbean basin. That cultural diversity is nowhere more demonstrable
than here in Guyana, and it remains our greatest resource: an enormous,
creative potential: the real gold of El Dorado.
The Guyana Prize for Literature, therefore, though it is a national award
(and that gives it a special, personal value) has deeper resonances. It is also
an occasion for celebrating the challenge of the Arts of the Imagination as a
measure of community the cultural life blood of the Regional body politic,
whose health it is the business of us all to safeguard and promote.
So, it is with a keen sense of occasion, and with the greatest pleasure that
we, theprize winners, accept with thanks the awards you havemade to us here,
tonight


-21-










.THE HOUTHE HEN O1F OCR TIfHEWE ARE
THE HOE OA1 WHE rs.










A H1~*t~ &4z~e4 P~d4e




KYK # 44



S Contents



Introduction............................................. ............................ 27
A Free Community of Valid Persons......................................... 30

Fiction
M accabee at Sea...................................... ............. 33
Out, Out the Fire.............................. .................... 36

Selected Articles/Editorials from Thunder
Non-Co-operation............................ ....................... 43
An American Oracle............................................... 45
Politics and The Individual....................... ...... ................ 49
No Separate Salvation ................................ ....................50
What is a Politician..................... ... ...........................52
Portrait of Churchill................... ... ..........................55
A Dark Foundation.................. ... .......................... 57
From Babylonian to British........................ ...... ............... 60
Bribes for What?................. ... ...........................62
Our Newspapers and What They Stand For..............................64
Hamlet........................... ....................66
This Race Business.......................... ................... 68
But Where is Burnham?............................. .................... 70
Wanted: A Great Obeah Man.................... ..................72
W here A re the H eroes?............................... ......................... 74

Other Newspaper Articles
Sensibility and the Search....................... ..................... 77
Recent Events Spring from Deeper Social Undercurrents..........82
If a Man Lies to Himself The World Will Lie to Him.................84
Open Letter to the People of Guyana.......................................88
A Note on Jagan....................................... ..................... 90


-25-





KYK # 44





Essays/Features in Journals/Magazines
A Note on Vic Reid's New Day.................................................93
Power Race and Trouble...................................................95
Why Guiana Needs Independence......................................97
Sambo at Large ....................................................... 100
Apart From Both.................................................................... 102
A Religious Interpretation of Guyanese Proverbs..................... 105
The Location of the Artist................................................... 111



Addresses/Speeches
Question of Fiji............................ ......................114
The Freedom to Choose........................... ..................... 118
The Changing Context of Arts and Artists in Guyana Today.....122

Notes on Artists
Artist as Artist....................................................... 128
The Paintings of Stanley Greaves.................................129
The Poems of Christopher Aird.............................................. 130
The Paintings of Bernadette Persaud....................................... 131

Interviews
In Contradiction.......................................... ..................... 133
On the Reality of Independence........................................... 142
Interview with Martin Carter by Peter Trevis......................... 145
Bibliography............................................ ................................... 152


-26-




KYK # 44









Introduction
Nigel Westmaas


In his foreword to the 1989 publication of Martin Carter's Selected
Poems, Ian McDonald wrote:

...He is also, without reservation, one of the finest poets to have
emerged in the Caribbean Region. And the varied subtlety and
strength of his poetry carries him without any doubt into the front
rank ofworldpoets. Long afterthe politics whichprompteda number
ofhispoems have been forgotten and long after the society which he
so often scathingly indicted has been "changed utterly ", the poetry
will continue to strike a chord among new generations.

The same chord will be struck among readers far andnear with this special
issue of Kyk-Over-Al which unveils for the first time, a collection of Martin
Carter's prose.
The invitation to co-edit this special issue with Ian McDonald was a great
honour. Working with him and Vanda Radzik on the issue enabled me a close
look at how much work is involved in producing the evergreen and valiant
"Kyk". The accumulation of these pieces and the overall collection was the
result of many years of random then serious collection. The piece that heads
this section A Free Community of Valid Persons was my original inspiration
in the quest for Martin Carter's prose. It stands as the touchstone for The
Martin Carter Prose Sampler offered here which we hope to be widely
circulated within and beyond the confines of this country.
Martin Carter has subjected the society in which he lives to deep, varied
and often unnoticed study over the years. In more recent times, tempered some
say by an inner censorship, Carter has not volunteered new public work. But
what is consistent with and connects the prose of earlier days and the rare
public presentations in whatever form, of the present, has been an unyielding
depth of approach to whatever subject he turns his gaze on. That approach has
invariably focused on the "spiritual" condition of existence perhaps best
summed up if one can sum it up in a phrase, in his often cited belief that this
society is a victim of the "paralysis of the spirit" that has succeeded in


- 27 -




KYK # 44


producing as one consequence, an "aggregation of subsistence seekers."
Reviews, short stories, speeches, interviews, articles and editorials are all
included in the overall prose collection. Ninety nine known pieces have so far
been uncovered. No doubt there are many more waiting to be found. The
Guyana National Archives notwithstanding, all these valuable pieces were
discovered in institutions like the University of Guyana (UG) Library, the
National Library and a few from personal collections; for that matter all of the
places where Guyana's prose works can be located with relative ease.
Due to space, this special edition only contains a selection of his works.
From what might well be his very first piece of public prose a piece
written in the school magazine when he was president of the Queen's College
Beekeeping Society to more recent time Carter's prose has encompassed not
only a generation but has been firmly connected to his personal concerns as
student, as political activist, and later as apoet of distinction living in Guyana.
Consequently, his prose varies from his political insights in the Thunder
articles of the 1950s,to reflections on the state of art and literature, and even,
as in at least one case, his interpretation of the impact of television technology.
The depth and variety of workhereinmay well surprise many since Carter
is largely known as a poet and that Muse has brought forth a few volumes of
great poetry.
Carter's method of analysis of the political is no different from the way
he treats art and literature. All fall under a humanist truncheon and is spelt out
with extraordinary craft of language. The language flowing with such rhythm
and finesse of argument that one almost ventures to suggest that it is poetic
in form. One cautions "almost" since T.S. Eliot warns in 1933 in his Uses of
Poetry, "if poetry approaches too close to prose it ceases to move us in the
way we expect verse to move us and ...it tends to come under the dominance
of the logical, reasoning part of the brain."
In his treatment of the race question, an issue greatly bound up in the way
we live with each other, and a theme that he turns to again and again, Carter's
prose betrays deep concern that wounds of the psyche born in part of our
peculiar history and struggle, persist in varied form and hinders free develop-
ment of the personality. Throughout his varied examination of race and its
deformations and consequences, the same logic and humanism prevails.
Carter's prose presentations can appear complex and laden to audiences,
who are at times unsure of his drift and intent. But he forces thought and
speculation on their part.
After his memorable address at the UG convocation, A Free Community
of Valid Persons, Carter was asked about his reference to AXOLOTL
(biological creature) in the speech. The questioner enquired whether he was
speaking as a scientist. His reply was devastating, but typical. "You know one
day my eldest son came home and said that his friends asked,'Is your father


-28-




KYK # 44


a poet or a biologist?' I asked him, 'Would they know the difference?"'
And there is also an interesting story behind the article Wanted: A Great
Obeah Man. Written in Thunder in 1955 when he was an executive member
of the PPP, Carter was at the time defending his party from attacks from hither
and thither calling for great leaders to emerge to satisfy all and sundry -
sometimes required to perform opposite requests at the same time. The
columnists of the colonial press so intent on discrediting leaders of the day,
failed to recognize their own contradictions.
The article, in a fit of brilliant irony, requested a faith healer to help the
authorities create the miracles apparently required. Unfortunately for Carter,
the spirit of the article was taken to its literal extreme and soon after its
publication a man approached him at headquarters and introduced himself
with great confidence, "I is the man yuh want!"
Carter's political writing, as the foregoing anecdote illustrates, under-
scores the descriptive prowess evident in most of his work. Witness the
following which flowed from his pen from among the political pieces of the
fifties;
Subsisting on a diet of Hollywood films, true detective maga-
zines and other such trash; bounded on one side by the sugar estates,
and on the other by the waterfront, the people of the city are like
creatures in a cage. Pressed down into the mud under the weight of
a hopeless sky, thepeople live like ants in an ants nest, biting at each
other because there is nothing else for them to bite at. And when a
voice emerges out of all this muck all the little lap dogs bark infurious
excitement, defending the master, who from time to time will
administer a well aimed kick for remembrance.

So here is a Prose Sampler, a selection of writings from a master in the
field of language. Let us hope it can inspire passion and attention to method
now that so many submissions of new writing are coming forward for
publication and a Guyana Prize for Literature has been established As for
encouragement of young people in the arts and literature Carter warns in Kyk
of 1955,

...Encourage young composers or novelists? I am a' avs
worried by the word 'encourage'. Too often it means that with the
best intentions we praise what is third rate and omit to point out that
Art requires talent real talent and not mere literacy in any medium.
I see no substitute for passion, internally generated, and hard work.

The responsibility rests with us.


-29-




KYK # 44









A Free Community of Valid Persons
Address to the the University of Guyana's
Eighth Convocation Ceremony
October 19, 1974.


In the year 1865, in the Jardin des Plantes,in Paris an event of more than
ordinary biological,for biologists, but for us, symbolic significance occurred.
Certain creatures known by their Aztec name of AXOLOTL, long held to be
sexually mature adults, metamorphosed and took on what in the common
process of growth would have been their expected physiological configura-
tion.
Symbolically significant for us here is that these creatures, in their native
habitats in certain lakes in Mexico, attain sexual maturity in larval form, which
is aquatic, and apparently in that habitat never metamorphosed beyond that
form.
According to investigators of this phenomenon, the permanent aquatic
larval form of the creature it is terrestrial when completely metamorphosed
- is brought about by a suppression of the thyroid gland, the secretion of which
is responsible for metamorphosis in AMPHIBIA; and that treatment of
AXOLOTLS with thyroid secretion, at any stage of thathalted growth, would
bring about metamorphosis; would bring about, that is to say, transformation
from the aquatic larval form to the terrestrial adult form, as is the normal case
with creatures we are all familiar with the frog or the crapaud.
What in this phenomenon fascinates me and makes me pause relates to
the whole concept of transformation and the startling possibility that, in some
ways, I believe we are somewhat like AXOLOTLS, which is to say that, for
some reason or other, something seems to have gone awry with that process
of metamorphosis, which, if we are to accept what our leaders tell us, should
work to transform us from what we function as an aggregation of begging,
tricking, bluffing,cheating subsistence seekers and assorted hustlers into a
free community of valid persons; each of whom has existed in a way we have
come to conceptualise as, at least one, among other, higher modes of being,
where the essence of staying alive means fulfilment of self and self-
realisation: which when achieved ceases to remain merely the accomplish-
ment of a competence but goes onward to the acquisition of the status of a


-30-




KYK # 44


function of the personality; a function which consummates itself in the
enrichment of every self that participates with it in the creation of a free
community of valid persons.
You may well want to ask Is not every person a valid person? And I say:
Yes. I say yes only if that person's person outweighs his babble in the war
against the reduction of himself, because every word or deed a person utters
or commits which fails to recognize or increase the value of another ends up
by effecting a reduction of the provenance of the intention.
So that is why when we look at the contemporary condition, nationally
and internationally, we want to mutter "All gone", acutely aware of our
victim's role in a ruthless world; profoundly critical of what to only too many
of us seems to be serious malfunctioning on the part of those who decide how
we should live; self-righteously indignant at what is considered the
demoralisation and apathy of the so-called masses and that out-look which
exposes itself as one that sees as irrelevant anything which does not serve its
own and immediate crassest self-interest; and these all combine to make our
contemporary and civic behaviour an ungodly scramble, where each one of
us is prepared to exploit the other. It may be, I would like to suggest, the
perception of this, accidentally or unconsciously, which causes ministers and
official spokesmen, whenever they say anything, to find it necessary to resort
to caustic admonition, and also to seek, at almost every opportunity, to
describe some one or other individual or section of the community as anti-
Guyanese, as though indeed there is some holy text somewhere which spells
out what being pro-Guyanese is.
But the truth is that every society is made of conflicting interests: the
interests of the rulers and the interests of the ruled; competition within the
ranks of the rulers and competition within the ranks of the ruled; and it is from
the creative encounter of these interests, from the clash of all these forces that
a valid hierarchy of values emerges to challenge the very premises that
sponsored them.
Nor can this encounter be abolished. It may be obscured and take perverse
forms of expression, in which eventually the individual personality suffers
erosion and ceases to function in a creative way, until, inevitably, general
paralysis of the spirit overcomes.
This is the war we have to fight, the war against paralysis of the spirit, for
I am tempted to think in a metaphorical way, that just as the suppression of
the thyroid gland in the AXOLOTL could have halted that creature's
metamorphosis, just so this paralysis of spirit ifnotitself overcome, can delay,
if not corrupt, our transformation into a free community of valid persons.
Greater and greater daily seems to grow this paralysis as the individual
person is confronted with the sometimes inscrutable workings of political and
bureaucratic power; when faced with the crises which present themselves in


-31-




KYK # 44


the form of seemingly unresolvable problems of conscience, dilemmas
created by a lack of courage or conviction or situations in general about which
he feels he can do nothing a condition of being which hobbles the mind,
induces varying degrees of hysteria and provokes adventurism, especially
among the young.
In the Caribbean and Guyana we have a sufficiency of historians, political
scientists, sociologists, economists and politicians who, from time to time,
depending upon the occasion, or conditioned by the audience, go to great
trouble to speak learnedly or rhetorically about the historical, social, eco-
nomic and political backgrounds of these territories and who also, sometimes
tentatively, sometimes dogmatically, seek to lay down guidelines for the
Caribbean Naissance.
In nearly all of the prescriptions, in addition to the often mechanical
recital of moral imperatives, there is to be found a pre-occupation with the
concept of systems and institutions a pre-occupation which communicates
that there is, in the minds of these savants, conviction that the solution of most
of our troubles lies in the construction of adequate systems and institutions.
And no one would dare to question the legitimacy of this pre-occupation
if in what is proposed as its consequence, the adjective, "adequate",
necessarily connoted the inclusion of informal social and psychological
elements, elements thatdefy codification, like commitment to the name but
not the substance of some one or other political ideology; or the prejudices
associated with skin-colour; or the failure of communication that accompa-
nies racial cleavage; or, most important of all, the exercise of state power
which brooks little interference and distorts men and laws in the overt and
covert processes of its consolidation and hegemony.
It is the action of these informal elements in their many combinations,
which can and does bring about the perversion of creative strategies and
exacerbates those very ills these strategies were originally planned to control.
In all of what I have been saying I have attempted to bring to your attention
some considerations, which in a world shaken by economic and attendant
crises, people like housewives and politicians may want to deem less urgent
than their own immediate concern with pragmatic issues.
But I am afraid in certain circumstances such concern can be manipulated
and used, if not to justify, then at least to conceal transgression. On the other
hand, it is precisely in times of crisis that we must re-examine our lives and
bring to that re-examination contempt for the trivial, and respect of the riskers
who go forward boldly to participate in the building of a free community of
valid persons.


-32-




KYK # 44






Fiction


Maccabee at Sea
Circa 1965 : Unpublished Short Story

All around him the dark sea stretched, shining in those places where the
water lumped into waves like the backs of black fish. It was the first time since
he had come out of prison that he had gone fishing at night. Far away, and
slightly below him, he could see the lights of the city blinking like artificial
stars. And a glow was in the sky like a low and shifting mound of light.
Maccabee sat in his gently rocking boat and stared around him. From
where he sat the city looked tiny and quiet like a little house with all its
windows closed down. Between the city and himself the tops of the poles that
pinned his seine into the sea floor projected upward, interrupting the low stars
and the flat sea brink. He was waiting for the tide to fall before hauling up his
seine.
It had been more than a year since he had been out fishing at night. And
as he sat waiting he remembered that night again when he hadheard something
calling his name, and the face emerging from the sea and looking at him over
the side of his boat. Remembering, he twisted uneasily and gazed around, half
afraid that he wouldhear his name being called again, and see the strange water
face.
But everything remained silent, save for the low sound of the secret wind
slapping the waves. With a grunt he dismissed his memory aid pulled up to
his seine.
The seine he had set in the sea was shaped like a bag. The poles which
were stuck in the sea bottom pinned it in place with its mouth open, facing the
falling water. As the tide fell, the fish drifting out would swim into the open
and waiting gap and be trapped in the mesh of the bag. Then all he would have
to do would be to pull the seine up and empty it into his boat. He leaned over
the side and heaved at the seine. As he pulled he felt something tug violently.
The seine was snapped out of his hand.
"Something big", he muttered to himself, leaning over again and
grasping the tug. This time he held it firmly and pulled. But as he pulled he
felt a sharp and even more violent tug, wrench the seine clean out of his hands.
"Really catch something big, big," he muttered in excitement, frowning.
"Biggest thing I ever catch."
Then he pulled around to the other side and positioned himself. Quite


-33-




KYK # 44


clearly he had caught something big. He knew he would have to be very careful
lest he damaged the seine in pulling it up. He should have had somebody to
help in the boat, he realized. To handle a normal catch alone was easy. But
this was something different. And yet somehow he felt glad he was alone. To
pull the seine alone with a big catch was something worth doing, something
that would give him a special satisfaction. It was as if he were making up in
one catch for all the catches he had not made while in prison.
He locked his feet beneath the seat of the boat and leaned right over. Both
hands were clutching beneath the water. Then his fingers caught hold and he
gripped firmly and pulled. As he started to pull he felt the seine shake and
twist again. But this time he was expecting resistance and he held on firmly.
Slowly he pulled, feeling the seine getting heavier, and yet heavier, as it
came up. The weight was most unusual. He wondered what kind of fish he
had caught. For a moment the idea that he had caught the creature which had
once appeared beside his boat flashed into his imagination. He paused,
startled. But he shrugged away the thought and he pulled again. As the seine
came out of the water he brought himself erect, sitting rigid again and fixed,
holding against the weight.
Suddenly, as the seine came out, the thing which was inside jerked
violently and pulled him right over. The sharp and exceedingly violent tug
was so sudden thathe fell forward striking his chest against the side of the boat.
He held on to the seine fighting to recover himself. But, as if coming to the
surface had only made the creature in the seine more violent, he found that he
had to fight madly to keep himself from being pulled over the side and into
the sea. He held on strongly, feeling the seine wriggle in his hand. With an
effort he pulled again, only to groan suddenly and relax, loosening the seine.
A sharp terrible pain in his groin paralysed him, and he lay limp, athwart the
boat with his hand trailing. He felt his whole belly fill with pain like a heavy
liquid gushing up from his groin. Slowly he felt the pain drain out of his belly
and collect at his groin. He held his groin in one hand to ease the pain, while
with the other he inclined himself into a more comfortable position in the boat,
where he lay on his back staring up at the sky, but seeing nothing. The pain
had driven sense from his head, and he was afraid to move lest the pain come
back again as terribly as it had begun, and invade his belly again.
The seine had fallen back into the sea and the boat drifted away from the
tall poles. With his face turned to the sky he lay on his back. He found that
holding his groin was a relief and he held it just as he had held it that night in
the prison hospital when the murdererhad spoken to him. The memory twisted
and shaped itself in his mind, and he wondered if the man had already been
hanged. As he stared up from his prone position in the boat he saw, as in a slow
dream, arope hanging from the beam of night, and the shape of aman dangling
with bent feet kicking. He groaned as a line of pain tightened from his groin


-34-




KYK # 44


to his belly like a noose. He sat up slowly and started to fit the mast in the hole
like someone else. As he worked at it, the pain came, then went, and he pushed
and groaned, jerking and grasping. Every action started a current of pain
running through him. Slowly he worked, pulling up the sail and turning the
bow of the boat toward the city. The pain inside him was now like a load that
slowed the boat in the water, like a weight thatanchoredhim in one place under
the vast sky of the hanged man and the dangerous sea of the naked creature
which had come to him and called to him, a long, long time ago.


-35-




KYK # 44


Out, Out the Fire
(Extract) Kyk-Over-Al Vol. 8 No. 23, May 1958

Outside, in the city the sun burns madly upstairs in the sky. The streets
blaze white near green grass, and galvanised iron roofs shimmer like vapour.
When the sun is high the city lies rigid, tense and trembling in the stark light.
And the sky is far away like a foreign country, and the clouds are like new
sails on old ships sailing forever.
Every street is straight and white like a chalk line. On either side houses
stand up on stilts like angular insects, reaching for something to eat. The fronts
of the houses are separated from the green parapets by fences made of wallaba
paling staves. But some are broken and jagged like splintered teeth, dirty and
discoloured. The fronts of the houses are like open mouths and the stumps of
the paling staves are like the strained stumps of broken teeth. And just as down
a human mouth, the food of life goes everyday, just so into the broken mouth
of the houselot, life goes everyday, passing forward and backwards as if some
giant face were eating with a morbid relish, spitting out the more tasteless
morsels and swallowing all the rest.
The street is wide and full of dust. In the white sunlight it lies down
passively. From the wide world come motor cars, lorries and vans, making
a lot of noise, shaking up the white dust and leaving the air full of the smell
of fume. Wooden donkey carts, creaking and shaking, rattle over the pieces
of white marl lying all about. Dogs fight in the grass, snarling and snapping
angry white teeth until they lock into each other, twisting violent muscles.
And little naked black children, with rags for shirts, run about with discarded
bicycle tyres, jumping over the furious dogs, the grass and the stones.
Sometimes, but sometimes only, the whole street goes suddenly quiet, as
though everything has stopped for a moment to listen to itself. But then it
begins all over again, iron wheels turning, sun wheels turning, sky wheels
turning, hub and rim, centre and circumference, point and limit, core and
boundary.
And when the sun goes down the whole yard becomes a slab of darkness,
like a block of black ice. In the night-wrapped city, where the streets intersect,
the light from lantern posts falls into yellow pools on dust and pebbles. Trees
grow tall above the roof tops and some of them look as if they were trying to
go to sleep.
Crapauds in the damp grass begin to rattle and whistle like birds who can
fly. And even the dogs bark with a different meaning. The night is like a door
that closes in the afternoon locking everything into a black room. And as it


-36-




KYK # 44


comes down, the sky seems to rise high up into space, only to come down
again. Below, in the streets, boys and girls on bicycles ride past men and
women walking. And a donkey cart would appear around the corer moving
slowly. The cartman droops over the donkey's rump, half-asleep. In his fist
he clutches a bottle fom the narrow spout of which protrudes a tongue of
yellow fire. And as the donkey walks, the cartman rolls fowards and
backwards in rhythm with the hooves. And in the yards, the women sit on their
doorsteps looking out at the street, spitting at the night, gossiping with their
neighbours and laughing at themselves, in strange and secret amusement.
Miss Agnes always sat out on her front steps watching the street after dusk.
She would sit down and look at the people passing for an hour or two before
going to prepare for sleep. But as somebody from the yard would come to look
out too, she invariably had a companion to talk to.
That night she was sitting on her front step in the dark as usual when
suddenly she heard a voice from the shadows behind her.
"Like you looking out," the voice said.
"Eh heh," Miss Agnes replied, turning her head to see who it was.
Recognised Old Katie's voice and repeated, "Eh heh, ah looking out lil."
Old Katie came up and stood beside Miss Agnes.
"But wait! Was to ask you. Is wha' kind of strimp shells you throw away
in the alley dis morning."
Miss Agnes started. The sudden question surprised her. She did not reply
at once but wondered why Old Katie had asked the question at all. Before she
could say anything else Old Katie continued:
"If you only smell the place now. It smell like some dead ramgoat bury
with rotten eggs. I never smell nothing so bad in all my life." As she spoke
she grimaced as though something was stuck up in her nose. In the dark her
flabby face twisted around her nose like a mask of soft rubber.
"But is wha' you mean at all" Miss Agnes asked her after a moment. "Is
only today I throw way' dem strimp shells in de alley. You never smell shells
before?" She demanded, turning fiercely on Old Katie.
Old Katie sighed. She was not a quarrelsome old woman so she said
quietly, "I custom to smelling strimp shells yes, but I ain't custom to smelling
strimp shells like dem at all. I telling you Miss Agnes, dem strimp shells really
smell bad. But you must come with me and tek a smell for yourself."
Miss Agnes did not reply. She was wondering how the few shrimp shells
she had thrown away that morning could ever smell as bad as Old Katie was
making out.
"You sure is strimp shells you smelling in de alley," she asked quietly,
looking at Old Katie.
"Is wha' den'," the old woman replied. "Is only you use strimps today
and throw way de shells in de alley. It didn't smell so last night, so it could


-37-




KYK # 44


only be you strimp shell that got de place smelling so nasty."
"Well", said Miss Agnes. "Well ah really don't feel like smelling no
nasty thing tonight. But if you sure is me strimp shells smelling so high in de
alley, I going to come down in de morning and tek a smell foh myself."
Old Katie turned away grumbling to herself. "Just fancy, she don't feel
like smelling no nasty thing tonight! But I who living in de backhouse got to
sleep with it, and bathe with it, cook with it, eh!eh?"
As she walked back through the yard to her house at the back she
continued grumbling in her mouth.
"But look at me trial" she grumbled. "Dey come and dey throw away
dey nasty things all about the place and when you talk to dem about it dey bex.
People like them should live in de pasture where dey could do what dey like."
She walked up her steps and entered her shaky house. Across the
alleyway she could see the lights in the other houses giving off a sickly yellow
glow as though the lights was weak and anaemic with living in all the darkness.
And when midnight comes and every light is out except the street lights,
all is quiet as a grave yard. In the silence the beat of the wind on the sea comes
gently, floating over the sleeping roofs. In the grass near the land crickets and
candleflies exchange places on hidden leaves. Dogs snarl and bark out
suddenly. And somewhere in the world of night, man lies on top of woman
closing his eyes and emptying himself into the invisible depths of her body.
And then when he is quite empty, he becomes light like a feather and floats
through the black silk cotton of sleep like a seed on wings. And far away to
the north of the city the sea surrounds the world, dark under the keen stars. Up
and down, forever and forever, the broken waves run from shore to shore, from
night to night and from man to man.
In the morning, bright and early, Miss Agnes went down to the alleyway.
The sun was lifting itself over the city and the sharp light made clear shadows
on the earth. The wind was fresh andmoist and the sky sparkling like wet grass.
"Ah come foh smell de thing you was telling me about last night," she
called out as she came up to Old Katie's house.
Old Katie looked through the window.
"Wha' happen" she asked, "you mean to say you ain't start smelling
yet." She looked at Miss Agnes suspiciously.
Miss Agnes took a noisy sniff, holding her nose to the air.
"You ain't got to do all dat," Old Katie cried out, "just come round by
the back step and you gin know."
Miss Agnes walked around and took another loud sniff.
"Oh Jesus Christ!" she exclaimed suddenly, "Oh Jesus Christ, but is
true. But is wha got dis place smelling so bad!"
As she stood up there she could see the shrimp shells she had thrown away
lying on the ground. Surely those few shrimp shells could not be giving off


- 38 -




KYK # 44


that smell. And yet, she reasoned, it had to be the shrimp shells. There was
nothing else lying about that could possibly give off such a cloud of stink.
Miss Agnes stood up looking about her. She couldn't say anything to
defend herself. And all she did was to cry out again and again about the smell.
Behind her at the window Old Katie was waiting to hear what she would
say.
"You believe now?" Old Katie asked, "you believe now about what I
was telling you last night. And you only smelling it now you deh here standing
up. But if you was like me living in dis house you would dead long ago. Last
night the smell was so bad that I dreamed I was living in the latrine, not no
clean big shot latrine, but them brum down nasty latrine some people got in
the yard where dey say dey living. And dis morning ah wake up and smell the
smell, ah know de dream was not no dream at all. Because up to know ah got
one splitting headache."
Miss Agnes turned around sympathetically.
"Ah know how you must be feeling wid dis nastiness so near you." She
walked away slowly wondering what she should do. As she turned around she
noticed a piece of cloth sticking out from under a pile of old boards lying half
in the yardandhalfin the alleyway. She walked over and looked at it curiously.
As she bent down to inspect it, the smell rose in her face like a dense spray of
water. She put her hand over her mouth and bent lower.
"But is wha dis?" Miss Agnes asked again. She looked around on the
ground and picked up a short piece of stick and started to probe at the half-
hidden cloth.
As she probed at it a piece of pinkish fabric broke away.
"Eh Eh" she remarked aloud. "But this look like blood." The smell was
stronger than ever and Miss Agnes kept her mouth tightly closed so as to
prevent any of the bad smell going down her throat.
Suddenly she jumped back as though something had leaped from the
ground straight into her eyes.
"Oh Gawd" she screamed, "Oh Gawd." She spun around to face Old
Katie. "Is a dead baby, is a dead baby." She bawled, "come quick."
"An was dat got the place smelling so bad an' got me blaming Miss Agnes
strimp shells," Old Katie told Policeman, Policeman was writing in his
notebook standing near the spot where the bundle showed under tl ; wood.
Around his black uniform the women from the adjoining houses were
discussing the pitiful discovery. They had all come running when Miss Agnes
gave the alarm, leaving their pots cooking on the fires in their kitchens.
"But why you all people don't go home and cook you husband food?"
Policeman asked them nudging one of the women with his elbow.
They were all grouped around him listening as he spoke with Old Katie, and
from time to time they interrupted him.


-39-




KYK # 44


The woman he nudged sucked her teeth loudly.
"But like you is a anti-man nuh?" she asked cutting her eyes at
Policeman. All the women laughed out boisterously, and Policeman looked
back into his book writing industriously so as to appear as busy and official
as possible. He knew he dared not attempt to exchange remarks with the
women and so he tried to ignore them.
The policeman was a young man with a dark brown skin and a very serious
expression on his face. The women knew that he was very young in the force
and that he felt he had one of the most important jobs in the world and that he
meant to live up to the dignity of it. Hehad been sent out from the Station when
old Katie went and gave a report. And now he was taking a statement from
Miss Agnes, who all the time had remained on the spot watching the bloody
bundle that showed under the wood.
"Is somebody living around here throw away dat thing," one of the
women said.
"But ah wonder is who," another asked, leaning forward as if to inspect
anew and discover some clue as to its origin.
"Is somebody living round here," the woman who had spoken first
repeated again, emphatically.
"Like you know is who," Policeman said suddenly, turning to look
directly at the woman. -
"Oh me Jesus," the woman cried out in alarm, "What I know about
anything like dat. And to besides leh me go and see what happening to me pot
before it boil over."
She bustled away hurriedly, leaving Policeman looking behind her
inquisitively.
He turned back to face the women.
"Now listen" he said "if anybody here got any information about who
throw away that ting in dis alley, dey bettah come forwardright away. Because
if you know and you don't tell is an offence."
He spoke proudly, aware of his authority. But nobody answered.
"Alright, alright," he warned. "You all people know to lie down wid
man when the night come and enjoy yourself. But when you get ketch you
don't want to mind pickney. You don't think about the consequences. All you
want is the sweetness. Ah know, ah know, but we going to see what is going
to happen. Somebody looking for trouble and is one of you."
As he spoke he frowned. The women, who a few minutes before were
laughing at him, now watched at him with troubled eyes.
"And this is a serious offence" he continued. He saw that he had them
frightened and he was happy.
"Last year in the country," he said, "a woman get baby and when the
baby dead she wrap it up in an old newspaper and throw it away in the alley.


-40-




KYK # 44


And you know what happened? Was only because the Magistrate sorry foh
her that she didn't get jail."
"Is true," one of the women said. Every eye fixed on Policeman.
Standing in his black uniform stiff and erect, he seemed to tower over them.
Suddenly Miss Agnes took a step forward.
"But boy," she said, without warning "But boy, is what you name?" She
had been listening to Policeman while he was speaking and her sudden
irrelevant question fell like a bucket of cold water over him.
"Constable Cecil Joe No. 4914" Policeman almost shouted, almost
saluting. But quickly he caught himself and relaxed.
He glanced at Miss Agnes.
"Like you is a botheration woman," he said softly with cold anger in his
eyes. The question had really caught him and his immediate parrot-like
recitation of rank, name and number made him feel ashamed. He realized how
stupid he looked and he knew that the women who only a few moments ago
were looking at him with awe, were now more or less normal again and ready
to laugh at him.
Just then another policeman came up to the crowd with an old toffee tin
in his hand.
"You tek down the statement and everything?" he asked constable Joe.
"Yes a got it."
"Well alright then, leh we pick up dis thing and carry um down to the
police station one time."
The second policeman picked up the bundle and put it in the toffee tin.
"I am going to have to ask some more questions," Constable Joe told Miss
Agnes as he started to leave. "This investigation only now start."
Miss Agnes stared at him for a moment, then she laughed out, with a
forced bitterness.
"But hear he!" she shouted at his back. "But hear he! You could start
anything like investigation!"
She turnedto the women. But they had all begun to walk away and so Miss
Agnes went back alone through the yard to her room. And on the grey ground
beneath her feet as she walked, the hard little brown ants journey through the
dust leaving no trail. In the yard the lean chickens scratch with impatient feet
at mounds of dirt, searching for a worm, a shrimp shell, a grain of rice. Green
blades of grass choking beneath weeds, lean back their clean points to the land
in a mute repudiation of light and sun. Only the winged marabuntas and the
slender-tailed pond flies dance through the air, flitting from earth-floor to
roof-top and darting from cool shade like memories seeking a place to rest.
And high above, beyond the tall interruption of coconut palm heads, the
unsympathetic sun bums out its white insistence, contemptuous of ant or
chicken, grass or weed, roof top or dust, memory or wing.


-41-










Ur


THE RED HOUSE, 65/67 High Street, Kingston, Georgetown
19th Century


Drawing by Kenton Wyatt, after
photograph by David Ford




KYK # 44


Selected Articles/Editorials From THUNDER


Non-Cooperation
Thunder Editorial, May 1, 1954

The enemies of the people, the ideologies of the rulers, the propagandists
of reaction have all come out with the flaring trumpets against the People's
Progressive Party's initiation of the programme and campaign of non-
cooperation with the interim government. Angrily the mouthpieces of the
oppressors seek to minimise the support given to the party by the people of this
country. In vain the reactionaries try to revile the ideas advocated by the party
in this period of national misfortune. Always in repeated attacks, do they seek
to create the impression on the minds of the people that the party' s programme
of non-cooperation is immoral and untenable.
For any people the ideal government is government of the people, by the
people and for the people. The present interim government is neither of, by,
nor for the people. And the argument that a community must have a body of
legislation and administrators to see to the smooth running of things, does not
have any cogency in this context, since any such argument presupposes the
given consent of those who are to be governed. The nominated interim
government therefore, far from having any claim for loyalty, from the people,
has in fact, by its existence, brought about a situation in which, in order to
make clear their unequivocal repudiation, the people are forced to take some
form of action consistent with a disavowal of all those things the Interim
government stands for.
Non-cooperation does not mean passivity. Indeed, in its own right, it is
an aspect of resistance and not an isolated form of activity. Together with
demonstrations, processions and other forms of resistance it contributes to the
whole movement of resistance in a special way. Where other forms may be
indirect, or more or less diffuse or spasmodic, non-cooperation is direct,
concrete and pointed. And non-cooperation has been carried on in other
countries for the same purpose as it is now being carried on in this country.
In India, during that country's struggle for independence, which by the way,
is not even yet completely won, non-cooperation helped to break the backs of
the British sahibs there. In France during occupation by the Nazis during the
last war, non-cooperation with the 'master race' was an essential part of the
underground resistance movement. As a matter of fact, however far back in
history wemay go, wherever occupation by foreigners has oppressed a people,


-43-




KYK #44


non-cooperation has been practised. It is a method of resistance universal in
its efficacy.
Today, in Guiana, where another master race is oiling guns and sharpen-
ing bayonets, the principle and practice of non-cooperation with the "Gov-
ernment" which owes its whole existence to the foul processes of imperialist
oppression, can neither be immoral or untenable. Instead, the degree and
extent of its practice is one sure way of measuring how much of imperialist
mind-poisoning propaganda has been rejected by the people.
Let the Guianese people therefore maintain and develop its programme
and campaign of non-cooperation with the present fraudulent government.
Let the campaign continue until the assembly of nominees, that collection of
puppets called a "Government" only by those who made its appearance
possible, or those who belong to it, is thrown with all its ignominy into
oblivion. Until that time, the slogan of non-cooperation, the principle of non-
cooperation, the practice of non-cooperation remain honourable and correct.


-44-




KYK#44


An American Oracle
Thunder, August 28, 1954

Every few weeks or so, some official or expert or advisor arrives in British
Guiana, and, after spending a few days in the company of assorted reaction-
aries, completes the visit by making oracular disquisitions either about the
Soviet Union or "the communist conspiracy to rule the world," or some such
thing, all very much in the manner of the character Shakespeare parodied by
crediting with the lines: "I am Sir Oracle, when I open my mouth let no dogs
bark."
Significantly enough, it was particularly only after the P.P.P. victory in
the 1953 elections that British Guiana became so popular with American
assistant professors, research workers and others who came like a line of
acushi ants, each with their own task to perform, each with his own assignment
to discharge. During the period when our Party was in office, the Ministers
were pestered with siege investigators, who behaved more like a pack of
trained spies seeking information, than anything else.
But now however, when our country lies at the mercy of imperialist
benevolence, the officials who come here in connection with the various
financial, economic or frankly political schemes, do not merely concentrate
on the specific tasks with which they are concerned, but on the contrary,
precisely because inmost cases they represent governments as reactionary and
aggressive as the U.S. and British Governments, are always very anxious to
give tips and hints to the people of Guiana on the trends in the world situation,
and how Guianese natives can best direct their energies to life and their own
betterment.
Apart from the fact that we cannot help viewing with the sharpest
suspicion anyone who consorts with our enemies, we are still forced to take
some notice of the pronouncements these people make, inasmuch as some of
us fall easy prey to the blandishments and verbal tricks of these ideological
tourists. And one such visitor who graced us with his presence not too long
ago is the Public Affairs Officer of the U.S. Information Service, Ar. L.E.
Norrie, who arrived on Tuesday, August 10th and left on Saturday the 14th.
On Sunday 15th the Daily Argosy printed in bold headlines: "Russia-
Greatest Colonial Power on Earth Today" above an article made up for the
greater part of the statements by Mr. Norrie about Russia's "armed aggres-
sion" and "domination over millions of people who now enjoy nothing more
than colonial status."
Mr. Norrie, the man from whom the headline is quoted, works with the


-45-




KYK # 44


U.S. Government and as such, is a representative of the most predatory
imperialism ever. Wall Street and the U.S. Government control one of the
most powerful countries in the world today. This is the country of McCarthy,
Hollywood, Negro Lynching, witch hunting and other aspects just as pleasant
as those mentioned above. And because this country is a capitalist imperialist
country, controlled by a class which derives its very heart beat from the
exploitation of human labour power, then, in the eyes of the same ruling class,
all the things in the world that sustain it are good. A man who is a
representative of the rulers of America must therefore be aman whose outlook
on world affairs is conditioned and determined by these very principles.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union, about which Mr. Norrie speaks so
bitterly, is a socialist country. There, in 1917, the people led by Lenin
overthrew the capitalist state and instituted a system of Soviet Government
which guarantees to the people a real chance to live like human beings.
Because control of the means of production is in the hands of the people who
decide how production should be organised, unlike the U.S.A. where the
minority class controls everything, the Soviet Government is able to lead the
people ever forward to a better life. And because again, the Soviet Union is
a socialist country, a country which leads the world in a fight for freedom from
imperialism and therefore from colonialism, it follows that Mr. Norrie's
statement is viciously false and is cunningly calculated to deceive and mislead
the people to whom it is directed.
So then we must ask why Mr. Norrie came to B.G. which after all is a very
small country in a very big world, and then upon his departure take upon
himself the job of denouncing the Soviet Union just off-hand like that.
According to theArgosy Mr. Norrie was here to see after arrangements for the
setting up of an U.S. Information Service in Guiana, which will help to explain
U.S. foreign policy andhelp to give an insight into U.S. cultural and social life.
Now that the mere fact that that U.S. proposes to set up an information
service in this country reflects certain realities of U.S. foreign policy. And one
of the most important of these features is that U.S. imperialism is getting down
vigorously to the job of taking over the British Empire not excluding Great
Britain itself. Andjust as the British rulers have their British Council here so
too will the U.S. Government have their own Yankee indoctrination centre.
Between these two the people of Guiana will be sandwiched, cut off from the
world as it were and left like gaping fish ready to swallow whatever these
imperial powers have to offer. Thus in addition to the existence of a law which
seeks to keep certain types of information and progressive ideas outof Guiana,
we will now have with us another barrel full of imperialist propaganda,
specifically geared for local conditions and consumption.
As a result of all this, how should we take Mr. Norrie and his statements?
Firstly we must recognize him as a spokesman of American imperialism and


-46-




KYK # 44


therefore an enemy of colonial people fighting for freedom. Secondly his
statements about the Soviet Union which are false and pernicious must be
recognized as a smokescreen set up to obscure the real motives of the
aggression in colonial territories and in the fomenting of a Third World War.
Finally we must let Mr. Norrie know that our fight here is for national
liberation and thatif he finds it necessary to tell lies about another country only
in order to distract our attention from the situation as we know it in our life,
we in turn find it necessary to reject him and his ideas in totality. For
experience has taught us to search diligently for the poison hidden in
everything the imperialists have to offer to our people.


-47-




KYK # 44


Politics and the Individual
Thunder, February 12, 1955

Every human being is born into the world completely naked. While this
is obvious physically, it is not always taken into account when people start
arguing about politics and the individual. For some people give it out that
politics implies a surrender of individuality, an assumption of a robot
existence- an existence in which all the distinctive individual qualities of the
human person involved, are submerged and lost in the general mass of activity
and organisation.
From the moment a human being is born, however, he enters into certain
relationships with the social pattern which surrounds him. This social pattern,
with its institutions, customs, laws etc, mould him into one of its own
creatures. And in a colonial territory, if this human being, this individual
happens to be a child of working class parents, then he finds himself locked
up in a huge cage of poverty where hardly any opportunity for real individual
development exists. Any kind of gift or talent must be immediately sacrificed
to the job of putting something in his belly from day to day. And, after a while
the grind of life takes over, bright dreams become a bolt in the sugar punt-
bent and rusty with the years.
If this is true to experience, then it follows that long before an individual
even begins to talk about politics, the social pattern begins to attack his
individualistic potentialities. For it is clear that an individual can only become
what his social environment allows him to become. Thus the limits to his
individual development are imposed by the society in which he is born and in
which he grows up. And if he wishes to push back the boundaries created by
the social pattern in which he finds himself, he will then have to do something
to bring about the change in that very social pattern. It is then that he enters
consciously into politics.
Of course, it must be statedhere that whether the individual likes it or not,
he begins taking part in politics from the day he is born. Here it is only a matter
of direct or indirect, positive or negative, conscious or unconscious activity.
For the sake of clarity however, the word politics is used in a direct, positive
conscious and purposive sense.
But to return. From the argument above, it can be seen that far from
politics being an hindrance to individual development, it is in fact, the means
whereby the individual may release himself and others from a crippling social
environment. For political activity is not an end in itself, but only a means to
an end, the end of social change.


-48-




KYK # 44


Of course people can corrupt anything and politics is no exception. As
a matter of fact, because of its importance, politics attracts the best and worst
of men. What is necessary then, is that no one should confuse politics as a
social instrument for politics as a social disease.
In the long run, the individual simply does not have the choice of merely
remaining an unattached individual. He may remain unconscious or negative,
a piece of wood floating on the tide, changing position as the tide changes. He
may thus share the same individuality as a piece of sea wood.
The following analogy may help to clarify the idea. When a child is born,
he is absolutely helpless and his parents have to do everything for him.
teaching and moulding him into humanity. When this child grows up, he too
will marry and beget children. In turn he will have to do everything for his
children, teaching and moulding them as he was taught and moulded by his
parents.
But now let the child take the name of Individual and his parents and
children the name of Society. It is easily sc en that just as Society moulded the
Individual, so must the Individual mould Society, transforming it into the
shape and the structure he desires. It is only through political activity that he
can do this.


-49-




KYK # 44





No Separate Salvation
Thunder Editorial, March 5, 1955

Everybody living in this country ought to know that people of African,
Indian, Portuguese and Chinese descent dwell here only because in the past
sugar lords found it necessary to bring their ancestors to this part of the world
to work in the cane fields. While Indians, Chinese and Portuguese came as
indentured immigrants, the Africans came as slaves. All of this is well known,
but some people behave nowadays as if they simply do not know these facts,
or that even if they do know them, they still do not realise what these facts
signify.
There are some people who are using the split in the P.P.P. as an
opportunity to foster racial feelings among the mass of people. Some of these
people claim that the Party has broken into two sections an Indian and an
African. And some on the one hand call upon the African element to support
that wing of the movement led by Mr. Burnham while others call upon the
Indian element to support the wing led by Dr. Jagan. Presumably both of the
groups of racial mindedpeople believe they are acting in the best interests of
the particular racial group to which they belong. But far from acting so, these
people are only acting in the interests of those who brought them here and who
have kept them down ever since. All of this without being understood, in the
same way as people may know a man is dying without understanding what he
is dying from.
Before going further let us see the racial composition of the leadership in
the two Wings. On the one wing we have Mr. Burnham, Dr. Lachmansingh
and Mr. Jai Narine Singh and on the other Dr. Jagan and Sydney King.
Looking at it we can observe that on both sides are Indians and Africans
working together, unless of course Sydney King moulted overnight like some
grass bird, or Dr. Lachmansingh has suddenly been transformed into another
man.
When we come to the broad masses of people the situation is somewhat
different. For example, among the people of African descent there has been
a history of a feeling of superiority over the Indians because it was felt the
Indians came to Guiana to do the work the slaves refused to do after
Emancipation. On the other hand there has also been a history of feelings on
the part of the Indians that the people of African descent were inferior because
at one time these people happened to be slaves. Further the cultural position
of the two groups is important in this matter. Indians proudly retain certain
ties with India in religion, custom, etc. while the people of African descent torn


-50-




KYK # 44


from Africa as they were with bleeding roots had to build right up from the
ground. These positions give confidence to the Indians while to the Africans
they lead to a certain self-pitying attitude and consequently to.an emphasis on
rather than to a resolution of the problem.
Further to all of this is the social and economic grudges which exist. It
is claimed for instance that Indians occupy all the big positions in commerce
and the professions. So therefore, the argument goes, Indians are getting on
while those of African descent are stagnant. This argument seems to ignore
the fact that Indians are the majority in this country and though some seem to
be doing well, thousands are seeing hell. Nevertheless because Indians
happen to be in the majority there is a tendency for some of them to believe
that of necessity they must assume the dominant role in everything. While
little argument can be brought against the fact of numerical strength, Indians
must realize that under colonial rule only the British Government dominates.
Indians complain that on the other hand Africans dominate the Civil Service,
the police force and the teaching profession and that appointments are limited
where Indians are concerned. Witness the appointment of all Negro interim
ministers and realise the trick in the thing.
But repeating these facts is one thing. We can see quite easily as shown
above that historical circumstance and social accident have more or less laid
a foundation out of which serious racial antagonism could emerge. Instead
of contemplating this reality we must master it. And the achievement of the
P.P.P. in the past gives us hope for the future.
The P.P.P. succeeded in uniting the people of Guiana because it showed
that only unity among themselves wouldmake them strong enough to fight the
imperial government effectively. This was demonstrated at the General
Elections when P.P.P. candidates of African descent won seats in decidedly
Indian constituencies against Indian candidates. That means if the people
would only understand the major issue of the people's struggle against
imperialism some good will be done. Thus it would be better for a person of
Indian descent to support Mr. Burnham for ideological reasons than for the
same person while agreeing with Mr. Burnham to support Dr. Jagan only
because he happens to be an Indian. The same holds good for a person of
African descent. For this would mean that the action was dictated by reason
and not by racialism. In the long run reason would lead to the truth while
racialism would lead to a disaster.
There is no separate salvation for Indians in Guiana, no separate salvation
for Africans. There is only salvation for a unitedGuianese people fighting as
a people against imperialism for National Independence. Let those who
advocate racialism in any form among the people confute this.


-51-





KYK # 44


What is a Politician
Thunder, March 12, 1955

As we can see in our political situation here, most people, when confused,
usually do one of two things. Either they regress to some previous belief, some
previously held principle of understanding, or they move forward, eager and
anxious to learn. This is true for the majority of human beings, whether they
live in Africa or in China or Greece, whether their colour of skin is black or
brown or white. That is why we must not feel that our people are the most
backward in the world when we hear some of them saying in this period of
stress that, "this is white people country and we can't do nutten about it,"
"what is the use of struggling and suffering, things will always be bad," and
other bits of wisdom in the same strain. On the other hand, there are some who,
feeling at a loss over the confused state of affairs, do at times honestly and
sincerely attempt to understand and come to grips with the tangle of things.
But a lack of information, inaccurate thinking, insufficient knowledge and
little experience of certain types of activity, land them right back in the suck
sand.
Because politics concerns everybody, everybody has something to say
about it. One very popular idea in this country, as in other countries, is that
to be successful, a politician must be dishonest, must be tricky, smart, slick,
must know to say one thing and mean something else, and do something
absolutely different from what is said or meant. No one can deny, of course,
that politicians by their words and deeds have done everything to create such
an attitude of suspicion among the people.
Now what is it that causes politicians in particular to acquire such
unpleasant reputations? It cannot be merely personal or individual attributes,
since as we know every human being carries within himself the germ of every
human quality and also, that no man is an angel. It is necessary then to go
beyond the personal and individual level if we are to understand how
politicians act and why they act as they do.
In our time politics has come to have many meanings. But there was a
time in human history when nothing like politics as we know it ever existed.
At one time among the American Indians for instance, there was social life
based not on the conflict of economic classes but on the principle of communal
cooperation, in which the leaders of the people were like real fathers, because
the people they led had common interests and common aims. Difference
among leading members of the group would not be difference in interest but
difference in tactic, difference only in the ways and means of achieving an end.


-52-





KYK # 44


This could be so only because the long term aim was fully accepted as the end
to which everything and everybody moved.
With the arrival of slavery, the first form in which class society appeared
in history, the human grouping is broken into two classes, master class and
slave class. And it is here that politics as we know it begins. From then on
to now class struggle has been going on incessantly taking different forms
at different stages of development. Politics then can only be one of the forms
in which class struggle manifests itself, and politicians only the symbolsof this
manifestation. Politicians then are symbols of the class struggle.
In Guiana we find ourselves engaged in political activity, precisely
because the society in which we live is class society. And our political outlook
is determined by our class interest. For if we happen to be company directors,
our political deeds in the long run will be directed to the strengthening of our
business interests, to the strengthening of our class interest as company
directors. This is the key to open the door of understanding why people as
politicians behave as they do. Forjust as at Christmas time masquerades put
on painted masks, so too in politics do politicians put on false faces to hide their
faces to hide their real motives, to fool the lookers on, to pass in the same way
as well made counterfeit coins are passed. Because this type of thing has been
going on for so long people are always suspicious of politicians.
But why is it that politicians find it necessary to hide their real motives
and intentions? Certainly not because they are ashamed of them; not because
in themselves they are repulsive. Politicians hide their real motives and
intentions because they want people whose interests may be different from
theirs to support them, because they dare not show the cards in their hands, lest
the people reject them. So rather than being open and clear, or unrealistic as
they say, be smart and tricky and realistic as they say, and success will in
inevitable.
Such ideas about politics emerge from the bowels of capitalistic and
colonial society where the binding tie of human relations is the profit motive,
the exploitation of man by man in economic, moral and social life. In such
surroundings moral principles are as stray dogs in a butcher shop. So now if
all this is true how will it be possible to produce honest politicians, politicians
who are not smart and slick?
In the first place it will be necessary to find some standard of value which
is independent of personal and individual desire, a standard which cannot be
challenged anywhere by anybody.
In this Guiana it is easy to find the standard. The standard is national
independence, not so-called personal independence, not the independence of
one class at the expense of another class, but of all the people from something
outside of them. That something of course is British Imperialism. And even
if one of the classes in the colony has to suffer a little, has to swallow a little


-53-





KYK # 44


of its pride, then that class will have to abide by the greater good. In any case,
however, every class in the colony suffers in some way from alliance with
other classes. But what is gained outweighs what is lost. Therefore what
counts more than anything is not the tiny gain, the temporary victory, but the
final gain, the final victory. If at any time the tiny gain, the temporary victory
becomes more than the final gain, the final victory, then clearly everybody is
no longer working on the generally accepted basis of struggle. Clearly
somebody will be agreeing in thought at least with Omar Khayyam's verse:

Oh take the cash and let the credit go
Nor heed the rumble of the distant drum

In order to produce ordinary straightforward politicians it is necessary to
get a principle accepted, a principle of action which holds it that the final aim
of struggle must never be sacrificed to the success of the moment. For the
sacrifice of the long term aim is the tactic of the politician whose real interest
lies not in the people's liberation as such, but only in the temporary progress
of some one class in the alliance of the class forces fighting for National
Independence. That is all.


-54-





KYK # 44


Portrait of Churchill
Thunder, April 16, 1955

If Shakespeare happened to be alive nowadays and had to read all the
eulogies of Winston Churchill presented by certain newspaper editors,
historians, columnists etc. he might certainly feel like revising those famous
lines: the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their
bones. For although Churchill is not dead, not physically dead at least. the
uncritical outpouring about "his greatness and eminence" would put to
shame many a long drawn out, space filling obituary.
After 60 years of politics Winston Churchill resigned on Tuesday, April
6, as Prime Minister of Great Britain. Starting off as a young war correspon-
dent he ended up as an old war monger, betraying a consistency in this field
which no one can deny. But by living in the era of the colonial liberation
movement and the disintegration of world imperialism and by playing such
an important part in the fortunes and misfortunes of the British Empire,
Churchill has come to be regarded as the very personification of all that
imperialism stands for.
In dealing with the political personalities, writers customarily trace
careers, furnish purple patches from writings and speeches, point out intellec-
tual strong points and so forth, then conclude with high flights of flattery. We
however cannot do that since what we want to know is how Churchill stands
in relation to us and the colonial people in the worldwide struggle for national
liberation.
Nevertheless for purposes of information, it is important to know that
Churchill entered politics at the age of 24 and that he was defeated in a by-
election in 1899. The next year he ran successfully as a Tory candidate for
Parliament. By 1904 however the Tories were losing out so Churchill became
a Liberal. In 1922 he losthis seat for Dundee as the Liberals were being moved
out of the front seats, Churchill decided to become a Tory again in 1924. When
the Baldwin Government was defeated in 1929 Churchill went out of office
and stayed out for ten years. Everybody knows of course that he w..s British
Premier during the Second World War which began in 1939.
During all this time Churchill practised with enthusiasm the politics of the
imperialist, whose attitude to his countrymen and to colonial people is one of
suppression, repression and oppression. It was only during the war that he
could find a common cause with all of these people and this was so because
Hitler was everybody's enemy including Churchill's.
Other than that, Churchill looked upon the working class of Britain with


-55-





KYK # 44


hatred and fear. In 1911 for example the railway workers went on strike. As
Home Secretary, Churchill demanded that 50,000 soldiers be called out to
smash the strike. When the soldiers attacked a demonstration, two railway
men were killed and several others wounded. During the 1930s when the
struggle of Indian people for National Independence mounted in intensity,
Churchill was among the wildest of the wild in calling for the suppression of
the Indians by raw brute force. "Give me a ship, a few hundred men, some
guns and I will quell those rebels in India" cried Churchill. On another
occasion Churchill said "I did not become Premier to preside over the
liquidation of the British Empire", all of which is in character.
Where Churchill really excelled however was in his hatred for the Soviet
Union. The triumphant revolution of the Russian people led by Lenin in 1917
roused in Churchill his most bellicose instincts. Churchill realized only too
well that the worker triumph of the Russians wouldinspire the working people
of every country in the world and would show to everybody that socialism was
possible and could be won. In his anxiety to hold back the tide, Churchill
helped to organise expeditionary force which he hoped would go into Russia
and crush the Bolsheviks. Thanks to the heroic residents of the Russians and
the support of their allies among the working people in Britain the expeditions
failed. Churchill had to swallow his bile. This was in 1919.
During the thirties Hitler rose to power in Germany. The Tories were all
for him because they felt that Hitler would wipe communism off the face of
the earth. But Churchill was sharp enough to see that Hitler would not stop
at the Soviet Union. Yet the war was no sooner over than Churchill was at his
old games again, this time ordering Montgomery to prepare to arm the Nazis
to fight the Soviet power. And in 1946 Churchill made his famous speech at
Fulton, in the U.S.A. demanding united action against the Soviet Union. This
was an official declaration of the cold war which today keeps the world in
perpetual tension.
We can even see from these few selected points that Churchill's career
was determined not necessarily by some innate quality but rather by the
circumstances of the times in which he lives. Standing as symbol of the rotten
past in the constantly changing world Churchill appears to us a figure
representing that social element which burst into power after the bourgeois
revolution of 1688 in Britain, and which since then has maintained itself by
strangling the working people of Britain and the subject people of the Empire.
Our experience of 1953 bears the mark.
Although Churchill has resigned, those forces which he represents are
still very much in power and are still hankering to use war and death in order
to survive. This is what we who live in Guiana will always remember.


-56-




KYK # 44


A Dark Foundation
Thunder, April 16, 1955

Following in the wake of our political confusion, what can be described
as a general bad-talking of black people has become quite a regular feature of
street corner gossip Statements like "black people can never lead anything"
and so on are quite popular. People of African descent are sinners in this
respect just as much as anybody else. We know of course that this sortof thing
has along history in Guiana, deriving in part from slave psychology and in part
from the disgraceful behaviour of some of our own leaders in the past.
On the other hand among some sections of the middle-class community
like school teachers, civil servants (lower bracket type) of African descent a
peculiar tendency is developing. Some time ago for instance member of this
section was heard saying that the black race is a master race. Since there is
nothing in Guiana's history to show that anybody other than the European
ruling caste and class has ever been master here, this statement can serve either
only to expose the fantastic complexes resident among some of us, complexes
which seek to mask themselves in their opposites, or to lay bare the secret
wishes of some people, whose class interests find reflection in such utterances.
For it is quite likely that the person who made the statement quoted
above is really wishing the class to which she belongs will some day become
the master class in Guyana. By deliberately confusing race with class this
person seeks to give all people of African descent a middle-class identity and
ambition. By using racial argument a given class attempts to masquerade as
a racial champion while low down in reality only the sordid selfish intention
is the motive power behind everything. This applies to every racial grouping
in this country.
Apart from all this however, it is high time for us to wrest from history
what history has for us. Having been brought here like cattle bereft of the
significant relations of our cultural patterns, we had to face a hostile and alien
world without any weapon other than sheerphysical life and strength. We were
born in slavery raw and wounded, borrowing everything from the very culture
that tortured the Light out of our life. Our position then and now is somewhat
similar to that of prisoner who on entering prison has to fit the clothes handed
to him by a prison warden, consequently there is still a lot of space between
skin and garment, space which only self knowledge can fill out and round off.
And all that we have to work with is that which we have created right here in
this country. The history of our existence from the first days of slavery is the
very earth on which we stand in this world. Dark is our foundation.


-57-





KYK # 44


Instead of abusing each other therefore, instead of giving ear to absurd
claims of racial superiority, let us rather examine our background and pick
some sense out of it. The two passages quoted hereunder should be useful as
a start. This is from John Smith who saw slavery with his own eyes.

The plantation slaves, are of course employed in the cultivation
of the ground. The field then, is their place of work. At about six
o'clock in the morning the ringing of a bell, or the sound of a horn
is the signalforthem to turn out to work. No sooner is the signal made,
than the black drivers, loudly smacking their whips, visit the negro
houses to turn out the reluctant inmates, much in the same manner
as you would drive out a number of horsesfrom a stable yard, now
and then giving a lash ortwo to any that are tardy in their movements.
Issuing from their kennels, nearly naked, with their instruments on
their shoulders, they stay not to muster, but immediately proceed to
the field accompanied by the drivers and a white overseer.
When a slave commits anything worthy of punishment, he is
ordered to lie down with his face to the ground. Should he show the
least reluctance, a couple or four negroes are called to throw him
down, and hold his hands and legs, stretchedout atfull length. In this
posture a driver flogs him on his bare buttocks till his superior tells
him to desist. In punishment no distinction is made between the men
and the women; the latter being forced to strip naked are held
prostrate on the ground by the men.

Against this let us place the achievement of 1763 when the slaves in
Berbice rose up in rebellion and drove all the slave owners and overseers and
rulers clean out of the county of Berbice. The Governor of Berbice wrote thus
of this matter:-

Today now (sic) the 4th of October andwe see no appearance
of our deliverers as yet; nor do we receive word or sign your honour;
what will become of us all, should your honours have entirely
forgotten us? We have come to the end of our tether here, and are at
our last gasp. If within a short time there is no deliverance, Iwill be
forced according to he-advice of the Court and the Sentences ofthe
War Council, to make arrangements to abandon this post and again
return to the extreme boundaries of the sea coast.
(Hoogenheim)

These words indicate the position of the Dutch rulers in Berbice at that
time, and illustrate the power wielded by the slaves in unity. The heroes of


- 58-





KYK # 44


these years were Accabreh, Atta, Coffy and Accara who were the leaders of
the insurrection. Needless to say when the insurrection was put down they
were all executed.
From these two very brief quotations covering the misery and revolt of
the slaves at different times, we can see how very much there is for us to learn
about ourselves, how very much there is that requires attention if we are ever
to stand erect in this world.
And the present state of things makes such attention an urgent necessity
for all of us.


-59-




KYK # 44


From Babylonian to British
Thunder Editorial, May 21, 1955

After a week or two spent in drill and marching practice, hundreds of
innocent school children turned out on May 23rd, the day before Queen
Victoria's birthdate, to sing songs of praise to the British Empire, the "empire
on which the sun never sets etc. etc."
If these children could have witnessed even in imagination, what torture
and pain the founders of this very Empire inflicted on their ancestors in Africa
and India, they may perhaps have gone to sing but remained to wail. For
beneath all those platitudes and cliches uttered by the officials representing
the rulers of this Empire, bullets and skeletons are scattered in profusion.
About seventeen years ago, by the old fish koker in Kingston, a fisherman
was once overheard saying that just as the Babylonian, Greek and Roman
empires fell,just so would the British. That was a time when the Second World
War had not yet broken out, at a time when the liberation movement in these
parts was as yet a spasmodic and unexpressed flickering in the hearts of the
people. And while the fisherman's wish might well have been the father to
his thoughts, nevertheless, his thoughts were true to the direction of history.
Because today, seventeen years after the fisherman spoke his piece, there are
visible and definite signs that the British Empire is on its way out.
Just as a house has to rest on pillars, just as a man has to stand on his two
feet, just so do Empires have to rest on specific human, social, political and
economic relationships. And speaking about the British Empire, Lord
Roseberry, a noble imperialist, once had occasion to say "some empires have
rested on armies, some on constitutions; it is the boast of the British Empire
that it rests on men," endeavouring by this word play to obscure the realities
involved. Because, in truth, everything rests on men, but it is another matter
when men are uniformed soldiers committed to the job of holding down other
men, and killing them too in the bargain as in Malaya and Kenya, those ever
quoted examples of modern British imperialism. As for Lord Roseberry's
reference to "some empires" resting on Constitutions, the case of Guiana is
a case of the British stamping down a constitution, which is much worse than
resting on it.
But let us consider the relationships that the British Empire really rest on,
using Guiana as an example. Politically it is a relationship of controller,
something like commodity controller, where Guianese men and women are
commodities. Socially it is a relationship of superiors and inferiors, of
advanced and backward, developed and underdeveloped, or so they say at


- 60-





KYK # 44


least. Economically it is a relationship of plunderer and plundered, robber and
robbed, cheater and cheated, profiteer and helpless consumer. And in human
relationships it is a case of cultural serfdom, and ugly indignity.
So far, so good. However, as we have seen here in this country since 1953,
the very imposition of total misery has brought about a searching in the minds
of thinking people for the real meaning of freedom. The lack of freedom has
convinced nearly everyone how great and precious a thing is freedom, how
worthy it is of effort and sacrifice. And similarly, as the fisherman said about
the Babylonian, Greek and Roman empires, reaching insidiously into every
crack and crevice like some gross spider, it has brought about in every one of
its colonies a searching and quest for new life, a life on which nothing like an
Empire can rest. Because the searching and the quest, the intentions and the
acts of millions of British colonials in different territories is simultaneous and
continuous, we can say with the fisherman, mending his net over seventeen
years ago on the fish koker, that the British empire like every other empire is
bound to fall. And here it is not the case of a wish being father to a thought,
but rather historical necessity being a process.


- 61 -





KYK # 44


Bribes for What?
Thunder, July 2, 1955

How much talk has there been since the proposed payments recom-
mended by Hands-Jakeway became public knowledge. From different
quarters havecome different comments, all expressing resentmentand disgust
over the whole affair.
Now, in any part of the world, the payment of a large sum of money, as
in the Hands-Jakeway context, is either made as a loan, as a gift or as a bribe.
Since the payments under Hands-Jakeway are neither loans nor gifts, they can
only be bribes. This is clear. But the question that still remains to be answered
is Bribes for what?
The intention of the British Government in making these payments is to
create in this country a super class, a class of colonial aristocrats who will be
living examples of the benefits that can be gained by all well behaved natives
in due course of time.
The idea is that this class of car-driving supermen will serve as an
inspiration to the non-car-driving ordinary men in the service who will
become so obsessed with the idea of getting on in life that they will do anything
and sooner or later acquire absolute immunity from any infectious idea
relating to politics or national liberty. The deep tide of national feeling that
flows so powerfully throughout this land has frightened the British Govern-
ment into making those payments. And while these things may serve the
intention well enough in a limited sphere, the proposed payments have served
also to increase among the mass of people, feelings of deep and intense
hostility. As the saying goes "monkey mek he pickney till he spoil un".
But what has been the source of even sharper resentment is the proposed
payment of increased salaries to the members of the Interim Legislature
retrospective from January 1954. These nominees are not like the Civil
Servants discussed above, as you cannot very well make a silk purse out of a
sow's ear. But it certainly does appear that even these have to be bribed. It
is difficult to believe, but the Administration surely knows what it is doing.
And there seems to be some urgency involved too; when it is remembered that
the Bill to make these payments possible was hurried through at one session.
There is a desperation somewhere along the line.
Never before have the local rulers of Guiana found themselves in such a
happy circumstance. The rule of force, the emergency, the suppression of
large scale protest by the people is a condition they once dreamed about. And
now they have it, they do not want to let it go. So they must keep their own


-62-




KYK # 44


interim servants in cotton wool, lest somebody get out of hand and attack. The
U.D.P.'s call for lifting of the Emergency was a warning. Soon perhaps, who
can tell, the U.D. P. will make one of its members like Mr. Kendall or Miss
Collins demand the lifting of the Emergency Regulations, not on paper as done
before, but in the sacred midst of the nominees, at a session of the Interim
Legislature itself.


-63-





KYK # 44


Our Newspapers and What They Stand For
Thunder Editorial: July 16, 1955.

The first newspaper ever published in Guiana was in the year 1793. On
Friday July 8, 1955, however, with the publication of Bookers News, the
number of publications now available comes up to a round dozen. And these
are: Thunder, P.P.P. Thunder, Torch, Labour Advocate, Clarion, Sandesh,
Sunday Times, B.G. Bulletin, Bookers News and the Graphic, Argosy and
Chronicle.
In a country with a population of only half a million, this is truly a
remarkable thing. And there must be some strong necessity operating to bring
about this journalistic bombardment. It is as if a crowd of people were
collected at the bottom of a hole in the ground, on the rim of which are poised
the snouts of cannon, discharging simultaneously salvos of opinion, comment,
lies and facts.
The publications named above may, for clarity of understanding their
positions, be classified in the following manner. On one extreme, the extreme
of the ruling force, supporting the local and imperial rulers stand the Graphic,
the Argosy, the Chronicle and the B.G. Bulletin, broad-sheet of the Govern-
ment Information Service. Playing a special role in this line-up is Bookers
News, of which more will be said.
At the other extreme, the extreme of the ruled population, giving
representation at different levels stand the Thunder, P.P.P. Thunder, Torch,
all organs of political parties. With these must be included the Labour
Advocate, which is a Trade Union publication (M.P.C.A.).
In the no-man's land between the ruling and ruled, stand the Sunday
Times, Clarion and Sandesh, or so it appears to be. The Editor of Bookers
News was once the Editor of the Clarion, as everybody knows.
But now let us look at the condition of the people to whom all these
publications are directed. Even apart from the all too obvious, political-
economic misery and strangulation, although a consequence of same, there
does exist here among us a gross overburden of corruption, social injustice,
cultural sterility, racial friction, dishonest practices in industry and com-
merce, flagrant police frame-ups and all the rest of the vile filth that bubbles
so happily in this colonial backdam. With so much material that needs airing
out and bringing to light, there can never be too many newspapers, publica-
tions and so on.
What do we find however when we examine the twelve publications? The
organs of the political parties and the trade union are necessarily unavoidably


-64-





KYK # 44


critical to matters of specifically political and trade union significance. The
organs of the rulers like theArgosy, Graphic and the Chronicle are always too
busy trying to keep the population in a state of intellectual vertigo. Bookers
News, organ of Bookers is dedicated to the impossible task of trying to make
capitalism look virtuous and cannot therefore find time to talk about anything
else. So what are we left with? Only the denizens of no-man's land, that is
to say, the Clarion, Sandesh and Sunday Times.
When we come to these hopefuls, in keen anticipation of some long
overdue exposure, some breath of disinfecting air, all we meet up with is a
shallow cynicism keeping company by and large, with sensational tidbits and
trivialities. Making out to be free- lance, these publications at bottom, only
echo the political line of the ruling class newspaper. All that makes them
different in effect is a question of approach, just as burglars may differ in
approach, one going through the open front door while the other creeps
through the kitchen window.
The fact that these newspapers have come into being at this time in
addition to such reactionary stalwarts as the Graphic, the Argosy and the
Chronicle gives some insight into the political situation.
Even after all the guns, the people are still thinking. And so the
newspapers are out to confuse issues, to divert and canalise the people's
furious disgust. By distorting information, telling fantastic lies and uttering
contemptible slander, some of these editors and publishers hope to succeed.
But what they seem to forget always is that the people do not necessarily have
to read to see oppression. For it is like the sky-- always visible. And when
they do read, the people want facts, for facts are the best propaganda and we
always stick to them in Thunder.


-65-





KYK # 44


Hamlet
Thunder, August 20, 1955

The production of Shakespeare's Hamlet last week by a group of English
and West Indian actors, was culturally significant but artistically weak. It was
significant in so far as it brought home to us the possibilities of a West Indian
theatre. It was weak in as much as the actors, save for a few at times, seemed
to be only now learning the techniques and finesses of acting. Of course drama
is something new to the West Indies and we are accustomed to seeing some
of the best actors in the world like John Gielgud on the cinema screen. So we
must not be too severe. Queen's College of course is not a theatre. Stage
property and acoustics were at a minimum.
What seemed to be lacking especially among the West Indians was, what
I would call a sense of theatre using "theatre" in a special way. This indeed
is understandable in our context. Errol Hill, who played Laertes at one time
appeared to be representing rather than creatively interpreting. And it is
certainly embarrassing at times to hear an actor saying his lines in the tone of
a school boy reciting "The boy stood on the burning deck", something which
happened all through the course of the play.
John Ainsworth, who was not only the leading actor (Hamlet) but also the
producer of the play seemed to be over burdened. During the first act he was
straining for effect. He hardly modulated his tone at all, and some of
Shakespeare's most beautiful lines were lost in the general imprecision. He
recovered in the second and third acts, but did not seem to capture the essence
of Hamlet. There was too much gesticulation and too little contemplativeness
in his portrayal. The flash of brilliance from time to time makes one believe
that Ainsworth could only grasp as an actor, some of the facets of Hamlet's
extraordinarily complex character.
Graham Suter (Claudius) was effective andat times quite convincing. He
did not maintain this standard all through the play though.
James King, (Polonius) aWest Indian, was rewarding. As a foil to Hamlet
he had a good part to play. Perhaps Ainsworth's interpretation of Hamlet
assisted him here. At any rate he succeeded in capturing the spirit of the old
busybody, the "wretched rash intruding fool" and was perhaps the most
successful actor. Barbara Assoon (Ophelia) was fairly good, with a clear voice
and good enunciation standing out above the rest. But as she was brought in
late to take Greta Mayer's place, we may not have seen her at her best.
The sword play was good and both Ainsworth and Hill deserve commen-
dation for their handling of the rapiers.


-66-





KYK # 44


All in all, remembering the intention behind the production, this presen-
tation was valuable. It shows us where we are and how we are in the West
Indies in this respect. Because we are in a void, however, we should not let
sheer novelty and strangeness blind us to the shortcomings we observe. And
that is why we must criticise as accurately as we can, so that we may set up
our standards and maintain them. Among us, as we know only too well, there
is far too much gushing and uncritical acceptance of anything novel or well
publicised. We must attempt to transform such an attitude into one of serious
appraisal, giving credit where credit is due and vice versa.
May I add that the applause at the end of the play on the first night served
also to awaken some of the members of the audience.


-67-





KYK # 44


This Race Business
Thunder, September 10, 1955

Imagine a community of people, in which everybody is of the same racial
stock. Everybody let us say has a green skin, purple hair and lilac eyes. Let
us say that this community lives in the Western world, the world in which we
live. Now if this imaginary community is like all the communities we know
about, then we will find in it people who are greedy, envious, rich, poor,
employed, unemployed etc. There will be also, distinctions of class, occupa-
tional and educational differences and the rest of it. So then, in spite of the
racial sameness in our imaginary community, there will be a whole network
of conflicts, a network of antagonism between everybody, those in the ranks
of the unemployed, those in the ranks of the employed, those in the ranks of
the rich and those in every single rank. This is given.
We can see that even without introducing the elements of racial dissimi-
larity, all human beings who live as we live, are always in conflict.
If what we are saying is true, then the racial richness in our particular
Guianese community makes our story a very complicated one. Because if in
our community where everybody is of the same racial stock there is already
cause enough for conflict, what is to happen when in addition to this the
quarreling parties are of different racial origin?
Take an example. A man of Indian descent was driving his car down one
of the streets of Georgetown one morning. A little child of African descent ran
across the road in front of the oncoming vehicle. The driver pulled hard on his
brakes and barely saved the child. Immediately from a yard the child's mother
and neighbours poured out into the street.
"Al you want to kill out black people nuh?" shouted the child's mother.
"you all coolie b_ want to kill out black people nuh?"
"You black a the driver shouted back, "why al you black people
don't keep your children off the road? Like you don't live nowhere, always
got your children on the road."
In this case, it can be seen that the incident only served to release attitudes,
to provide symbols whereby each of the two persons involved fell back upon
a system of belief. This system of belief, has its origin, not in the barely
avoided incident, as is obvious, but in the whole social,economic, cultural
reality of the life lived by both car driver and the mother of the child.
Now take the child's mother. Terrified by the danger her child was in, she
immediately sought to give protection. But to protect her child in this instance


-68-





KYK # 44


meant to attack the source of danger, as she understood it. Thus, picking out
the most obvious thing the racial origin of the car driver she blames
everything on that. Had the car driver been a man of African descent, she
would most likely have said, that because he could afford to drive a car, he (the
driver) believes he could do whatever he likes, putting the blame in this case
on economic fact.
As for the car driver, his knowledge of the conditions under which most
of the people of Guiana live, whether Indian or African, gives him a defence,
which although economic in origin, ends up in expression as racial abuse.
This very much over simplified example gives an idea of the complexity
of the problem we are dealing with. What we can very easily see however, is
that the racial antagonism usually expressed is not just due to what is
sometimes called bad-mindedness. This instance cited above is only an
accident that nearly occurred. How much worse must it be when things like
property and jobs are involved?
With all this burden in front of us, we tend to become pessimistic and
retreat into silence. On the other hand, realising that the only profound
solution is the creation of an equitable social order, we tend to repeat wornout
cliches, until even we ourselves stop believing in their value. Preaching is not
going to help us very much, when all the raw causes remain. Be that as it may
however, one thing we must remember. Without racial cooperation in the face
of imperialist menace, we go nowhere. And that is the most significant point
at this moment in our history.


-69-




KYK # 44





But Where is Burnham?
Thunder Editorial, September 10, 1955

The Right Honourable Patrick Gordon Walker, Member of Parliament,
is a man well versed in what some people describe as diplomacy, but what we
denote by using a much more offensive word.
This Member of Parliament visited us some time ago, and since his return
to Britain has been writing articles on the Caribbean. One of these articles,
reprinted locally, created something of a stir in local political circles. And we
are not thinking now about Mr. Walker's opinion of the Interim Legislature.
We are thinking about what he said about the political situation in Guiana, and
of Mr. Burnham's position in this situation.
From Mr. Walker's position as a British politician, whose political
philosophy so far as colonial people are concerned does not differ from that
of Sir Winston, Lyttleton, Lennox Boyd and other philanthropists who control
the British Empire, we can only expect one thing. Whatever contains within
itself any support for British imperialism is blest. That is all.
In the article we are talking about, Mr. Walker announced that Mr.
Burnham is the key to the whole problem of British Guiana. What does this
mean? It means that if Mr. Burnham so desires, he could become the darling
of the British in Guiana. What must he do? "Break openly with the Jagans
and declare his readiness to work a Democratic Constitution." How easy?
Mr. Walker knows very well that in February 1955, the Party broke into
two pieces, one led by Dr. Jagan and one led by Mr. Burnham. He also knows
that both Dr. Jagan and Mr. Burnham would welcome with open arms anything
like a really Democratic constitution in place of the present monstrosity. So
what is he making all the fuss about?
Apparently, what has Mr. Walker so unsettled is this. The behaviour of
Mr. Burnham after the split in February is not at all satisfactory. Mr. Walker
is not at all sure about Mr. Burnham, so while he calls him an opportunist with
one breath, he kisses him with the other. Not exactly blackmail, but certainly
not surface mail. And so, as we think a li title more, we are forced to invest with
a meaning those words of Mr. Walker: "Break openly with the Jagans and
declare his readiness to work a Democratic Constitution."
For this is a statement in code. In ordinary English it means, sell out, start
witch hunting and all the other practices that go so well with imperialism.
Why, Mr. Walker almost says it point blank by alleging that Mr. Burmham said
he had split with Dr. Jagan because he (Mr. Burnham) was anti-communist,


-70-





KYK # 44


while Jagan was communist. If Mr. Walker's allegations are true to the facts,
then Mr. Burnham certainly has to explain. Because in P.P.P. Thunder June
18, 1955, in dealing with that startling young man who votedagainst his own
party, Mr. Leigh Richardson of British Honduras, Mr. Burnham wrote: "The
P.P. P. reiterates that it is not a communist organisation but it refuses to start
witch hunting." And in the same articlehe wrote that it is adull intellect which
cannot distinguish between a Party or movement being non-communist and
being anti-communist.
We are not prepared on principle to use the assessment of Mr. Burnham
given by Mr. Walker. Because if we do that, the next thing we will do is to
quote from the Robertson Commission and the speeches of Sir Alfred Savage.
Of course we know that some people are already doing that. But that does not
mean we will do it too.
But where is Mr. Burnham?


-71-




KYK # 44






Wanted A Great Obeah Man
Thunder, October 22, 1955

From time to time over the past two years we have been hearing laments
over the absence of great leaders in this country. These laments have come for
the most part from the editors of certain newspapers, visitors from Britain and
America and various others who either do not understand what is really going
on around here or in the world at large, or who deliberately shut their eyes to
facts.
On Sunday, theArgosy published an Editorial under the caption "Wanted
Now: Leaders", as though leaders were things like stamps or coins, only
waiting to be collected. Written in round Victorian style, this Editorial
contains the following interesting statement: "There is as yet in British
Guiana no one at least we do not know him who speaks with the voice of
the people, whose words find an echoing thrill in the hearts of the people,
whose leadership and magic personality are acknowledged by the people."
If by the word "people" the writer of the Argosy's editorial means
everyone in Guiana, that is to say, from the most humble fisherman to the most
arrogant Police Inspector, then the search will never end. For the words that
bring hope to the unhappy cane-cutter are words that terrify estate managers.
And ideas that lodge in the hearts of the weary masses are ideas considered
subversive by those who conspire and intrigue to suspend constitutions,
victimise fathers of children and hold the whip of starvation over their heads
like a curse. Can any man who understands all this and takes his place among
the little men, the wretched and the poverty-stricken, be a great leader in the
eyes of the privileged or in the eyes of one who occupies the position of editor
in a local capitalist newspaper? Quite obviously not.
All this argument has appeared in Thunder before. It's necessary to
repeat it now so as to prevent ourselves being taken in by myths.
The history of the human race is full of great men. But these men had a
very hard time of it in their own lives, and some of them were even crucified
as Jesus Christ was. One of them, Giordano Bruno, a scientist in feudal Europe
was burnt at the stake as a heretic. Another one, John Brown, the friend of the
slaves in America, ended up with a rope around his neck. John Smith, the
Demerara Martyr, was imprisoned right here in Guiana. And the great slave
rebels like Accabreh, Accra and the others were burnt to death in Berbice. For
the truth of the matter is that it is a dangerous thing to be great in this world.
Those who are great are loved by some and hunted by others. Unfortunately


- 72-





KYK # 44


for our generation at the present moment in the Western World, the hunters
occupy powerful positions. And that is why they bark so coldly and bite so
savagely.
The Editor of the Argosy can continue calling for the great leaders but
none will rise to fithis measurements. Because what the Editor and others who
think like him really want is not a great leader, but a great obeahman, one who
can defend the interests of the people without affecting the lords of the land.
Messrs. Sugar, Bauxite and Chamber of Commerce, the strangers of freedom,
the authors of misery and despair. And we have not even mentioned the
imperialists!


-73-




KYK # 44





Where are the Heroes?
Thunder, November 26, 1955

Speaking at a meeting held at the L.C.P. hall in Third Street, at which the
Hon. E. Williams and M.E. Cox of Barbados were guest speakers, Mr. Cox
said that Sir Alfred Savage was a Christian who has done much for Barbados.
In using the term Christian, Mr. Cox, like many others in the West Indies
today, was attempting to forestall criticism by erecting a barricade of religion.
The reference to the instance quoted above is made only to draw attention to
this practice of certain newspaper editors, politicians and others, who,
whenever they are faced with unsavoury facts, try to escape from answering
by calling upon Christianity.
But as a man in Water Street said the other day, if Jesus Christ himself
was to come down on earth, there are some people who will be only too anxious
to crucify him. In speaking like this the man was drawing upon his experience
of the world, with all its corruption, dishonesty and indecency.
The moral tenets of Christianity are of course held to be unchallengeable,
inasmuch as they crystallise the best feelings possible in men. But the
conditions under which men have to live in a world like ours, make it difficult
for them to uphold these things which they so profoundly believe in. We have
innumerable examples of men who go to church on Sunday, full of piety, and
who on the other days of the week practise all sorts of dishonesties and
injustices. And it is not so much that these men are born with bad minds or
anything like that, but rather that the world they live in forces them to behave
as they do. Those who can lie and deceive the best are considered the smart
ones, while those who attempt to play fair are considered fools. As a matter
of fact the whole situation can be summed up in an equation: Decency equals
Stupidity.
This kind of thinking is not only confined to commerce. It permeates
politics and leads people to the conclusion that to be a politician the man must
be a damn scamp and a villain. Who has not heard people saying that if the
P.P.P. was a pack of rascals, willing to accept bribes and so on, no suspension
of the constitution would have occurred? And some people go as far as to say
that the P.P.P. was foolish not to accept bribes, secure itself in office, and do
what all the politicians do all over the world.
Subsisting on a dfiof Hollywood films, true detective magazines and
other such trash; bounded on one side by the sugar estates, and on the other
by the water front, the people of the City are like creatures in a cage. Pressed
down into the mud under the weight of hopeless sky, the people live like ants


- 74 -




KYK # 44


in an ants' nest, biting at each other because there is nothing else for them to
bite at. And when a voice emerges out of all this muck, all the little lap dogs
bark in furious excitement, defending the master, who from time to time will
administer a well aimed kick for remembrance.
Those who really attempt to practise Christianity will be heroes in an
environmentlike the one describedabove. But where are theheroes? Are they
hiding their lights under a bushel? For at the moment they are invisible.


-75-

































- .d-


GEORGETOWN YMCA, Camp Road.
1925


Drawing by Kenton Wyatt, after
photograph by Edward Rodway




KYK # 44


Other News aer Articles


Sensibility and the Search
Argosy, January 26th, 1958

There being no such thing as society in general, or a reader in general, I
propose to introduce our subject by dealing first of all with ourselves, who, as
we must agree, are particular people in a particular place.
By dealing with ourselves first I think we would be putting ourselves in
a better position to deal with the writer, the reader, and society today, in as
much as, having started with ourselves, we would have taken up a particular
position, a particular vantage point. And from this vantage point I think we
will be in a better position to assess the meaning of writing and reading as
activities having relevance to the human condition.
To recognize and accept a standpoint in this connection is of special
importance. For just as the man on the peak of a mountain sees a different
world from the man in the valley, just so should we, from ourparticular context
of being, see something more and something different from anybody else.
And yet I do not propose here to offer any detailed study of society. All
I will try to do is delineate the experience of the people from whom we spring.
And in doing so, surely it must be unnecessary for me to trace the chronologi-
cal development of life in this territory to an audience such as this.
For a long time the pattern of experience I am talking about has been clear
to me, and I have written about it time and again the institution of slavery
which remains for us the unknown land, the source of our sensibility. And of
course colonialism and the status colonialism connotes is an ineluctable
concomitant. Thus to live here and have our being here denotes immediately
a particular kind of sensibility, derived from the actuality of slavery, and a
particular kind of status, derived from the actuality of colonial life. I contend
too that the sensibility of the slave and the status of the colonial combine to
make us what we are. in the innermost meaning of the term. Thus our status
as colonial will change when our sensibility is transformed, and with the
transformation of our sensibility will come the birth of a people. I hesitate to
use the word 'nation' for a variety of reasons, chief among which is the
possibility of controversy arising as to meanings.
Professor J.H. Parry of the University College of the West Indies, in an
article in one of the issues of Caribbean Quarterly, a publication of the
U.C.W.I (University College of the West Indies), wrote as follows:


-77-




KYK # 44


Experience in the West Indies has shown the importance of
facing squarely and objectively the history of an institution (slavery)
which affected all the Americas in some degree and which in some
countries left deep scars in the social memory.

I agree with Professor Parry. I know at the same time that many West
Indians shift about unfortunately when slavery is brought up as an item of
discussion. Nonetheless, I insist on facing "squarely and objectively" the
reality of slavery. What actually is the essential meaning of slavery in human
terms? Dom Basil Matthews, the Trinidadian sociologist, in his book Crisis
of the West Indian Family has put it this way:

In the earth shaking upheaval, the strange new world surround-
ings, the new economic occupations, the African, bereft of his social
controls, was lost not only to his kin but to himself.

I wish to stress here the last phrase of this quotation:

lost not only to his kin but to himself.

Basil Matthews continues:

The backbone of social control in West African society, namely
the tribal religion, was badly broken. No alternative religion or
moral system was as yet effectively introduced. The social function
filled by the old tribal religion remained vacant. The results on
society and the individual were disastrous. Turn to any sphere of
slave activity, conduct, work, crime, folk literature, folk music,
educational outlook, the reading of the cultural barometer is the
same anarchy, with a strong suggestion of cultural frustration.

In a symposium on whether a West Indian way of life exists, published
in the 1955 Mid-year issue ofKyk-Over-Al, I wrote that emancipation in the
1830's took the chains off the hands and the feet, but that the psychological
constitution woven in the gloom of the plantation remained. And I went on
to say that, to me, the essential meaning of slavery is the loss of self, the loss
of identity and its inevitable consequence, the most shattering self concept.
What I mean by the loss of self and the loss of identity is the loss of those
relationships which allow of choices, the loss of those equivalences between
inward necessity and external situations. And I mean too the disruption in
which integration and action remains action, remote from any possibility of
being transformed into destiny. That I contend is what slavery means in


-78-




KYK # 44


human terms.
After the abolition of slavery the social process took a certain direction.
This direction and the results of this process are summed up very well by Dr.
Raymond Smith who in his book The Negro Family in British Guiana writes:

Since the white group is the apex of the social pyramid and
extremely close to the cluster of positively evaluated elements it
forms the most isolated and solitary sub-group. Numerically small
and culturally homogeneous (at least within the colony) its members
participated solely at the executive, managerial and administrative
levels of the occupational structure... it preserves its social distinc-
tions vis a vis the rest of the population by means of an intricate and
usually covert mythology of racial purity and superiority. But it is
equally true that the black group retains a good deal of social
solidarity, not so much as a large cohesive group extending all over
the colony as in small territorial clusters such as villages. Once
again this solidarity is maintained by an elaborate mythology, this
time of inferiority... Portuguese, Chinese and East Indians all came
to British Guiana after the foundations of the colour class system had
been laid and all are in a sense marginal to it.

The quotation I have used from Dr. Smith refers to the "colour class
system", but I wish to confine them to the slave actuality, in which the social
pattern is bounded at one limit by the "nigger yard" and at the other limit, by
the "Big House", to use Gilberto Freyre's terminology. And if we examine
our experience in this context many things seem to emerge.
What stands out most forcibly during slavery and at the abolition of
slavery? The flight of the slave from the plantation. Who has not read of slaves
escaping from estates and attempting to set up homesteads in thejungle? Who
has not heard of the desperate flight of the slaves from the plantation and the
hunting down of these slaves by Amerindians hired for the purpose by the slave
owners? And after abolition too we see porknockers leaving the estates in
haste and going to the jungle in search of precious minerals. Some may say
this is something natural and to be expected. I suggest that this general flight
from the plantation is not only a simple flight but also a profound search. it
is, I contend, not only a search for identity as such, but indeed a search for the
self lost in the circumstances of slavery. I go further and say for example, that
the emigration of West Indians to Britain is not purely and simply an economic
affair. I suggest that here too at a certain level, a search is implied, although
of course by now this search has lost the marks of its origin and assumed new
masks and disguises, even as the slave who was taught carpentry by his owner
makes out in due process of time that it was always his ambition to become


-79-





KYK # 44


a carpenter. Purely for illustration and with no claim to argument I refer to
the Freudian concept of childhood conditioning and its relation to individual
motivation.
"The Flight of the Slave and the Search" is the essential meaning of West
Indian life, I believe. I invite your attention to the music and the poetry we
call West Indian. What actually is the secret of the music, the native music?
All I can find is the rhythm. But even this rhythm is not our own, in the sense
of having been created by us. For are these rhythms not actually the germ
motifs of African music? We certainly didn't create these rhythms. Far from
it. All we have done, so far as I can see is to batten or hem and repeat them
over and over again without developing them; without allowing them to
challenge us to creation. I am not, of course, by any means, trying to argue
away their value or any such thing. All I am trying to do is to put them in
perspective. Again, lookat thepoetry we call WestIndian. What has the larger
part of it been, other than a series of poor imitations of English models? If,
for instance, at a given period Tennyson is the leading English Poet, then the
poems written are poor copies of Tennyson. If Swinburne is the leading
English Poet, then the poems written are poor copies of Swinburne. It is, of
course, true that all artists go through a pastiche period, and further that the
world of the arts must have its great family spirit and resemblances: Dylan
Thomas for example and Gerald Manley Hopkins are remarkable poetsin their
own right, though the influence and background of Hopkins and Thomas is
plain. It is well known that the French Symbolists were heavily influenced by
the literary theories of Edgar Allan Poe, the American poet. But this certainly
is a family spirit a kinship not a relationship between master and slave.
The vantage point spoken of therefore at the beginning of this introduc-
tion is the standpoint of the slave which we must learn to accept as a reality.
Acceptance of this reality will be the first step to self identity, the first step on
the journey in search of ourselves. But this is no easy task. It will call for the
emergence of men of genius, men who by a gift of nature are able to assimilate
the experience of their heritage and transform it into meaningful symbols and
images, so that all of us, on looking at those symbols and images, will be
looking into a mirror and seeing ourselves for the first time.
In this connection we can prepare ourselves by considering the words of
Salzberger who in an essay on Holderlin, the German poet, wrote:

Genius, the agent of the dialectical process of history, has to
transgress against the laws of moderation which govern the lives of
ordinary men, in order to bring to a crisis the conflicts of his age and
restore a healthy equilibrium.

Unfortunately, however, the circumstances obtaining here and now do


-80-




KYK # 44


not give rise to feelings of optimism in this respect. For the slave is still in
headlong flight and the flighthas not yet consciously become the search. And
that is one aspect of the human condition in the world today.


- 81 -





KYK # 44


Recent Events Spring From
Social Undercurrents
Chronicle March 23, 1962

Many people are writing and speaking of recent events here as though
B.G. is the first country in the world to have had a massive strike, or
widespread rioting, or arson, or looting. But this is precisely the state of man
in our time, and rather than taking up self-righteous positions, we should at
least try to understand what is really going on among us. And let no one think
that he is exempt. For all are involved and all equally responsible, guilty and
innocent.
The history of this country began with slavery and from then until
Emancipation the slaves carried on a running fight with the plantocracy and
the administration. After Emancipation, as we all know, the former slaves
refused to work on the sugar estates and indentured immigration had to begin.
But before the indenture system came into full swing the pattern of Guyanese
society had already been down. And that pattern was founded on the master-
slave relationship. Every facet of life organised around this relationship, like
iron filings around a magnet.
As time went on and the indenture system began in earnest, all the
newcomers to Guiana the Portuguese, Chinese and East Indians had to adapt
themselves to this relationship. And while the Portuguese and Chinese were
soon assimilated, the scope of East Indian immigration, and the fact that these
immigrants were concentrated on the sugar estates, made them a group which,
for other important reasons too, remained on the periphery of the society,
outside, as it were, the direct master-slave relationship and, consequently,
beyond the pale in many respects.
Now, between Emancipation and the turn of the century, two riots of
considerable relevance to the present situation occurred. The first was the
Angel Gabriel riots of 1856 and the second the Cent-Bread riot of 1889. In both
cases these riots took the form of clashes between the people of African
descent and the people of Portuguese descent. My contention is that these riots
occurred because members of the Portuguese community had become well
assimilated into the master-slave relationship, and on account of various
factors, had moved up the scale of relationships in the direction of the masters.
And it was the resentment of the descendants of the slaves at the appearance
of what seemed to be a new ruling group that smouldered beneath the surface
and found subsequent expression in rioting and violence.


- 82-




KYK # 44


Meanwhile, on the sugar estates, the indentured immigrants and their
descendants were beginning to rise up against the planters and the adminis-
tration, spasmodically it is true, but vigorous none the less. The passing of
years brought about a stronger solidarity within the ranks of this group, which
as I have said before, had not been assimilated into the essential relationships
obtaining within the society.
It is my further contention that our present situation had its beginnings
in the emergence of this group as a power in its own right. Challenging the
whole traditional structure of Guianese society by its mere existence, this
group, isolated as it was by social circumstance, developed on the sidelines
of the traditional fabric of relationships andmade its entry into the society not
as emancipated slaves or indentured immigrants, but as a possible ruling
group. And the process which led up to the events of February 16 is the same,
in character, as that which brought about the revolts of the slaves, the Negro-
Portuguese riots and the sugar estate disturbances, all of which stand like mile-
posts in Guiana's history
One conclusion to be drawn from the above is this: None of the groups
in Guianese society is prepared to have any other group ruling it. Not until each
group is confident that no other group will rule will there be real peace in this
country. Thus although recent and contemporary events manifest themselves
in political terms, we should try to understand that they spring from even
deeper social and psychological undercurrents. For what we are witnessing is
the transformation of a whole society. And the apparent complexity of local
politics, expressed in what passes for ideological combat, serves to obscure
rather than explain the factors at work beneath the surface of things. While this
may sound strange in the local context, an examination of international
political activity, with special reference to the cold war as it affects underde-
veloped territories, will make it clear why, although irrelevant to the issue at
hand, Communism plays such a big part in the give and take of local political
rivalry.
It is now that, for the first time in the history of the country, we have a
chance to initiate things, and to fashion them to our own purpose. And without
in the least condoning the tragic events of February 16 and their unhappy
consequences, it may be, after all is said and done, that what happened on that
day is certainly not the worst that could have happened to us in this time and
age. For now at the very least we know what can happen. And also that the old
days have gone forever.
The new days are for us to make. Are we good enough?


-83-




KYK # 44


If a Man Lies to Himself,
The World Will Lie to Him!
Guyana Graphic, April 1973, Radio Broadcast, April, 1973

It was the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca who said and I quote: "The
light of understanding makes me very careful."
Living in a world distinguished by its capacity for producing lies, personal
experience and theoretical reflection combine to elevate Lorca's self-advice
to the status of serious wisdom. For one can as well believe in a lie as in a truth;
and the real problem seems to be not so much what one believes in, as why
does one believe in anything at all.
Believing in anything is having a certain kind of relation with that thing
- be it a concept, value orelse. And depending on the position ofthe observer,
this concept or value or else can be a good thing or a bad thing. What for my
purpose is more important here, concerns what believing itself means: what
meaning it establishes in connection with life.
A man who habitually tells lies is also habitually presenting a truth, which
is that lying is one of his habits. But we can only know this when we find out
that a certain kind of discrepancy exists between what he is telling us and what
the truth is, in so far as this can be ascertained in the environment of his
utterance. And while such a case may be pathological or existential, the point
the example makes is that when sufficient information is available, the telling
of lies becomes the presenting of a truth.
In like manner, what a man believes is contained within the significance
of what he consistently does; so that though his declarations of belief may
point in one direction, the belief-meaning of his consistent activity may well
point in another. While the latter may make clear what he really believes, the
former may just be a habit of expression of the codification into acceptable
terms of practices that are indefensible.
Again, it is often claimed that circumstances prevent men from doing that
which they feel they ought to do in keeping with what they claim they believe.
But when we examine this carefully we will see that we are not in fact dealing
with a conflict between circumstance and belief, but rather with a conflict
between doubtand belief- that is, doubt as to the soundness of the held beliefs.
When such doubt increases beyond a certain point belief ceases to be
belief and becomes something of the order of the truth that lying presents. In
a word, doubt is the belief.
I believe that if a man does not lie to himself, the world will not lie to him,


-84-




KYK # 44


and he will then be in a position to try to find out what the truth of the world
is. On the other hand the man who lies to himself will find the world lying to
him; and he will not be able to find a position from which the truth of the world
may possibly be apprehended. When this happens, lies wouldbe the only thing
available for him to believe in.
What is important here is that the man who does not lie to himself would
know that he sometimes lies; while the man who lies would not even know that
he is lying. The question that leaps at us here is not simply: How is it that some
men manage to fail to lie to themselves; but, how is it that some men find out
what are the things they should not lie to themselves about?
The crude answer to this question is that a man may lie or not lie depending
upon whether lying or not lying serves to accomplish his purpose. And are
there purposes such as can redeem lies? Only actual life and living can provide
answers to this question. And imagination affirms that life does, positively
and vividly.
About ten years ago during what we have come to call our political and
racial disturbances, I happened to be on a street in Georgetown when I noticed
what seemed to be a tugging and scuffling among a group of young people a
little distance away.
In the context of the crisis at that particular time and place, such behaviour
could only have racial implications; and the facts indeed were that a group of
young men of one racial origin had come upon another young man a boy
really and were attacking him with fists and feet.
For some reason the attack ceased rather suddenly with the group of young
men going away in one direction and the boy running in another. Subse-
quently, in a conversation, I mentioned the incident and was told of another
one in which a boy from a coastal village had come to the city an,' 1-d with
misplaced confidence gone walking as though the quiet disposition of the
roadway and dwelling houses was all there was to the city.
An attack like the one I had witnessed ensued. The boy this time,
however, recognizing the racial character of the event, had instinctively
claimed to be of the same racial strain as his attackers. But his attackers,
suspicious, removed his hat to look at the kind of hair growing on his head.
Upon noting it, one of the attackers had challenged the boy's claim of racial
identity.
And upon his admitting thathis parents were each of different racial origin
the attack had commenced to the accompaniment of the attackers stated
intention that they would "beat out" that part of the boy's existence that owed
its origin to the in the eyes of the attackers wrong racial strain.
Thus, beating tookplace. With haton, his appearance wouldhave saved
him. With hat off and his hair's evidence of a relationship with the existence
of a human being of a certain racial strain, he was trapped. What was being


-85-




KYK # 44


attacked was not just the racial origin of the boy, but human existence itself
in the shape of a parent possessing certain characteristics.
And if this is indeed the reality behind this example of racial antagonism,
then what is at stake is not just political, economic, social or cultural issues
as such, but rather the very basis upon which these are built, that is, that taken-
for-granted belief which includes the human as an animal species, a species
governed as a species by ways of behaviour that work for species preservation.
But let this pass for the time being, and let us consider if, say, someone
had asked one of the attackers why he had beaten up the boy. A sure reply
would have been, because other people had beaten up other people on racial
grounds. But this could only be accurate if all the victims hadhad the identical
racial composition as the boy, which would have not in fact been the case.
To seek further, what would the position be if the attacker himself had
happened to be a person of mixed racial composition? Would his attack on
someone be carried out by only a part of himself, that part which did not match
his victim's racial composition? The apparent absurdity is far from absurd.
For it discloses the nature of the void that can exist between whatmen actually
do and what they believe they do and in that believing, proceed on their
journey of lies.
In may be argued, of course, that what I am calling lies are only the
unfortunate consequence of ignorance or a lack of understanding. But this
really is not at issue, since I am talking aboutpositive, notnegative, ignorance.
And positive ignorance is a dangerous thing. That it is, may be readily reduced
from the implications of the example of racial conflict I have cited. For if
racial grounds are presented and accepted as reasons for certain actions when
in truth the real grounds are elemental and not reducible to attributes, then
what really is at stake is not likely to be taken into account at all; as can well
happen if, and, or when political, or economic, or social, or cultural targets,
which are meant in the same way as race is accident, become confused with
what creates them human life.
It is most often in times of crisis that some beliefs, uncritically accepted
in their self-presentation, come to be exposed for what they really are. This
is why it is possible, I think, to suggest as I have done in the example I used,
that the conflict was notjust a matter of a local aberration but rather one which
directly connects with the universal condition; with the fact of human conflict
itself, which derives from the clash between what human beings have and what
they want; from the tension between what they are and what they want to
become.
Inheriting by birth the human way of dealing with this conflict, together
with the triumphs and disasters that have accompanied this way, we fail, I
think, to realise that these triumphs and disasters have their origin in the same
thing, that is, the human cause.


-86-





KYK # 44


And when in the pursuit of any purpose, men find it necessary to resort
to challenging the very right of the human existence of any human, it is the
body of belief which leads to such a position that must be examined, because
the meaning of these beliefs is self-destruction. And destruction of the human
as we know it in human life, does not connote regression to the state of the
animal as is asserted. It connotes rather a departure into the realm of the
monstrous.
Over twenty years ago, in a different yet similar vein, I wrote this poem:

This I have learnt:
today a speck
tomorrow a hero
hero or monster
you are consumed!

Like a jig
shakes the loom;
like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!


-87-





KYK # 44


Open Letter to the People of Guyana
Dayclean Special, 1979

Like other regimes of similar character, the PNC's main preoccupation
is self-perpetuation. In principle the pre-occupation with self-perpetuation is
understandable, since it accords with the fundamental idea of self preserva-
tion.
But while a truly democratic regime would try to ensure self-perpetuation
by acting in a way such as would make it acceptable and needed by the people,
what does the PNC, which poses as socialist, actually do?
The PNC's method of ensuring self-perpetuation consists of indulging in
a deliberate policy of degrading people. And the reasoning behind this is that
degraded people are incapable of effective resistance.
Hamilton Green's statement, published in the Chronicle of August 4, to
the effect that a certain unnamed Roman Catholic priest was responsible for
the death of Father Darke, is the latest flagrant example of this deliberate
policy of degradation. It is so because it expresses contempt for the
intelligence and humanity of people.
Green's statement is in character with the PNC's deliberate policy of
degrading the people.
Of this policy, the following examples should be kept in mind:
Item: In the rigging of elections in which many ordinary and by no means
vicious people were cajoled into doing indecent things, and were thereby
compromised.
Item: In corruption as a way of life, in which people were made to accept
that stealing, cheating, lying, bearing false witness, informing on each other
was a positive sign of loyalty to the regime; was what was expected of them,
and were thereby further compromised.
Item: In the budgetof informationpresented to thepeople by the regime's
rigidly controlled mass media, in which the very language used is perversion,
facts falsified; threats against individuals and groups openly advertised;
internal events of significance ignored; local events of significance sup-
pressed; all contributing to the whole process of moral and intellectual
honesty, one end of which is to make mental independence a crime, and mental
subservience to the regime the highest qualification in the land. And the
greatest damage done in this area is to young people who are led to believe
that they can do anything, no matter how selfish, how intolerant, how
mindless, how coarse, since they identify this attitude with the attitude the
regime underwrites. The result is the warp of personality, the degradation of


- 88 -





KYK # 44


the spirit that is so much abroad in the society.
Item: In the militarisation of the people in which poorly fed children are
made to march in the sun like soldiers, playing militia at the expense of their
lessons; in which paramilitary forces enjoy a spurious social prestige at the
expense of the rights of their fellow citizens, thereby putting a premium on
authoritarian bullying in clear mirror image of the behaviour of the leaders of
the regime, all serving to bring about in the consciousness of people and their
children that parading is more important than learning, and uniforms more
important than respect for law.
These are but a few examples, but for the people they have come to
constitute to some extent what socialism, as the PNC endorses it, signifies to
them.
Socialism is a system based on lofty ideals and its end is the liberation of
man: the enloft of being.
What the PNC regime has brought the people to experience as socialism
is a system based on degradation, the end of which is the regime's self
perpetuation.
The ideology of the PNC is not based on a philosophy of man. It is based
on disrespect for people. The only way to deal effectively with this process
of degradation is by example. The example required is the example of
resistance, the very things the degradation is designed to prevent and to
destroy.
Resistance has to be on two fronts. Resistance to the brute fact of
degradation itself. Resistance to the exploitation of this degradation by the
regime.
The first front is refusal to be further degraded, as individual and as group.
One goes with the other. Thus individual repudiation and civil disobedience.
The second front is exposure of the PNC's ideology of self-perpetuation.
as this ideology can be perceived to have its base on the degradation of the
people. Thus the waging of the psychological offensive, the continuous "war
of nerves."
Who do we think we are?

I sign my name,
Martin Carter


-89-




KYK # 44


A Note on Jagan
Stabroek News, December 1 th, 1987

When in 1947, Cheddi Jagan was first elected to Parliament, the
prevailing state of mind of sophisticated and unsophisticated Guyanese alike,
was marked by an inherited subservience to white colonial officialdom and
uncritical acceptance of the labels posted on people.
By the time of his election, Jagan had already spent six years in the United
States, had studied dentistry, had married Janet and had become acquainted
with the ideas associated with Marxism. The effect of these ideas on the
content of his thinking and the substance ofhis activity he has openly affirmed.
Chief among the ideas associated with Marxism is that which relates to
class struggle as the force that brings about really important social change.
Given the specific social stratification obtaining in Guyanese society it would
be no accident that Jagan's insistence on the primacy of class struggle in
political thought and action, would, in the minds of supporters and opponents,
acquire the status of superstition, in the sense of a questionable applicability;
a superstition displacingsuch other superstitions as the political responsibility
of the native educated stratum or the political benevolence of colonial
administrators.
The events leading up to and following the suspension of the constitution
in 1953, showed however, how little the two latter superstitions had been
displaced. By which time the notion of class struggle had itself been displaced
by another superstition, that is to say, race struggle again a superstition, in the
sense of questionable applicability.
It was even as this transition took place that another one did; the transition
in emphasis on Jagan's part from the notion of class struggle, as rallying call,
to the advocacy of socialism and its economic doctrine, public ownership of
the means of production. Already branded communist, he would now be
baptised Russian, the intended manipulation being that in as much as
socialism was something Soviet, the absurdity followed that to advocate
Socialism and be a socialist, was once to be Sovietist.
Under the burden of these accumulated confusions Cheddi jagan's
political work strained for resemblance to the work of other English speaking
Caribbean leaders. Yet, even before the careers of Jagan and his contempo-
raries had begun, there was already a particular difference in place, and this
had to do with the fact that while the other Caribbean leaders' critical years
in political education had been British oriented, Jagan's had been American,
a comparatively unusual thing for any kind of education in those times.


- 90 -





KYK # 44

Jagan's own memorials of his life as a child of, and on a plantation, depict
a privation and remoteness which could not be less of a preparation, although
possibly more ofa differentiation than a childhood in a town or city would have
inured. The urban and British, rural and American contrasts involved here
must have much to do with the difference in political style between Jagan and
his contemporaries; that style that so many have commented upon, and so
wrongly interpreted as a function of ideological orthodoxy.
It was in keeping, offensively, with the anxiety to find some reason that
would disparage, that, in the earliest of Jagan's political days, it was to the
white American lady's, Janet's, Cheddi Jagan' s wife's incitement that many
of Jagan's opponents would attribute what they saw as Jagan's intransigency.
The antecedent implicit in both of these instances of refusal was and
remains a commonplace of colonial psychology, that inversion of the accep-
tance of domination. Of the latter, it remains to Burnham's credit that he did
not countenance or exploit such and like canard.
It was after Cheddi Jagan again became Premier in 1957 that the nature
of class struggle as such manifested some of its more intractable demographical
and productional contrarities. The observable partition of urban as against
rural interests that hardened after the split in 1955, was a confirmation of
partisan resolve to rectify that disappointment of the prospects raised by the
PPP victory in the election of 1953; that, rather than a consequence of
thorough-going ideological conflict as made out at the time by thesis-
contriving experts and colonial office spokesmen.
The point was that ideological affairs by then had become things that
leaders argued about which would then also have to mean that it was not
ideology that made leaders, but leaders who made ideology. But even such a
formulation would be inadequate. For, with the advent of what, in the crass
idiom would be called Jaganism and Burnhamism, had come the imprison-
ment by mentality of whatever aspects of ideology might have happened to
be engaged.
With accession to virtual parliamentary control following the elections
in 1964, and with accession to actual State control following elections in 1968,
the PNC and Burnhamism would fuse into leadership paramountcy. This in
turn would conduce to a demand from Jagan's supporters that, above all, he
should look out for their interests, since the paramountcy in place would
dispossess them. And political struggle, such as it was, would dissolve into
rampant opportunism, impenetrable and self-justifying.
Intimately bound up with political activity over forty years the outstand-
ing characteristic of Jagan's involvement has been a singlemindedness
commanding admiration. It is as a pioneer in a community's education that
Jagan has come to be accepted. The dismissively intentioned cliches borrowed
from an obsolete reactionary vocabulary and wantonly applied cannot dimin-
ish the value of what he has done.


-91-









































BOVELL HOUSE AND PHARMACY, Skeldon, Corentyne


-i7x


Drawing by Kenton Wyatt, after
photograph by David Ford





KYK #44






Essa sFeatures in Journals


A Note on Vie Reid's New Day
Kyk-Over-Al, No. 24, December, 1958

When Vic Reid's book New Day first appeared it was warmly greeted by
some andrudely challenged by others, in both cases for extra-literary reasons.
Those who greeted warmest were those who felt that Reid had created or at
least led the way to the creating of a "West Indian literary style", whatever
that may mean. As Arthur Seymour expressed it: "Reid's adaptation of
Jamaican dialect points the way for a distinctive West Indian style".
Now it seems to me that the idea contained in the term "West Indian
style", derives from a preoccupation with something other than literature.
For the term "West Indian" presupposes of course "West Indies" and the
term "West Indies" presupposes a community. Thus "West Indian style"
must mean a style informed by the communal life of those who live in the West
Indies. While this is so anthropologically speaking, I do not know if it is in
terms of literature. So far as I know, a book, a piece of literary art, is produced
by an individual, who no matter how much influenced by the life around him
is still an individual, before, during, and after working on a book. The life that
exists around him is material to be taken and transformed into art. It is his raw
material. It cannot dictate what he must do. It yields to him even as he yields
himself to it. Thus what he created is the particular irreducible un-analysable
consequence of a process in which what is external and what is internal
combine to make something new. And whatmatters most in the process is the
artistic power of the writer, the individual at work. If in the process of working
the writer stops to worry about whether he is creating a West Indian style or
anything like that, it seems to me that he will be interfering in the very nature
of the process, which has nothing to do with what people want but rather with
what people are going to get. But perhaps what is meant by the word "style"
in this context is really language, literary language, and what Reid's admirerss ,
seek is a West Indian literary language.
If this is so it is perhaps time to take a look at a sample from the book. I
quote, quoting a sample used by Arthur Seymour in one of his essays.

All of us are waiting to see Father strike Aaron Dacre. You can
see shoulder muscles a-talk to my father's arm underneath his coat;
worry rides Mother and Manuel; Naomi's mouth opens wide, a


-93-





KYK # 44


mecca back fish being shored in net. Fora long time myfather's hand
stayed on the Bible he was carrying. Then his head shook a little, the
shoulder muscles stopped talking. All this time Father's and Aaron
Dacre's eyes were making four with each other...

Good. As Arthur pointed out, it is an "adaptation of Jamaican dialect".
So now we must look forward to adaptations of Barbadian, Trinidadian, St.
Lucian, Grenadian, Guianese, Berbician, Buxtonian dialects, and when all the
adapting and writing is done we will have our body of "distinctive West Indian
styled literature" (which even those who speak the dialect from which it is
contrived will not be able to read, if that is the hope and intention). Then the
main problem will be to decide which is the most West Indian of all, which
is the most distinctively West Indian.
Quite obviously this hankering after a "distinct West Indian style" is a
throw-off from nationalism, West Indian nationalism. The idea is well known
and popular a nation must have national things. But many people seem to
forget that even poverty can have an adjective before it, for example. That
doesn't make it different though, qualitatively, from poverty in general, as a
condition.
So what is Reid's contribution? It ishis style created for a special purpose,
for the purpose of making his book as he wanted it to be made. It may have
significance outside of literature, no one denies that. But to deal with that
significance is to deal with something else, something extra-literary. The
problem is to avoid importing extra-literary considerations into these things.


- 94-





KYK # 44





Power, Race and Trouble
Unpublished, Circa 1965

In nearly all the more illuminating reflections on the Guyana situation,
the word POWER is mentioned and mentioned so often that a danger exists
of it becoming accepted as just another used term, another inevitable unit of
the political language of the day. For everyone knows what is generally meant
when someone says, for example, that "politicians fight for power". Yet how
many fail to realise that, in saying so, or in understanding what is said, they
are, in fact, including themselves and making a judgement about the form of
activity with which they are intimately concerned.
For to say or to understand that "politicians fight for power" is, firstly,
to admit that a certain thing called power does exist, and may well be worth
fighting for. To say, or to understand the same, in derogation, is either to reject
the value of this power or to disapprove of those who seek to obtain it. The
very same sentence therefore acquires differing meanings in the mouth of the
same speaker when directed toward a politician occupying a friendly position
in the structure of power, as against a politician occupying a hostile position
within the same structure. And when the politician who is fighting for power
retains a friendly relation to a given observer then that politician is, for all
practical purposes, fighting for power on behalf of this observer. And when
he is in a hostile relation, the opposite is the case. The dynamic pnnciple of
power alignment illustrated by this system of relationships extends through all
aspects and levels of human experience. In an inverted manner, as Martin
Buber puts it,

...what has a pathological character in personal life is normal
in the relation between the historical representatives of the nation
and the nation itself (Between Man and Man, p. 186).

But what makes a structure of power capable of being evalu-:ted as a
structure in which both beneficial and harmful capacities reside? Time, I
suggest, is the question here, since in all instances, two quantities of power
exist. One, power as available capacity, here and now The other, power as
available capacity, anytime in the future. In our local context, racialism, in
the crude sense of Indians against Negroes, is made to explain away the causal
elements of this universal situation. And it appears to do so because it is a form
of behaviour not amenable to treatment by the accepted procedures of western
parliamentary democracy, the only tools which local political leaders so far


-95-




Full Text

PAGE 1

?'THE HORE THE HEN Of THE HOf?E M TrHE fS. I?' I I ,r.' l' .. .. , I i '.

PAGE 2

KYK#44 IJ77L :.-3'3 ... Art requires talent real tale"t and not mere literacy in any medium. I see no substitute for passion internally generated, and hard work Martin Carter

PAGE 3

KYK#44 FRIENDS OF KYK-OVER-AL NO. 44 A great many individuals and organisations have contributed t o the success of KYK-OVER-AL si nce it was relaunched in December, 1984. Now we o we a very special debt of appreciation to the following for their support of this special issue N o. 44. Their vigor o u s assistance. so readily offered, in strengthening an important part of tbe c ultural traditi o n of Guyana and the West Indies deserves the thanks of the wh o le community. Guyana Bank for Trade & Indu s try Guyana Stores Demerara Distillers Banks DIH Brass Aluminum & Cas t Iro n F o undry Sbell Antille s Caribbean M o l asses Company A ssoc iated Indu stries Guyana F ertilizer s Bank of Nova Scotia National Bank of Industry & Commerce The cost of printing and distributing a literary magazine i s very beavy Plea se help u s t o stre ngthen KYK-OVER-AL by se ndin g your subscrip ti ons to:IAN McDONALD (Editor) do Guysuco, 22 Church Street, Georgetown, Guyana. In the UK please apply to:-F.R. THOMASSON, 38 Carlton Mews Wells. Somerset BAS ISG. In Canada and the United States plea se apply to:AILEEN MORGAN 219 Woodsworth Road North York, Onia. rio M2L 2T5. Subscriptions per i ss ue ( including postage) G$400 EC$15 US$7 C AN$8 The Edit o r would welcome the submission of p oems. s h o rt s t o ries. articles and review s t o con s ider for publication. Publicatio n of cour se. cann o t be g uaranteed and because of expense it will n o t be possible t o return manuscripts. Submissions may be acco mpanied by illu s tr a ti o n s and ph o t og r a ph s o f authors. s uit a ble for blac k and wbite repr od u ction. Copyri gh t (C) 1993 N o r ep rodu ction by a n y means. except for s hort extracts fo r review purposes, may be made with oultbe pe r mission of t h e Editor. ISSN 1012-5094 Layout and Typesetting of Kyk-Over-Al #44 by Red Thread Women's Press in cooperation with Asraf Alii

PAGE 4

KYK#44 Acknowledgements: KYK 44 The Editors wish to express sincere appreciation to: Stanley Greaves for the pen and ink portrait of Martin Carter The Heritage Society for pel mission to reproduce its "Heritage Cards" series. Abraham Poole for recourse to the Booker News archives Asraf Alii for typesetting Joan Gilkes for assisting with proof reading Bridget Welch for assisting with inputting of data from manuscripts The staff and volunteers of Red Thread Women's Press & Especially Martin Carter for permission to include his unpublished poems and prose in this volume.

PAGE 5

Kyk-Over-AI No. 44 May 1993 KYK#44 Co-Editors: Ian McDonald & Nigel Westmaas Copy Editor: Yanda Radzik Table Of Contents New Poems by Martin Carter ... .... . ......... ... ...... ...... ....................... .. .. 1 Across the Editor's Desk. ....... ................. .... .............. ...... .................... ... 5 The Guyana Prize ....................... ... ............... .... ........... ........ .... ........ 1 2 A Martin Carter Prose Sampler ............................ ...... .................... .... 23 Bibliography of Martin Carter's Prose ................... ............... ............. 152 Portfolio of Heritage Houses Pen and Ink Drawings by Kenton Wyatt for The Heritage Society of Guyana #1 Red ......... ...................... ...... . . . . . ... ... .... ........ 42 #2 Georgetown YMCA ...... ............. ...... .... .... .................. 76 #3 Bovell House & Pharmacy ......................... ................. 92 #4 Sharples' House ...... ............ ............. ... ...... .... ............ 113 #5 ThePal,n.s ... ... . ....... ..... ............. ... . ... ............ ..... 127 #6 High Court Buildings.. .... .......................... ............... 132

PAGE 6

New Poems THE CONJUNCTION Very sudden is the sought conjunction. Sought once over and found once over and again in the same sudd e n place. It is where the hair grows. It is where the hand goes. It is the conjunction of loin and the rare possibility of a head on the cushion of hair and l ove. Indeed, I have always want e d to climb upon a window sill to climb and compete with the rain failing down, and rising up. And staying still, in the promissory hope of passion's Signature and the returned wealth of a conjunction. Martin Carter (1989 ) 1 KYK#44

PAGE 7

KYK#44 HORSES My shoe has fallen off And the sole of the foot pleads. As both of my hands. Why is it I do love horses? And their hooves And their very free flanks. It is because they climb the sky And are at one with God. Martin Carter (1989) -2 -

PAGE 8

NO EASY THING I must repeat that which I have declared even to hide it from your urgent heart: No easy thing is it to speak of love Nor to be silent when it all consumes! You do not know how everywhere I go You go with me clasped in my memory: One night I dreamed we walked beside the sea And tasted freedom underneath the moon. Do not be late needed and wanted love What's withheld blights both love itself and us: As well as blame your hair for blowing wind As me for breathing, living, loving you. -3 -Marlin Carter (circa 1970s) KYK#44

PAGE 9

KYK#44 THE POEMS MAN Look, look, she cried, the poems man, running across the frail bridge of her innocence. Into what house will she go? Into what guilt will that bridge lead? I the man she called out at and she, hardly twel ve meet in the middle, she going her way; I coming from mine: The middle where we meet is not the place to stop. Martin Carter (circa 1960s) -4 -

PAGE 10

KYK#44 ACROSS TilE EDITOR'S DESK A Martin Carter Prose Sampler This special issue of Kyk-Over-AI is deeply indebted to Nigel Wesunaas for his dedicated work of research and editing in preparing this special issue devoted principally to prose works by Martin Carter. Mr. Westmaas has spent countless hours delving into the archives to find, so far, ninety nine examples of Martin Carter's prose. Of these he has chosen forty as a sample to appear in this issue. If it had not been for Mr. Westmaas' work and his initiative this invaluable evidence of another dimension in the creative life of a great poet would hardly have come to light. He has rendered a great service to Guyanese and West Indian literature and scholarship. This issue also owes a considerable debt to Vanda Radzik of Red Thread. She is responsible for the design and layout of this issue, for organising the illustrations, and in general for shepherding the issue through all its prepara tory stages into print. The seriousness of her commitment is exceeded only by the quality of her work Derek Walcott's Nobel Prize When I heard the news that Derek Walcott had won the Nobel prize for literature I sat down and wrote the following out of profound delight: All West Indians will be celebrating Derek Walcott's winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is an immense honour by far the world's most prestigious literary prize. It is a measure of Wal c o tt's stature as a poet that not only does the Prize honour him, but he also greatly honours the Prize. It is also a measure of the strength of our literature that the re were two other West Indians contending closely for the world's greatest literary honour V .S. Naipaul of Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana's Wilson HaITis. But Walcott has won and all West Indians should celebrate. It is the literary equivalent of being world champions in cricket. I felt jubilant this morning when I heard -5 -

PAGE 11

KYK#44 the news and the sun seemed brighter than nOllllal and the trees greener. And I spared a thought, as I heard the news, for Walcott's old mentors, Frank Collymore of Barbados and Arthur Seymour of Guyana, who way back in the 1940s gave Walcott his first chance in their magazines. They must be drinking a toast now in the Elysian fields. It is astonishing to think that Derek Walcott has been writing and publishing poems since the 1940s. His work seems so immortally young. I remember when I was a schoolboy reading in RIM the poems As John to Patmos and A City's Death by Fire, written when he was still in his teens, and knew -as I knew it also when I saw Frank Worrell late cut Lance Pierre at the Queen's Park Ovalthat here was gemus. As John to Patmos, in each love-leaping air, o slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear What I swear now, as John did: To praise love long, the living and the brown dead. Over the years which have since cascaded through all our histories he has created for us a special poetic domain, "independent of the tradition he inherited, yet not altogether orphaned from it." He belongs to us and to the world through his absolute mastery of words which has increased and increased and increased the singing lines emerging, as it was said of Mozart's music, as if an artery was cut and the flow of the life-blood could not be stopped. In 1992 Derek Walcott, from small St. Lucia, has become a towering figure in world literature. Joseph Brodsky, the Russian Nobel Laureate, has called him the best poet writing in English. There has been awed acclaim, worldwide, for his full-length narra tive poem Omeros; "filtering all sorts of titanic sorrows through a limpid and ferocious intellect." Walcott himself says of Omeros : I wrote it primarily for the Caribbean. For me it was an act of gratitude for St. Lucia, the people, the weather, the life I have lived there. And thus, as it has always been, genius finds universality in lives and places remote from any mainstream or central points of history. What will he do next to astonish us? As Edward Baugh of Jamaica said not long ago, we cannot guess what port his poetic craft will put into next we must leave him voyaging still, the words of -6 -

PAGE 12

KYK#44 Shabine, the red-nigger mariner-poet of The Schooner Flight beat mg 1D our ears : I have only one theme: The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart. Permission has been sought from the Nobel Foundation to reproduce Derek Walcott's Nobel lecture in a future issue of Kyk-Over-AI. In a way every issue of Kyk-Over-A I which has gone before will have been waiting for such an event. Poetry and the President Politics is for now, literature lasts forever but even so we cannot resist taking note of the elections held on 5th October, 1992, which were vouched for as essentially honest by a large assembly of observers and which therefore brought to office at last a Govemment agreed by all to be popularly returned and democratically based. A few days after his inauguration the Pre sident, Dr. Cheddi Jagan surprised many by fmding time to attend readings on October 15th, World Poetry Day. The following records that event: World Poetry Day, 15 th October, was celebrated in Georgetown with readings given by a number of Guyanese poets at the Playhouse, a small theatre in the heart of Georgetown. The oppvttunity was taken also to read from the works of Derek Walcott whose winning of the 1992 Noel Prize for Literature has been greatly acclaimed in Guyana as no doubt it has been in the rest of the West Indies. The theatre was packed for the occasion with not enough seats available and people standing in the aisles and wings. In the last few years there has been an increasing number of poetry reading s in Georgetown and the numbers attending have been growing impres sively. Dr. Cheddi Jagan, sworn in as President of Guyana only a e w days previously, paid a surprise visit to the Playhouse to attend the readings. He was given a warm and appreciative welcome. He was accompanied by the new Minister of Education and Cultural Devel opment, Dr. Dale Bisnauth. It was an unexpected boost from officialdom for those who love literature and the arts. Among those reading were young playwright/actress/singer Paloma -7-

PAGE 13

KYK#44 Mohamed, performance poet Ras Michael and story-teller Michael Khan, poet and novelist Ian McDonald, distinguished critic and playwright Dr. Michael Gilkes and poet and playwright Churaumanie Bissundyal. In honour of Derek Walcott, Dr. Gilkes gave a memorable reading from Walcott's great poem. The Schooner Flight with its famous line challenging all West Indians to choose what they will be: and either I'm nobody, or I am a nation. When President Jagan was leaving a young lady approached and touched him on the arm. "Mr. President, thank you for coming. I hope you can release the creative energy of all of us in Guyana." The President turned and looked a little surprised. Tben be smiled and nodded. It was a good moment on a good evemng. What is a Poet? In Stephen Gill's excellent biography of William Wordsworth (Oxford University Press, 1990), there is a passage which brings home vividly the source and purpose of poetry at its best. In the Spring of 1802 he prepared a new copy for the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, third edition, cbanging the 1800 one so substan tially the two Prefaces ought always to be treated as separate. He wrote at length on metre and put in an Appendix a defence of his assertions about "that what is usually called poetic diction." More remarkable than either of these additions, however, is the answer Wordsworth gives to bis own question: "what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet?" He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions. and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe and habitually impelled to create them wile re h e does not find them ... Unlike the biographer or the historian, the poet need acknowl edge only one overriding imperative that be should give pleasure. But "this necessity of producing immediate pleasure is not a degra--8

PAGE 14

KYK#44 dation of the Poet's art:" It isfar otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere, because it is not formal, but indirect: it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves. Finally, with the grandeur matched only by Shelly in his Defence of Poetry, Wordsworth defines his "sublime notion" of Poetry as the "breath and finer spirit of all knowledge" and of the Poet as: The rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywher e with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowl edge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the Poet's tiwughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wing s. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge it is as immortal as the heart of man. This is a glorious afflIll1ation, but an astonishing one to make at the close of the Enlightenment and of the fIrst phase of the Industrial Revolution. Scientists and engineers, philosophers and political thinkers, philanthropists and social activists had transformed every aspect of life from cups and saucers to concepts of Deity, and yet it is poetry which Wordsworth declares" the most philosophic of all writing." This is more than a declaration of the importanceofhllmane learning, more than an assertion of the imagination against the pressure of a sceptical, scientifIc, or utilitarian ethos. Wordsworth confers upon the poet the roles of chronicler and preserv er, of comforter and moral guide, of prophet and mediator. His reference to the "divine spirit" of the poet is not a lazy one To the author of The Dunciad such exalted affillllations would have seemed ravings. Johnson who defIned the poet as "An inventor; an author of fiction; a writer of poems; one who writes in measure", would have thought them nonsense, probably blasphemous nonsense. Even readers accustomed to place poetry at the highest of the literary arts and -9-

PAGE 15

KYK#44 familiar with the many eighteenth-century disquisitions on the theory of poetry could not have been prepared for the subJime and comprehensive credo Wordsworth published in June 1802. Publications Publications of interest to West Indians are received across this desk in an unending flow. They all deserve notice and many of them deserve substantial commentary and review. One of the weaknesses of West Indian literary life is the dearth of carefully considered and finely wrought reviews of individual books and magazines of importance. Where would these appear with any regularity? When will we graduate to anything beginning to approach the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement or even the better weekend supplements in the Metro politan newspapers? Here is a sample of the scores of interesting West Indian publications received recently which we would have wished to have reviewed with the substance and style they deserve. The 50th anniversary issue of BIM, edited in chief by John Wickbam. This, surely, is compulsory purchase for any self-respecting West Indian's library. Anyone at all interested in West Indian art and literature must make the effort to get hold of copies of the Callalloo special issues, Volume 15 Nos. 2 and 3, on the literature and culture of Haiti. Callalloo is a journal of African American and African arts and letters edited by Charles Rowell (Depax unent of English, Wilson Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA) and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. These two issues there are really two full-scale books are superlatively produced and full of astonishing creative endeavour. Look what treasures are near at hand and we hardly know them. Wasafiri No. 16, Autumn 1992, is a special issue of this magazine, published by A TCAL Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures and edited by Susheila Nasta (P.O. Box 195, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7XB, UK) devoted to the Caribbean. The issue is "dedicated to the wealth of excellent writing that continues to come out of the Caribbean." Amidst a great deal more, this issue includes extremely interesting interviews with Kamau Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Jamaica Kincaid, Ramchand's article Columbus in Chains, Michael Gilkes writing on the poetry of Robert Lee, and Fred D'Aguiar's long and extraordinary poem 1492. One of the most important books we received is undoubtedly Anne 10-

PAGE 16

KYK#44 Walmsley's The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966 72 (New Beacon Books, 1992). There is an excellent review of it by Stewart Brown in Wasafiri No. 16, and we wholeheartedly concur with his concluding remark: "For everyone engaged in the study of contemporary Caribbean culture in its broadest sense this book is an invaluable and indispensable source." Poetry in the Caribbean is vibrantly alive if one is to judge by what must surely be a record number of anthologies appearing recently. Issue No. 14, Spring 1991, of the Graham House Review (Published by the Colgate University Press, Box 5000, Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y 13346, USA) is a special issue featuring recent poetry from the West Indies, guest-edited by Kenneth Ramchand. Crossing Water, published in 1992 by The Greenfield Review Press (2 Middle Grove Road, Greenfield Centre, N.Y 12833, USA) and edited by Anthony Kellman, is a very fine collection of contemporary poetry from the English-speaking Caribbean. The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry published in 1992 by Heinemann (Halley Court, Jordan Hill, Oxford, OX2 8EJ, UK) and edited by Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald. The editors in their Introduction, writing about their attempt to meet the publisher's brief to make a selection from "simply the best", had this to say: After all the worrying and wrangling over the selection, we do believe that this anthology offers its readers a real sense of the energy, variety and accomplishment of contemporary West Indian poetry. Issue No.9 of Offerings, edited and published by Kampta Karran (Bel Vue Pilot Scheme, West Bank Demerara, Guyana) is a valuable "Celebration of Guyanese East Indian Poets 1901 1991." It is an anthology of the poems of 83 different poets of diverse backgrounds and from very different eras. It is an extremely useful introduction to the poetry of East Indians in Guyana, whose work is often neglected in writing about West Indian literature. Perhaps my favourite among all the anthologies which have crossed this desk in recent times is the Special issue, Volume 35, No.4, Summer 1992, of The Literary Review (285 Madison Avenue, Madison N.J. 0794'1 USA), devoted to the poetry of women poets of the Caribbean (all, not just the English-speaking, Caribbean). The issue is guest-edited by Pam Mordecai and Betty Wilson and they have done a wonderful job. All the poets in this collection have had (some are now dead) a home in the Caribbean .. Their work jumps from these pages cascadingly alive with beauty and sadness and vivid involvement with life at the grass roots. -11

PAGE 17

KYK#44 TheGn Prize Feature Address : His Excellency Dr. Cheddi lagan President of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana Distinguished Guests, Cbah Ulan of the Committee for the Guyana Prize for Literature, Guyanese Writers, Chancellor of the University, Vice-Chan cellor, Faculty Heads and Staff Members of the Diplomatic Corps, Leader of the Opposition, Overseas Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. This evening I am enOlUlously honoured to be here and to address you on this important occasion of the Third Award Ceremony of the Guyana Prize for Literature. As we arrive at the threshold of change in our homeland, after a long and arduous struggle, our most urgent question is: what resources can we draw on in the rebuilding of our country, in the remoulding of the values and perceptions necessary for the task ahead and in the fostering of a truly national consciousness. There is a new dawn in our sky and how can we, as a people, seize upon the possibilities it offers? How do we aspire to debunk our past experiences and embark upon new beginnings? Today, in Guyana, a land rich in natural resources, the stark paradox is the undeniable presence of poverty among the vast majority of our people, not just economic poverty, but intellectual and spiritual impoverishment, the deprivation and depravation of our young women, generations of human potential wasted through oppression, repression and lack of opportunity at various levels. Translated into facts and figures, today, in this country, at the most fundamental level, only one outof every seven students can obtain a gOOd grade in English at the CXC examinations, while only one in every six can pass mathematics with an acceptable grade, and so on. Infant mortality rate is at an unprecedented high, the highest in the region, standing at forty-five out of every thousand, while disease (such as malaria) is devastating our rural and aboriginal populations Our present daily minimum wage is approximately one US dollar per day; all the while the country has been haemorrhaging from a brain drain by virtue of the exodus of our vital human resource. We have to find the road to self-recovery from the onslaught of colonial ism, from our more recent experiences and from the cultural penetration brought to us through the little TV boxes in our living rooms. We have to get in touch with ourselves as a people and plumb the depths of our consciousness to find ournative strengths. reject the discourses that have labelled us as racial -12-

PAGE 18

KYK#44 and cultural stereotypes and seek freedom from the shackles of our past. As one regional writer said, where the re is nothing, there is everything to create. What is the role of the Guyanese writer in this pledge we have just taken? What is the relevance of art in the pursuit of daily life? .. This is why I am pleased to be he re today to shar e this moment with the writers whose works have been submitted for the Guyana Prize for Literature because the Guyanese writer has a major role to play in the rebuilding of our society. Together with the capacity for thought and reason man's most valuable, powerful asset is his imagination and, consequently, his creative application of knowledge and his creative reconciliation of land and landscape. George Lamming, speaking at CAR I FESTA 1982, on the importance of the creative imagination, said: "it functions as a civilizing andhumanising force in a proceSs of struggle. It offers an experience through which feeling is educated ... The education of feeling must be at the heart of any struggle for liberation." For the past forty years I have been close to the working man. Based on this affinity I want to relay an observation which I think our writers may find it necessary to consider People engaged in the arts must see themselves as part of the development process and relate to all other sections of the population. This mOllling, Ian McDonald, over Viewpoint, said this exercise is not for the purpose to produce the best literature in the world it is an exercise to enhance our abilities to communicate. I agr ee We have to communicate in such a way that at the end of the day all your creativity would have been purposeful. All your work should be able to reflect itself in the daily lives of actual people. This is why it is most important for our young students, in the most formative years of psycho-social growth and the acquiring of self-knowledge, to gain a good grounding of the issues addressed in imaginative writing. Education is not just giving each child a free place in school. It is the material that comes out of that crucible that forms the fabric of our society, the perceptions that are born in that process, the inculcation of positive values, to promote, above all honesty in human relationships and the ability to recognise and address, rather than to be clouded by, situations which are inimical to personal, national and regional growth. Very often, the most perceptive insights into the human condition are contained in fiction and it is through its literary parallels and analogies that we can recognise the quirks of human nature and society and come to terms with our own identity problem s ; we can learn how to rid ourselves of inherited and inbred prejudices in our common pursuit of one destiny. For those who will be awarded prizes tonight, my warmest congratula tions to you and, at all events, I want to encourage our writers who have not won prizes, not be discouraged but to continue to be the voice, the vision and the conscience of our people. You have a pivotal role to play in the revolution of consciousness now crucial to the rebuilding of this country. It is imperative -13-

PAGE 19

KYK#44 that we allow our imagination to seek new creative possibilities of the EI Dorado dream. I applaud the spirit of your undertakings and re-assert the promise made in the PPP/Civic Manifesto that this government will give even more for the development of the creative abilities of our people. I thank you. The Judges' Report: Mark McWatt ChaiIman, Your Excellency the President of Guyana Honourable Prime Minister, Honourable Mr. Desmond Hoyte, Ministers of Government, Mem bers of the Diplomatic Corps, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is an honour and a privilege to be here tonight to participate in this celebration of the Literary arts and recognition of those whose literary talent, skill and careful craft have caused them to be singled out among Guyanese writers for this year's award of the Guyana Prize. I am also grateful for the opportunity to present this report on behalf of my distinguished fellow judges. These were Dr. Denis Williams, Guyanese author, artist and anthropologist and Director of the Walter Roth Museum; Dr. Carolyn Cooper, senior lecturer in English at the Mona, Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies; Mr. Alim Hosein, lecturer in English at the University of Guyana and Dr. Stewart Brown, senior lecturer at the Institute of West African studies at the University of Binuingham. Unfortunately Dr. Carolyn Cooper could not attend the adjudicating sessions in person, but we were able to have discussions with her, via telephone, at her home in Mona, Jamaica. Despite these long-distance consultations the work of the judges proceeded with despatch and we were able to reach unanimous decisions about short-lists and eventual winners without lengthy or embattled debate. On behalf of the Judges I must express our gratitude to the chainnan of the management committee of the Guyana prize, Vice Chancellor Professor Dennis Craig, for providing all that was necessary for the smooth progress of the judging exercise The Guyana prize has grown in stature and recognition over recent years and is viewed with wistfulness or perhaps even envy particularly by young writers in other parts of the Caribbean. This confirDls the value of the prize for the Guyanese writer and society and vindicates the original decision to institute it at a time of scarce resources. Mindful of all this the judges were determined to preserve the criterion of excellence as they approached the forty-three entries in this the third series of awards of the Guyana Prize. Forty-three entries in the three genres of poetry, drama and prose fiction: It was a lot of reading! But very rewarding reading; for a Guyanese it was an exercise of recognition or self-recognition. Having to read these works in a -14-

PAGE 20

KYK#44 relatively short span of time left a particularly vivid impression of people and place, of the multiple textures of the lives lived in this country and, at the same time, a conflImation of an undefinable, but definite common vision or quality of mind what Jeffrey Robinson has called "the Guyaneseness of Guyana Literature." In this sense the num ber and the variety of the entries indicate that literature is alive and in robust good health here in Guyana; this is not to say, however, that all entries were of the highest literary qUality. There were a few in each category that achieved excellence and could comfortably be short listed; there were several which, while not making it into the short lists, showed promise or potential or were good, solidly entertaining works of which no author need be ashamed; but there were also several that were weak.. The genre with the largest number of weak entries was poetry, and it is significant that this is also the genre in which there was the largest number of entries which were "untested" in the sense that they were self-published works They had not undergone the trial by fire of public performance, as would have been the case with most of the plays; nor were they subjected to the careful scrutiny and possible revision attendant upon commercial publication. Some collections were slight, some indulgent, some obscure; but the most common fault in the weaker entries was the fact that they were insufficiently crafted not enough time and thought and work went into their production. For support in this last point I turn to no less an authority on the making of poetry than Derek Walcott the first West Indian writer to be awarded the Nobel prize for Literature. The craft of writing has been an obsession with Walcott since his youth in St Lucia at high school, and in a recent interview he denounces the impatience with craft in the young writers of regions such as ours: ... the most upsetting delusion that emerging literatures or cultures have is that the word craft is an antagonistic concept ... (it is) in the apprenticeship stage you can reatly judge a person as an artist There's no apprenticeship around, there s instant recognition, instant belligerence, instant arrogance It's very dangerous . people d o n't realize how they're being trapped into a universal idea of what the latest fashion should be. These tough words from Walcott are not offered here as a stick with which to beat the young writers of Guyana, but rather as an indication from someone who should know of the dangers we court when we neglect to put in the full quota of those lonely hours of unglamorous and repetitive spadework that are necessary in the practice of all the creative arts Unless he's convinced he's transcribing the words of God, a writer must revise and revise, and resist the seduction of his own written words. It is seldom the case that anything good 15 -

PAGE 21

KYK#44 is lost in the revision of a poem or a story; and even if he has to cut out a favourite passage or scene, unless he's teIminall y ill, there's every chance he'll be able to use it in a future poem, novel, play. A writer must be hard on himself: Walcott served a long and arduous apprenticeship in order to become a poet in English; this meant (in his own words): "nothing less than ranging over the entire corpus of English poetry, learning the technical variety of different epochs and movements ... Hard work, but look where it got him. But I begin to run the risk of usurping the office of those who are here tonight to make speeches about literature. My function is merely to report on the judges' decisions, so let me turn to the short-lists. The three collections of poetry short -listed were all different in focus and texture; Season of Sometimes, by Marc Matthews is a mature and accom plished collection of the kind of highly wrought poems we expect of him, one hears the distinctive voice of this great perfoImer of poetry in these works of wry and serious social comment. Courida Elegies by Sardar Asare is a collection of poems on an impressive range of subjects and full of echoes of different voices and languages. The poet has made use of his vast experience of foreign lands and tongues to create a fabric composed of different textures oflived experience. Not all the fragments cohere, however, in a unified vision or aesthetic experience The third short-listed collection is Essequibo, by Ian McDonald, in which one part of the Guyanese landscape, the lowerreaches of the Essequibo River, are hallowed and claimed by the creative imagination in some truly fine poems. The river itself is a powerful, unifying presence in the collection and becomes almost a character in several individual pieces. The riverain land scape is described with considerable evocative power in day and night and in several of its different "moods". It bears historical vestiges of past settlement and cultivation, suggestions of mystery and menace and the traffic of ordinary humanity; it is the scene of heroic actions by fabled characters; it is the text in which one reads the fate of a continent and its peoples. The voice in most of these poems is quiet, but mature and unfaltering, and breathes a kind of grandeur into the relationship between man and river. The judges found that there was much to commend among the entries in drama. It was quite clear and somewhat surprising for those of us who don't live here that there is a robust and thriving popular theatre in Guyana, which, despite the sameness of theme and subject, has reached, in the hands of some playwrights, a great technical sophistication. Harold Bascom's Philbert and Loraine was the best of the plays of this type, centred around the home and complicated domestic relationships. The play is well-written and makes excellent use of the resources of the theatre. A Pleasant Career, by Michael Gilkes, is a play involving the life and fiction of Edgar Mittelholzer. Through several interesting devices and techniques television interviews, childhood 16 -

PAGE 22

KYK#44 conversations, ghostly presences, the enactment of scenes from the novels a compelling psychological portr ait of Mittelbolzer emerges, amidst multiple echoes (for the cognoscenti) from the novels and the autobiography. Children of Two Worlds, by Jay Bunyan is a hard-hitting play by a Canada-based Guyanese playwright about identity crises that cause the disintegration of a mixed-race family of Guyanese origin living in Toronto. Though the play's tough language sometimes seems overdone and might ring false to the Guyanese ear, it contributes to the impression of power and the profound feeling that the play's conflicts evoke. The Eleventh Hour, by Han y Narain, apart from being a suspense-filled thriller about a frantic attempt to save a man convicted of murder in the last hours before his scheduled execution, raises philosophical questions about the death penalty and about parental neglect as the cause of criminal behaviour. The actual writing may be crude in parts, but the plot and the superb sense of theatre recommend Harry Narain as an important new playwright. The works short-listed for fiction were Steadman and Joanna, a novel by Beryl Gilmore set in 18thcentury Surinam about a white European man and the slave girl he married. The events of this very interesting and unusual novel take place in the Corentyne/Canje area at the time when the foundations of Guyanese history were bein g laid there. The Crying of Rainbirds, by Noel Williams, is a collection of finely crafted stories presenting ajaundiced view of life on a tourist-infested Caribbean Island. Guyanese fiction and several of the writers that produce it -continue to be well served by Peepal Tree Press, which published Williams' novel as well as the next one on the short-list, Janjhat, by Rooplal Monar Monar a previous winner of the GuyanaPrize and an acclaimed master of short fiction, is here venturing into the world of the novel; his keen observation and mastery of dialect are much in evidence, although the novel seems to give way to a selmon towards the end. Finally, there is The Intended, by David Dabydeen, on one level a marvellous tale of two places Guyana's Corentyne coast and the London of the West Indian Immigrant; there are other levels, however, in this richly suggestive novel: there is the complex question of origin and identity as the Guyanese Indian protagonist [mds himself in London among immigrants of his own race, but from the sub-continent, and who speak language s he d oes not understand. At the same time he is rejected by the English, whose language, customs and racist hostility he understands only too well. The Intended is a novel that is cunningly aware of contemporary literary theory and all the shibboleths of post-colonialism and deconstruction, and on one level, is playing to this particular gallery. This is a very impressive achieve ment for a frrst novel. Those are the short-lists anditmust be stressed that each short-listed work was judged to be worthy of receiving the prize in its particular category it 17 -

PAGE 23

KYK#44 was simply a matter of choosing the best in each case. As it happened the judges had no great difficulty in separating the prize-winners from the others. In poetry it was the decision of the judges that there was no work that merited the prize for first book of poetry, so there is only one prize awarded in this category: I am delighted to announce that the Guyana prize for Poetry goes to Ian McDonald for Essequibo. Next, I announce with great pleasure that the Guyana prize for Drama is awarded to Michael Gilkes for his play A Pleasant Career. In fiction the judges again found that, once the winner of the Guyana Prize for Fiction was decided, there remained no work of sufficient merit in the category of first book of fiction to be awarded the prize. The judges felt, however, that a case should be made for the award of a special prize for historical fiction to be given to Beryl Gilroy for her interesting and original novel, Steadman and Joanna. This case was made and agreed, and it is therefore my pleasure to announce the award of a special prize to Beryl Gilmore for Steadman and Joanna. We come finally to the Guyana Prize for Fiction. It is a great honour for me to declare the winner of the Guyana Prize for Fiction David Dabydeen for The Intended. Ladies and gentlemen, I feel greatly honoured to have been appointed cbainuan of the judges; I was very impressed by the quality of the works that were short-listed and I regret that it is not possible for all of them to be awarded prizes. I am satisfied that the winners chosen are writers of the greatest distinction, and I look forward to reading future works by them. I remind those who did not win that now is the time to start writing the works that will be entered for the next Guyana prize. I thank you very much. ACCEPTANCE SPEECH: Michael Gilkes Mr. Chairman, your Excellency, the President of Guyana, Ministers of Government, Members of the Diplomatic Corps Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen I feel deeply bonoured tonight. Not only because it is always reassuring to have one's work selected for a prize: a kind of public endorsement of one's private vision, but also because it is the Guyana Prize. As we've heard, there were nearly 50 entries. The number has grown every year. The competition has certlinly provided an important impetus -a focus -for the literary arts in Guyana. Guyanese and their governments, in good times and bad, have demon strated a healthy regard for the arts. The works of our established writers and -18-

PAGE 24

KYK#44 artists (Martin Carter, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew, Roy Heath, Aubrey Wil liams Denis Williams, Ian McDonald Stanley Greaves, Philip Moore, Ken Corsbie, Henry Mootoo -to name only some of the best Icnown) are highly respected and appreciated wherever in the world they are read, seen or performed. But they do not exist in a vacuum: There is a thread of continuity running through the arts. Today's younger Guyanese writers and artists (whether they Icnow it or not), owe something to the work done by other, established figures. Those figures, in turn, owe something to the ground work of early pioneers like Edgar Mittelholzer Arthur Seymour, Edward Burrowes, Norman Cameron and others. The artist may be a lonely figure, but never a loner, a Crusoe startled by strange footprints. He or she is part of a community of souls: Art is a continuum. So, in receiving a prize for my play on the life and fictions of Edgar Mittelholzer I fee l that it is Mittelholzer's spirit, his uncompromising commitment to his art, that is really being honoured. And that is as it should be. I'm especially happy that, in spite of Guyana's troubled political history, our fall from admired standards of social, intellectual and economic life, a high regard for the Arts of the Imagination has (like our Guyanese hospitalj ty, stubbornly survived. Guyana has always welcomed the arts, ever since those early artists' associations the Assembly Rooms the dramatic clubs, the Theatre Guild, the Working People' s art groups, the little magazines and journals like Caribia, the Chronicle Xmas Annllal (soon to be re-issued, I'm glad to hear) and of course, Kyk-Over-Al. Through that ftrst remarkable Carifesta the brainchild of Mr. Forbes Burnham an event still talked about (21 years later) with misty-eyed nostalgia by our Caricom cousins ( and an event still to be paid for it is wickedly rumoured by less friendly Regional neighbours) to the present Guyana Prize, instituted by former President Mr. Desmond Hoyte, who, I'm reliably informed can quote Wilson Hani s's poetry, from memory a feat Hanis scholars might well envy Guyana has remained a country where the arts have always been respected, enco uraged and enjoyed. President Jagan and Mrs. Jagan have always been enthusiastic supporters of the Arts. I still have a newspaper clipping of Mrs Jagan's critical review of a Theatre Guild Production in the late 70s. Hers was easily the most infor med the most lucid and the fairest of the reviews on that occasion. Recently, at a public reading at the Playhouse on World Poetry Day, President Jagan paid a s urprise visit well, it was unexp ected, but no s urprise to those of us who know of his keen interest in the arts. There is a report of this visit in the latest edition of our Regional newspaper, Caribbean Week, by Ian McDonald. This is how it ends: When President Jagan was leav ing, a young lady approached 19 -

PAGE 25

KYK#44 and touched him on the arm. "Mr. President, thank you for coming. I hope you can release the creative energy of all of us. The President turned and looked a little surprised. Then he smiled and nodded. It was a good moment on a good evening. This may be a good moment, on another good evening, to echo that young lady's bold-faced but right request. And judging from our President's address tonight, I think. the answer is in the afflrmative. But if there has been respect for the Arts there has also been neglect. This splendid Cultural Centre, for example, the envy of many of our richer Caricom neighbours, has fallen into disrepair. This, and other cultural and theatre spaces urgently need mainte nance, equipment, major repair or re-construction. Without these, even the most vigorous and dedicated management will remain a downhill struggle. Any attempt to provide what's needed, whether privately or publicly funded (or both) would, I suggest, be an important investment in our human resources, in the creative potential an d development of young Guyanese in particular, who to their immense credit have themselves helped to keep these cultural centres alive in difflcult times. A popular theatre has sprung up with all the inevitable, attendant pleasures and problems that that implies. But the talent and skills needed for the maintenance of high standards, for the training of young people, for the release of their creative energies, already exists. A solid framework; well-equipped, well-managed cultural and theatre spaces is all that is needed. I must, however, confess to a certain bias. I believe that the Theatre Arts (Drama Dance and Music), offer the widest scope for the development of a use of personal confldence and social responsibility. A strong theatre movement, supported with services (if not with subventions) would, I submit, not only enhance our educational, cultural and social climate, but also encourage personal and national pride through the training, development and exercise of creative talent for social consciousness. Theatre is, after all, a community art, requiring all the available skills, employing all the disciplines, including literature helping a society to understand itself. The value of the Arts, as a whole, in promoting Regional thinking, is inestimable Even as talk of Regional integration grows louder the artists and writers of the Region continue to demonstrate as they have for decades, the reality of Regional Consciousness. Derek Walcott's Nobel Award is not only the most prestigious prize available for literature it is also more importantly the clearest most public acknowledgment of the power and vision of the Caribbean Consciousness. For it is Derek's cross-cultural vision, his creole eye, his Janus style which cuts across racial and cultural barriers an approach which marries classical and creole, white and black, dialect and standard, craft and caring, that makes -20-

PAGE 26

KYK#44 his wort. OIiginaJ and great. His is a heterogenous Caribbean identity (shared by many of our remarkable artists and writers) which powers his work: the result of a long apprenticeship and patient marinading in the cultural diversity of the Caribbean basin. That cultural diversity is nowhere more demonstrable than here in Guyana, and it remains our greatest resource: an enorlllOUS, creative potential: the real gold of EI Dorado. The Guyana Prize for Literature, therefore, though it is a national award (and that gives it a special, personal value) has deeper resonances. It is also an occasion for celebrating the challenge of the Arts of the Imagination as a measure of community the cultural life blood of the Regional body politic, whose health it is the business of us all to safeguard and promote. So, it is with a keen sense of occasion, and with the greatest pleasure that we, the prize winners, accept with the awards you have made to us here, tonight. 21 -

PAGE 27

I I I I I I I .TH HORf TH HEN Of OUR TrH W TH HORf OUR TrH rs. , , '. , , , / , I , I , , I /

PAGE 28



PAGE 29

, ..

PAGE 30

KYK#44 Contents Introduction .................. ............................................................ 27 A Free Community of Valid Persons ............... .... .................. ..... 30 Fiction Maccabee at Sea ..... ............................. ............... . .... ................ 33 Out, Out the Fire .... ............... . .......................... ,_ ....... ,_, _._. ,_ .. _.36 Selected ArticieslEditorials from Thunder N on-Co-ope ration ..................................... ............................... 43 An American Oracle .... ........... .... ............................................. .45 Politics and The Individual.. ...... ......................................... ...... .49 No Separate Salvation ...... ..... .................................................... 50 What is a Politician .. ............. ........ ... ........ ....................... ,_ ... 52 Portrait of Churchill. .............. ................................................... 55 A Dark Foundation ............. ... ....... .... . ................. .... .... ...... ... .. 57 From Babylonian to British ....................................................... 60 Bribes for What? ........... ................. ........................... .... .......... 62. Our Newspapers and What They Stand For ................................ 64 Hamlet ..................... ................................................ ...... ..... ... ... 66 This Race Business .... ................................ ... ............................ 68 But Where is Burnham ? .......... .................................................. 70 Wanted: A Great Obeah Man ......... ............................................ 72 Where Are the Her oes ? ...... ........... ............................................. 74 Other Newspaper Articles Sensibility and the Search ..................................... ...... ............... 77 Recent Events Spring from Deeper Social Undercurrents .......... 82 If a Man Lies to Himself, The World Will Lie to Him ................. 84 Open Letter to the People of Guyana ........................................ 88 A Note on Jagan ........... ............. ........... .................................... 90 25 -

PAGE 31

KYK#44 Essays/Features in Journals/Magazines A Note on Vic Reid's New Day ................................................... 93 Power Race and Trouble ..... ...................................................... 95 Why Guiana Needs Independence ............. ................................ 97 Sambo at lArge ............................... ........................................ l ()() Apart From Both ..... ...... ............................................... ........ 102 A Religious Interpretation of Guyanese Proverbs ..................... 105 The Location of the Artist ................ ..... .... ....... ..................... 111 Addresses/Speeches Question of Fiji .................... ...... ............................................ 114 The Freedom to Choose ........................................................... 118 The Changing Context of Arts and Artists in Guyana Today ..... 122 Notes on Artists Artist as Artist . ...... ............ ..... ..... ......................... .... .... ....... 128 The Paintings of Stanley Greaves . . . ........ . . ...... .................... 129 The Poems of Christopher Aird ..... ...... .... ............................. . 130 The Paintings of Bernadette Persaud. ............ .......................... 131 Interviews In Contradiction ........ .... ......... .... .......... ........................ ....... 133 On the Reality of Independence ............................................... 142 Interview with Martin Carter by Peter Trevis ....................... .... 145 Bibliography ............ ... . .... ............ ..... ... . ......... ................. ....... .... 152 -26-

PAGE 32

Introduction Nigel Westmaas KYK#44 In his foreword to the 1989 publication of Martin Carter's Selected Poems, Ian McDonald wrote: .. .He is also, without reservation, one of the finest poets to have emerged in the Caribbean Region. And the varied subtlety and strength of his poetry carries him without any doubt into the front rank ofworld poets. Long after the politics which prompted a number of his poems have beenforgotten and long after the society which he so often scathingly indicted has been "changed utterly", the poetry will continue to strike a chord among new generations The same chord will be s truck among readers far and near with this special issue of Kyk-Over-AI which unveils for the first time, a collection of Martin Carter's prose. The invitation to co-edit this special issue with Ian McDonald was a great honour. Working with him and Vanda Radzik on the issue enabled me a close look at how much work is involved in producing the evergreen and valiant Kyk". The accumulation of these pieces and the overall collection was the result of many years of random then serious collection. The piece that heads this section A Free Community of Valid Persons was my original inspiration in the quest for Martin Carter's prose. It stands as the touchstone for The Martin Carter Prose Sampler offered here which we hope to be widely circ ulated within and beyond the confines of this country. Martin Carter has subjected the society in which he lives to deep varied and often unnoticed study over the years. In more recent times, temp e red some say by an inner censorship, Carter has not volunteered new public work. But what is consistent with and connects the prose of earlier days and the rare public presentations in whatever fOIIll, of the present, has been an unyielding depth of approach to whatever subject he turns his gaze on. That approach has invariably focused on the "s piritual condition of existence perhaps best summed up if one can sum il up in a phrase, in his often cited belief thal this society is a victim of the "paralysis of the spirit" that has succeeded in -27-

PAGE 33

KYK#44 producing as one consequence, an "aggregation of subsistence seekers." Reviews, short stories, speeches, interviews, articles and editorials are all included in the overall prose collection. Ninety nine known pieces have so far been uncovered. No doubt there are many more waiting to be found. The Guyana National Archives notwithstanding, all these valuable pieces were discovered in institutions like the University of Guyana (UG) Library, the National Library and a few from personal collections; for that matter all of the places where Guyana's prose works can be located with relative ease. Due to space, this special edition only contains a selection of his works. From what might well be his very fIrst piece of public prose -a piece written in the school magazine when he was president of the Queen's College Beekeeping Society to more recent time Carter's prose has encompassed not only a generation but has been funlly connected to his personal concellis as student, as political activist, and later as a poet of distinction living in Guyana. Consequently, his prose varies from his political insights in the ThuruJer articles of the 19 50s, to reflections on the state of art and literature, and even, as in at least one case, his interpretation of the impact of television technology. The depth and variety of work herein may well swptise many since Carter is largely known as a poet and that Muse has brought fill th a few volumes of great poetry. Carter's method of analysis of the political is no different from the way he treats art and literature. All fall under a humanist truncheon and is spelt out with extraordinary craft oflanguage. The language flowing with such rhythm and fInesse of argument that one almost ventures to suggest that it is poetic in form. One cautions "almost" since T.S. Eliot warns in 1933 in his Uses of Poetry, "if poetry approaches too close to prose it ceases to move us in the way we expect verse to move us and .. .it tends to come under the dominance of the logical, reasoning part of the brain." In his treatment of the race question, an issue greatly bound up in the way we live with each other, and a theme that he tUl1l$ to again and again, Carter's prose betrays deep concern that wounds of the psyche born in part of our peculiar history and struggle, persist in varied form and hinders free develop ment of the personality. Throughout his varied examination of race and its deformations and consequences, the same logic and humanism prevails. Carter's prose presentations can appear complex and laden to audiences, who are at times unsure of his drift and intent. But he forces thought and speculation on their part. After his memorable address at the UG convocation, A Free Community of Valid Persons, Carter was asked about his reference to AXOLOTL (biological creature) in the speech. The questioner enquired whether he was speaking as a scientist. His reply was devastating, but typical. "You know one day my eldest son came home and said that his friends asked, 'Is your father -28

PAGE 34

KYK#44 a poet or a biolo g ist?' I asked him, 'Would they know the difference?'" And there is also an interesting story behind the article Wanted: A Great Obeah Man. Written in Thunder in 1955 when he was an executive member of the PPP, Carter was at the time defending his party from attacks from hither and thither calling for great leaders to emerge to satisfy all and sundry sometimes required to perform opposite requests at the same time. The col umni sts of the colonial press so intent on discrediting leaders of the day, failed to recogni se their own contradictions. The article, in a fit of brilliant irony, requested a faith healer to help the authorities create the miracles apparently required. Unfortunately for Carter, the spirit of the article was taken to its literal extreme and soon after its publication a man approached him at headquarters and introduced himself with great confidence, "I is the man yuh want!" Carter's political writing, as the foregoing anecdote illustrates, under sco res the descriptive prowess evident in most of his work. Witness the following which flowed from his p e n from among the political pieces of the fifties; SubSisting on a diet of Hollywo od films, true detective maga zines and other such trash; bounded on o n e side by the sugar estates, and on the o ther by the water front, the people of the city are like creatures in a cage. Pressed down into the mud under the weight of a hopeless sky, the people live like ants in an ants nest, biting at each other because there is nothing e lse for them to bite at. And when a voice e m e r ges out of all this muc k all the little lap dogs bark infurious excitement, defending the master, who from time to lime will administer a well aimed kickfo r r emembrance So here is a Prose Sampler, a sele ction uf writings from a master in th e field of languag e. Let us hope it can in s pir e passion and attention to method now that so many su bmi ss ion s of new writin g are coming forwar d for publication and a Gu y ana Prize for Literature has been established A s for encouragement of young people in the art s and lit e rature Carter warn s in K y k of 1955, ... Encourage young compusers or n o velists ? f am a worried by the word -'encourage'. Too often it means that with the best intention.s we praue what is third rate and o mit to point out that Art requires talent r eallalent and no/ mere lUnacy in any medium T see no substitute for passion internally generated. and hard work. The responsibility rests with us -29-

PAGE 35

KYK#44 A Free C of Valid Persons Address to the the University of Guyana's Eighth Convocation Ceremony October 19, 1974. In the year 1865, in the Jardin des Plantes,in Pans an event of more than ordinary biological, for biologists, but for us, symoolic significance occurred. Certain creatures known by their Aztec name of AXOLOTL, long held to be sexually mature adl,llts, metamorphosed and took on what in the common process of growth would have been their expected physiological configura tion. Symbolically significant for us here is that these creatures, in their native habitats in certain lakes in Mexico, attain sexual maturity in larval form, which is aquatic, and apparently in that habitat never metamorphosed beyond that form. According to investigators of this phenomenon, the pennanent aquatic larval fOIlll of the creature it is terrestrial when completely metamorphosed is brought about by a suppression of the thyroid gland, the secretion of which is responsible for metamorphosis in AMPlllBIA; and that treatment of AXOLOlLS with thyroid secretion, at any stage of that halted growth, would bring about metamorphosis; would bring about, that is to say, transformation from the aquatic larval form to the terrestrial adult form, as is the normal case with creatures we are all familiar with the frog or the crapaud. What in this phenomenon fascinates me and makes me pause relates to the whole concept of transformation and the startling possibility that, in some ways, I believe we are somewhat like AXOLOlLS, which is to say that, for some reason or other, something seems to have gone awry with that process of metamorphosis, which, if we are to accept what our leaders tell us, should work to transform us from what we function as an aggregation of begging, tricking, bluffing, cheating subsistence seekers and assorted hustlers into a free community of valid persons; each of whom has existed in a way we have come to conceptualise as, at least one, among other, higher modes of being, where the essence of staying alive means fulfilment of self and self realisation: which when achieved ceases to remain merely the accomplish ment of a competence but goes onward to the acquisition of the status of a -30-

PAGE 36

KYK#44 function of the personality; a function which consummates itself in the enrichment of every self that participates with it in the crf"ation of a free community of valid persons. You may well want to ask -Is not every person a valid person? And I say: Yes. I say yes only if that person's person outweighs his babble in the war against the reduction of himself, because every word or deed a person utters or commits which fails to recognise or increase the value of another ends up by effecting a reduction of the provenance of the intention. So that is why when we look at the contemporary condition, nationally and intelllationally, we want to mutter "All gone", acutely aware of our victim's role in a ruthless world; profoundly critical of what to only too many of us seems to be serious malfunctioning on the part of those who decide how we should live; self-righteously indignant at what is considered the demoralisation and apathy of the so-calJed masses and that out-look which exposes itself as one that sees as irrelevant anything which does not serve its own and immediate crassest self-interest; and these all combine to make our contemporary and civic behaviour an ungodly scramble, where each one of us is prepared to exploit the other. It may be, I would like to suggest, the perception of this, accidentally or unconsciously, which causes ministers and official spokesmen, whenever they say anything, to find it necessary to resort to caustic admonition, and also to seek, at almost every opportunity, to describe some one or other individual or section of the community as anti Guyanese, as though indeed there is some holy text somewhere which spells out what being pro-Guyanese is. But the truth is that every society is made of conflicting interests: the interests of the rulers and the interests of the ruled; competition within the ranks of the rulers and competition within the ranks of the ruled; and it is from the creative encounter of these interests, from the clash of all !!.lese forces that a valid hierarchy of values emerges to challenge the very premises that sponsored them. Nor can this encounter be abolished. Itmay be obscured and take perverse fOInnms of expression, in which eventually the individual personality suffers erosion and ceases to function in a creative way, until, inevitably, general paralysis of the spirit overcomes. This is the war we have to fight, the war against paralysis of the spirit, for I am tempted to think in a metaphorical way, tha t just as the supp ression of the thyroid gland in the AXOLOlL co uld have halted that creature's metamorphosis, just so this paral ysis of spirit if not itself overcome, can delay, if not COllUPt, our transfolillation into a free community of valid persons. Greater and greater daily seems to grow thi s paralysis as the individual person is confronted with the sometimes inscrutable workings of political and bureaucratic power; when faced with the crises which present themselves in -31

PAGE 37

KYK#44 the fOlm of seemingly unresolvable problems of conscience, dilemmas created by a lack of courage or conviction or situations in general about which he feels he can do nothing -a condition of being which hobbles the mind, induces varying degrees of hysteria and provokes adventurism, especially among the young. In the Caribbean and Guyana we have a sufficiency of historians, political scientists, sociologists, economists and politicians who, from time to time, depending upon the occasion, or conditioned by the audience, go to great trouble to speak learnedly or rhetorically about the historical, social, eco nomic and political backgrounds of these territories and who also, sometimes tentatively, sometimes dogmatically, seek to lay down guidelines for the Caribbean Naissance. In nearly all of the prescriptions, in addition to the often mechanical recital of moral imperatives, there is to be found a pre-occupation with the concept of systems and institutions -a pre-occupation which communicates that there is, in the minds of these savants, a conviction that the solution of most of our troubles lies in the construction of adequate systems and institutions. And no one would dare to question the legitimacy of this pre-occupation if in what is proposed as its consequence, the adjective, "adeq u a t e", necessarily connoted the inclusion of infOIlllal social and psycho logical e l e me!lts, elements that-defy codification like commitme n t to the name but not the substance of some one or other political ideology; or the prejudices associated with skin-colour; or the failure of communication that accompa nies racial cleavage; or, most important of all, the exercise of state power which brooks little interference and distorts men and laws in the overt and covert processes of its consolidation and hegemony. It is the action of these informal elements in their many combinations, which can and does bring about the perversion of creative strategies and exacerbates those very ills these strategies were originally planned to control. In all of what I have been saying I have attempted to bring to your attention some considerations, which in a world shaken by economic and attendant crises, people like housewives and politicians may want to deem less urgent than their own immediate concern with pragmatic issues. But I am afraid in certain circumstances such concern can be manipulated and used, if not to justify, then at least to conceal transgression On the other hand it i s pr ec isely in tim es of crisi s that w e must re-examine our lives and bring to that re-examinati o n contempt for the trivial and respect of the riskers who go forward boldly to participate in the building of a free community of valid persons. -32-

PAGE 38

KYK#44 Fiction Maccabee at Sea Circa 1965 : Unpublisbed Sbort Story All around bim the dark sea stretcbed, shining in those places wbere the water lumped int o waves like the backs of black fisb. It was the first time since be bad come out of prison that be bad gone fisbing at nigbt. Far away, and sligbtly below bim, he could see the lights of the city blinking like artificial stars. And a glow was in the sk y like a low and shifting mound of ligbt. Maccabee sat in bis gently rocking boat and stared around him. From wllere he sat the city looked tiny and quiet like a little bouse with all its windows closed down. Between the city and himself the tops of the poles that pinned his seine into the sea floor projected upward, intenupting the low stars and the fiat sea brink. He was waiting for the tide to fall before bauling up his seme. It bad been more than a year since he had been out fisbing at night. And as he sat waiting be remembered that nigbt again when be had beard something calling his name, and the face emerging from the sea and looking at bim over the side of his boat. Remembering, be twisted uneasily and gazed around, balf afraid that he would bear his name being called again, and see the strange water face. But everything remained silent, save for the low so und of the secret wind sla pping th e waves. With a g runt he dismissed his memory :!.'1d pulled up to his seine. The seine he had set in the sea was sbaped like a bag. The poles which were stuck in the sea bottom pinned it in place with its mouth open, facing the falling water. A s the tide fell, the fish drifting out would swim into the open and waiting gap and be trapped in the mesh of the bag. Then all he would have to do would be to pull the seine up and empty it into his boat. He leaned over the side and heaved at the seine. As he pulled he felt something tug violently. The seine was snapped out of hi s hand. "Somethi n g big", he muttered to himself, leaning over again and grasping the tug. This time he held it titmly and pulled. But as be pulled he felt a sharp and even more violent tug, wrench the seine clean out of his bands. "Really catch so mething big big, he muttered in excitement, frowning. "Biggest thing I ever catch ." Then he pulled around to the other side and positioned himself. Quite -33-

PAGE 39

KYK#44 clearly he had caught something big. He knew he would have to be very careful lest he damaged the seine in pulling it up. He should have had somebody to help in the boat, he realised. To handle a nonnal catch alone was easy. But this was something different. And yet somehow he felt glad he was alone. To pull the seine alone with a big catch was something worth doing, something that would give him a special satisfaction. It was as if he were making up in one catch for all the catches he had not made while in prison. He locked his feet beneath the seat of the boat and leaned right over. Both hands were clutching beneath the water. Then his fingers caught hold and he gripped fumly and pulled. As he started to pull he felt the seine shake and twist again. But this time he was expecting resistance and he held on frrmJy. Slowly he pulled, feeling the seine getting heavier, and yet heavier, as it came up. The weight was most unusual. He won at the sky, but seeing nothing. The pain had driven sense from bis head, and he was afraid to move lest the pain come back again as terribly as it had begun, and invade his belly again. The seine had fallen back into the sea and the boat drifted away from the tall poles. With his face t urned to the sky he lay on bis back. He found that holding his groin was a relief and he held it just as be bad beld it that night in the prison hospital when the murderer had spoken to bim. Tbe memory twisted and sbaped itself in his mind, and be wondered if the man bad already been hanged. As he stared up from bis prone position in the boat he saw, as in a slow dream, arope banging from the beam of night, and the shape of a man da n gling with bent feet kicking. He groaned as a line of pain tightened from his groin

PAGE 40

KYK#44 to his belly like a noose. He sat up slowly and started to fit the mast in the hole like someone else. As he worked at it, the pain came, then went, and he pushed and groaned, jerking and grasping. Every action started a cnrrent of pain running through him. Slowly he worked, pulling up the sail and turning the bow of the boat toward the city. The pain inside him was now like a load that slowed the boat in the water,like a weight that anchored him in one place under the vast sky of the hanged man and the dangerous sea of the naked creature which had come to him and called to him, a long, long time ago. -35-

PAGE 41

KYK#44 Out, Out the Fire (Extract) Kyk-Over-Al Vol. 8 No. 23, May 1958 Outside, in the city the sun burns madly upstairs in the sky. The streets blaze white near green grass, and galvanised iron roofs shimmer like vapour. When the sun is high the city lies rigid, tense and trembling in the stark light. And the sky is far away like a foreign country, and the clouds are like new sails on old ships sailing forever. Every street is straight and white like a chalk line. On either side houses stand up on stilts like angular insects, reaching for something to eat. The fronts of the houses are separated from the green parapets by fences made of wallaba paling staves. But some are broken and jagged like splintered teeth, dirty and discoloured. Tbe fronts of the houses are like open mouths and the stumps of the paling staves are like the strained stumps of broken teeth. And justas down a buman mouth, the food of life goes everyday, just so into the broken mouth of the houselot, life goes everyday, passing forward and backwards as if some giant face were eating with a morbid relish, spitting out the more tasteless morsels and swallowing all the rest. The street is wide and full of dust. In the wbite sunligbt it lies down passively. From the wide world come motor cars, lorries and vans, making a lot of noise, shaking up the white dust and leaving the air full of the smell of fume. Wooden donkey carts, creaking and shaking, rattle over the pieces of wbite marl lying all about. Dogs fight in the grass, snarling and snapping angry white teeth until they lock into each other, twisting violent muscles And little naked black children, with rags for sbirts, run about with discarded bicycle tyres, jumping over the furious dogs, the grass and the stones. Sometimes, but sometimes only, the wbole street goes sudde nly quiet, as thougb everything has stopped for a moment to listen to itself. But then it begins allover again, iron wheels turning, sun wbeels turning, sky wbeels turning, bub and rim, centre and circnmference, point and limit, core and boundary. And when the sun goes down the wbole yard becomes a slab of darkness, like a block of black ice. In the night-wrapped city, where the streets intersect, the ligbt from lantern posts f alls into yellow pools on dust and pebbles. Trees grow tall above the roof tops and some of them look as if they were trying to go to sleep. Crapauds in the damp grass begin to rattle and wbistle like birds who can fly. And even the dogs bark with a different meaning. The night is like a door that closes in the afternoon locking everything into a black room. And as it -36-

PAGE 42

KYK#44 comes down, the sky seems to rise high up into space, only to come down again. Below, in the streets, boys and girls on bicycles ride past men and women walking. And a donkey cart would appear around the comer moving slowly. The cartman droops over the donkey's rump, half-asleep. In his fist he clutches a bottle fom the narrow spout of which protrudes a tongue of yellow fire. And as the donkey walks, the cartman rolls fowards and backwards in rhythm with the hooves. And in the yards, the women sit on their doorsteps looking out at the street, spitting at the night, gossiping with their neighbours and laughing at themselves, in strange and secret amusement. Miss Agnes always sat out on her front steps watching the street after dusk. She would sit down and look at the people passing for an hour or two before going to prepare for sleep. Butassomebody from the yard would come to look out too, she invariably had a companion to talk to. That night she was sitting on her front step in the dark as usual when suddenly she heard a voice from the shadows behind her. "Like you looking out," the voice said. "Eh heh," Miss Agnes replied, turning her head to see who it was. Recognised Old Katie's voice and repeated, "Eh heh, ah looking out ill." Old Katie came up and stood beside Miss Agnes. "But wait! Was to ask you. Is wha' kind of strimp shells you throwaway in the alley dis morning." Miss Agnes started. The sudden question surprised her. She did not repl y at once but wondered why Old Katie had asked the question at all. Before she could say anything else Old Katie continued: "If you only smell the place now. It smell like some dead ramgoat bury with rotten eggs. I never smell nothing so bad in all my life. As she spoke she grimaced as though something was stuck up in her nose. In the dark her flabby face twisted around her nose like a mask Of soft rubber. "Butis wha' you mean at all" Miss Agnes a5ked her after a moment. "Is only today I throw way' dem strimp shells in de alley. You never smell shells before?" She demanded, turning fIercely on Old Katie. Old Katie sighed. She was not a quarrelsome old woman so she said quietly "I custom to smelling strimp shells yes, but I ain't custom to smelling strimp shells like dem at all. I telling you Miss Agnes, dem strimp shells really smell bad But you must come with me and tek a smell for your:-,df." Miss Agnes did not reply. She was wondering how the few shrimp shells she had thrown away that morning could ever smell as bad as Old Katie was making out. "You sure is strimp shells you smelling in de alley," she aske d quietly. looking at Old Katie. "Is wha' den' ," the old woman replied. "Is on ly you u se s trimps today and throw way de s hells in de alley It didn't smell so last night so it could -37-

PAGE 43

KYK#44 only be you strimp shell that got de place smelling so nasty "Well", said Miss Agnes. "Well ah really don't feel like smelling no nasty thing tonight. Butifyou sure is me Shimp shells smelling so high in de alley, I going to come down in de morning and tek a smell foh myself." Old Katie turned away grumbling to hers elf. J ust fancy, she don't feel like smelling no nasty thing tonight! But I who living in de backhouse got to sleep with it, and bathe with it, cook with it, eh!eh?" As she walked back through the yard to her house at the back she continued grumbling in her mouth. "But look at me trial she grumbled. "Dey come and dey throwaway dey nasty things all about the place and when you talk to dem about it dey bex. People like them should live in de pasture where dey could do what dey like." She walked up her steps and entered her shaky house. Across the alleyway she could see the lights in the other houses giving off a sickly yellow glow as though the lights was weak and anaemic with living in all the darkness. And when midnight comes and every light is out except the street lights, all is quiet as a grave yard. In the silence the beat of the wind on the sea comes gently, floating over the sleeping roofs. In the grass near the land crickets and candleflies exchange places on hidden leaves. Dogs snarl and bark out suddenly And somewhere in the world of night, man lies on top of woman closing his eyes and emptying himself into the invisible depths of her body. And then when he is quite empty, he becomes light like a feather and floats through the black silk cotton of sleep like a seed on wings. And far away to the north of the city the sea surrou nd s the world, dark under the keen stars. Up and down, forever and forever, the brok en waves run from shore to shore, from night to nigh t and from man to man. In the morning, bright and early, Miss Agnes went down to the alleyway The sun was lifting itself over the city and the sharp light made clear shadows on the earth The wind was fresh and moist and the sky sparkling I ike wet grass. "Ab come foh smell de thing you was telling me about last night," she cal l ed out as she came up to Old Katie's house. Old Katie looked through the window. "Wha' happen" she asked, "you mean t o say you ain't start smellin g yet." She looked at Miss Agnes s uspiciously Miss Agnes took a no isy sniff, holding her n ose to the air. "You ain't got to do all dat," Old Katie cried out, "jus t come round b y the back step and you gin know Miss Agnes walked around and took another loud sniff. "Oh Jesus Christ!" she exclaimed suddenly, "Oh Jesus Chri st, but is true But is wha got dis p lace smelling so bad! As she stood up there she cou ld see the shrimp shells she had thrown away lying on the ground. Surel y those few shrimp shells could not be giving off 38-

PAGE 44

KYK#44 that smell. And yet, she reasoned, it had to be the shrimp shells. There was nothing else lying about that could possibly give off such a cloud of stink. Miss Agnes stood up looking about her. She couldn't say anything to defend herself. And all she did was to cry out again and again about the smell. Behind her at the window Old Katie was waiting to hear what she would say. "You believe now?" Old Katie asked, "you believe now about what I was telling you last night. And you only smelling it now you deh here standing up. But if you was like me living in dis house you would dead long ago. Last night the smell was so bad that I dreamed I was living in the latrine, not no clean big shot latrine, but them brum down nasty latrine some people got in the yard where dey say dey living. And dis morning ah wake up and smell the smell, ah know de dream was not no dream at all. Because up to know ah got one splitting headache." Miss Agnes turned around sympathetically. "Ah know how you must be feeling wid dis nastiness so near you." She walked away slowly wondering what she should do. As she tumedaround she noticed a piece of cloth sticking out from under a pile of old boards lying half in the yard and halfin the alleyway. She walked over and looked at it curiously. As she bent down to inspect it, the smell rose in her face like a dense spray of water. She put her hand over her mouth and bent lower. "But is wha dis?" Miss Agnes asked again She looked around on the ground and picked up a short piece of stick and started to probe at the half hidden cloth. As she probed at it a piece of pinkish fabric broke away. "Eh Eh" she remarked aloud. "But this look like blood." The smen was stronger than ever and Miss Agnes kept her mouth tightly closed so as to prevent any of the bad smell going down her throat. Suddenly she jumped back as though something had leaped from the ground straight into her eyes. "Oh Gawd" she screamed, "Oh Gawd She spun around to face Old Katie. "Is a dead baby, is a dead baby ." She bawled, "come quick. "An was dat got the place smelling so bad an' got me blaming Miss Agne s strimp shells," Old Katie told Policeman, Policeman was writin g in hi s notebook standing near the spot where the bundle showed under U-..: wood. Around his black uniforlll the women from the adjoining houses were discussing the pitiful discovery They had all come running when Miss Agnes gave th e alarm, leaving their pots cooking o n the frres in their kitchens. "But why yo u all people don't go home and cook you husband food?" Policeman asked them nudging one of the women with his elbow. They were all grouped around him listening as he spoke with Old Katie, and from time to time they intenupted him. -39-

PAGE 45

KYK#44 The woman he nudged s u cked he r teeth loudly "But like you is a anti man nub? she asked c u t tin g her eyes at Po li ceman. All the women lau ghed o ut boisterously, and P o li cem an l oo ked back into his book writing ind u strio u sly so as to appear as bu s y and official as possible. He knew he dared no t att e mpt to exchange r emarks with the women and so he tried to ignore the m. The policeman was a young man with a dark brown skin and a v ery s e ri ous ex pr ession on his face The wome n kne w that he was very yo ung in th e force and that be felt he had one of the mos t im portant jobs in the worl d and that he meant to live up to the dignity of it. H e h a d been sent out from the Statio n w hen old Katie went and gave a report. An d n ow he was taking a state m ent from Miss Agnes, who all the time had remained on the spot watching th e b loody bundle that showed under the wood. "Is somebody living around here throwaway dat thing," one of the women said. "But ah wonder.is who another asked leanin g forward as if to inspect anew and discover some clue as to its origin I s somebody living round here, the woman who bad spoken flrst repeated again, emphatically. Like you know is wbo," Policeman said suddenly, turning to look directly at the woman . "Oh me Jesu s, the woman cried out in alarm "What I know about anything like dat. And to besides leh me go and see what happening t o me pot before it boil over." She bustled away hurriedly, leavi n g Policeman looki n g be h i n d her i n q u isitively. He t urned back t o face the women. "Now listen" he sai d "if anybody here got any infOImation a b o u t wh o thr o w aw ay that ti n gin dis all ey, d e y b e ttah co m e fo rw ard ri ght a w ay. B ec au se i f you kn o w and y o u d o n't t e ll i s an o ff e nc e." He s poke proudly aware of his authority. But n o body answer ed. Alright, alright," he warned. "You all people know to lie down wid man when the night come and enjoy yourself. But when you get ketch you don t wantto mind pickney You don t think about the c onsequences. All you want is the s weetness. Ah know, ah know but we going to see what is going to happen. Somebody looking for trouble and i s one of you ." As he spoke he frowned. The women who a few minutes before were laughing at him, now watc h ed at him with troubled eyes. "And this is a serious offence" he continued. He saw that he had them frightened and he was happy. "Last year in the country," he said, "a woman get baby and when the baby dead she wrap it up in an old newspaper and throw it away in the alley. -40-

PAGE 46

KYK#44 And you know what happened? Was only because the Magistrate sorry foh her that she didn't get jail." "Is true, one of the wom en said. Every eye flxed on Policeman. Standing in his black unifOIII1 stiff and erect, he seemed to tower over them. Suddenly Miss Agnes took a step f orward. "But boy," she said, without warning "But boy, is what you name?" She had been listening to Policeman while he was speaking and her sudden irrelevant question fell like a bucket of cold water over him. "Constable Cecil Joe No. 49 14" Policeman almost shouted, almost saluting. But quickly he caught himself and relaxed. He glanced at Miss Agnes. "Like you is a botheration woman," he said softly with cold anger in his eyes. The question had really caught him and his immediate parrot-like recitation of rank, name and number made him feel ashamed. He realised how stupid he looked and he knew that the women who only a few moments ago were looking at him with awe, were now more or less nOI lIlal again and ready to laugh at him. Just then another policeman came up to the crowd with an old toffee tin in his hand. "You tek down the statement and everything?" he asked constable Joe. "Yes a got it." "Well alright then, leh we pick up dis thing and carry urn down to the police station one time. The second policeman picked up the bundle and put it in the toffee tin. "I am going to have to ask some more questions," Constable Joe told Miss Agnes as he sta rted to leave. "This investigation only now start." Miss Agnes stared at him for a moment, then she laughed out, with a forced bitt erness. "But hear he!" she shouted at his back. "But hear he! You could start anything like investigation!" She turned to the women. But they had all begun to walk away and so Miss Agnes went back alone through the yard to her room. And on the grey ground beneath her feet as she walked, the hard little brown ants journey through the dust l eaving no trail. In the yard the l ean chickens scratch with impatient feet at mounds of dirt, searching for a worm, a shrimp shell, a grain of rice. Green blades of grass choking beneath weeds, lean back their clean points to the land in a mute repudiation of light and sun. Only the winged marabuntas and the slender-tailed pond flies dance through the air, flitting from earth-floor to roof-top and darting from cool shade like memories seeking a place to rest. And high above, beyond the tall intelluption of coconut palm heads, the unsympathetic sun bums out its white insistence, contemptuous of ant or chicken grass or weed, roof top or dust, memory or wing. -41 -

PAGE 47

I I "--------------------------------------I -. r' -THE RED HOUSE, 65/67 High Street, Kingston, Georgetown 19th Century -" -. . / -" -, '- r ; . -. --, -, Drawing by Kenton Wyatt, after photograph by David Ford

PAGE 48

KYK#44 Selected Articles/Editorials From THUNDER Non-Cooperation Thunder Editorial, May 1 1954 The enemies of the people, the ideologies of the rulers, the propagandists of reaction have all come out with the flaring trumpets against the People's Progressive Party's initiation of the programm e and campaign of non cooperation with the interim government. Angrily the mouthpieces of the op pressors seek to minimise the support given to the party by the people of this co untry. In vain the reactionaries try to revile the ideas advocated by the party in this period of national misfortune. Always in repeated attacks, do they seek to create the impression on the minds of the people that the party's programme of non-cooperation is immoral and untenable For any people the ideal government is government of the people by the people and for the people. The present interim government is neither of, by, nor for the people. And the argument that a community must have a body of legislation and administrators to see to the smooth running of things, does not have any cogency in this context, since any such argument presupposes the given consent of those who are to be governed. The nominated interim government therefore, far from having any claim for loyalty, f rom the people has in fact, by its existe.nce, brought about a situation in which, in order to make clear their unequivocal repudiation the people are forced to take some fOlm of action consistent with a di sa vowal of all those thing s the Interim government stands for. Non-cooperation does not mean passivity. Indeed, in its own right, it i s an aspect of re s istance and not an isolated fOlm of activity. Together with demonstrations, processions and other forms of re s istance it contributes to the whole movement of resistance in a s pecial way. Where other fOlms may be indirect, or more or less diffus e or s pasmodic non-coop e ration i s direct, concrete and pointed. And non-cooperation has been carried on in other countries for the same purpose a s it is now bein g carried on in this country. In India, during that country's struggle for independence, which by the way, is not even yet completely won, non-cooperation helped to break the backs of the British sahibs there. In France during occupation by the Nazis during the last war non-cooperation with the master race' was an essential part of the underground resistance movement. As a matter of fact, however far back in history we may go, wherever occupation by foreigners has oppres se d a people, 43 -

PAGE 49

KYK#44 non-cooperation has been practised It is a method of resistance universal in its efficacy. Today, in Guiana, where another master race is oiling guns and sharpen ing bayonets, the principle and practice of non-cooperation with the "Gov ernment" which owes its whole existence to the foul processes of imperialist oppression, can neither be immoral or untenable. Instead, the degree and extent of its practice is one sure way of measuring how much of imperialist mind-poisoning propaganda has been rejected by the people. Let the Guianese people therefore maintain and develop its programme and campaign of non-cooperation with the present fraudulent government. Let the campaign continue until the assembly of nominees, that collection of puppets called a "Government" only by those who made its appearance possible, or those who belong to it, is thrown with all its ignominy into oblivion. Until that time, the slogan of non-coopetation, the principle of non cooperation, the practice of non-cooperation remain honourable and correct. -44-

PAGE 50

An American Oracle Thunder, August 28, 1954 KYK#44 Every few weeks or so, some official or expert or advisor arrives in British Guiana, and, after spending a few days in the company of assorted reaction aries, completes the visit by making oracular disquisitions either about the Soviet Union or the communist conspiracy to rule the world," or some such thing, all very much in the manner of the character Shakespeare parodied by crediting with the lines: "I am Sir Oracle, when I open my mouth let no dogs bark. Significantly enough, it was particularly only after the P.P.P. victory in the 1953 elections that British Guiana became so popular with American assistant professors, research workers and others who came like a line of acushi ants, each with their own task to perform, each with his own assignment to discharge. During the period when our Party was in office, the Ministers were pestered with siege investigators, who behaved more like a pack of trained spies seeking information, than anything else. But now however, when our country lies at the mercy of imperialist benevolence, the officials who come here in connection with the various financial, economic or frankly political schemes, do not merely conce ntrate on the specific tasks with which they are concerned, but on the contrary, precisely because inmost cases they represent governments as reactionary and aggressive as the U.S. and British Governments, are always very anxious to give tips and hints to the people of Guiana on the trends in the world situation, and how Guianese natives can best direct their en ergies to life and their own bettelment. Apart from the fact that we cannot help viewing with the sharpest suspicion anyone who consorts with our enemies, we are still forced to take some notice of the pronouncements these people make, inasmuch as some of us fall easy prey to the blandishments and verbal tricks of these ideological tourists. And one such visitor who graced us with his presence not too long ago is the Public Affairs Officer of the U.S. InfOlmation Service VIr. L.E. Norrie, who arrived on Tuesday, August 10th and left on Saturday the 14th. On Sunday 15th the Daily Argosy printed in bold headlines: Russia Greatest Colonial Power on Earth Today" above an article made up for the greater part of the statements by Mr. Norrie about Russia's "armed aggres sion" and "domination over millions of people who now enjoy nothing more than colonial status." Mr. Norrie, the man from whom the headline is quoted, works with the -45-

PAGE 51

KYK#44 u.s. Government and as such, is a representative of the most predatory imperialism ever. Wall Street and the U.S. Government control one of the most powerful countries in the world today. This is the country of McCarthy, Hollywood, Negro Lynching, witch hunting and other aspects just as pleasant as those mentioned above. And because this country i s a capitalist imperialist country, controlled by a class which derives its very heart beat from the exploitation of human labour power, then, in the eyes of the same ruling class, all the things in the world that sustain it are good. A man who is a representative of the rulers of America must therefore bea man whose outlook on world affairs is conditioned and detellllined by these very principles. On the other hand, the Soviet Union, about which Mr. Norrie speaks so bitterly, is a socialist country. There, in 1917, the people led by Lenin overthrew the capitalist state and instituted a system of Soviet Government which guarantees to the people a real chance to live like human beings. Because control of the means of production is in the hands of the people who decide how production sheuld be organised, unlike the U.S.A. where the minority class controls everything, the Soviet Government is able to lead the people ever forward to a better life. And because again, the Soviet Union is a socialist country, a country which leads the world in a fight for freedom from imperialism and therefore from colonialism, it follows that Mr. Norrie's statement is viciously false and is cunningly calculated to deceive and mislead the people to whom it is directed. So then we must ask why Mr. Norrie came toB.G which after all isa very small country in a very big world, and then upon his departure take upon himself the job of denouncing the Soviet Union just off-hand like that. According to the Argosy Mr. Norrie was here to see after arrangements for the setting up of an U. S. InfOt mation Service in Guiana, which will help to explain U.S. foreign policy and help to give an insight into U.S. cultural and social life. Now that the mere fact that that U.S. proposes to set up an infOllllation service in this country reflects certain realities of 0. S. foreign policy. And one of the most important of these features is that U.S. imperialism is getting down vigorously to the job of taking over the British Empire not excluding Great Britain itself. And just as the British rulers have their British Council here so too will the U.S. Government have their own Yankee indoctrination centre. Between these two the people of Guiana will be sandwiched, c u t off from the world as it were and l eft like gapi n g fish ready to swal low w h a t eve r these imp erial p owe r s h ave t o of f er. Thu s i n a ddition to the ex i s t e n ce of a l a w which s e e k s t o k ee p ce r tai n types of infOlmation and progr essive ideas o ut of G uiana, we will now have with u s another barr e l f ull of imperiali s t propa g anda, specific al ly g e ared for l o c al c o nditions and con sumptio n A s a re s ult of all this, how s hould we tak e Mr. N o rri e and his statem e nts ? F ir stly w e mus t recognize h i m as a s pokesman o f American imperialism and -46-

PAGE 52

KYK#44 therefore an enemy of colonial people fighting for freedom. Secondly his statements about the Soviet Union which are false and pernicious must be recognised as a smokescreen set up to obscure the real motives of the aggression in colonial territories and in the fomenting of a Third World War. Finally we must let Mr. Norrie know that our fight here is for national Ii beration and that if he finds it necessary to tell lies about another country onl y in order to distract our attention from the sit uation as we know it in our life, we in turn find it necessary to reject him and his ideas in totality. For experience has taught us to search diligently for the poison hidden in everything the imperialists have to offer to our people. -47-

PAGE 53

KYK#44 Politics and the Individual Thunder, February 12, 1955 Every human being i s born into the world completely naked. While this is obvious physically it is not always taken into account when people start arguing about politic s and the individual. For some people give it out that politics implie s a s urrender of individuality, an assumption of a robot existence an existence in which all the distinctive individual qualities of the human person involved are submerged and lost in the general mass of activity and organisation. From the moment a human being is born, however, he enters into certain r e lationships with th e s ocial pattern which surrounds him. This social pattern, with its institutions cus t oms, laws etc mould him into one of its own creatures. And in a colonial territory, if this human being, this individual happens to be a child of working class parents, then he fmds himself locked up in a huge cage of poverty where hardly any opportunity for real individual development exists. Any kind of gift or talent must be immediately sacrificed to the job of putting something in his belly from day to day. And, after a while the grind of life takes over bright dreams become a bolt in the sugar puntbent and rusty with the years. If this is true to experience, then it follows that long before an individual even begins to talk about politics, the social pattern begins to attack his individualistic potentialities. For it is clear that an individual can only become what his social environment allows him to become. Thus the limits to his indi vidual development are imposed by the society in which he is born and in which he grows up. And if he wishes to push back the boundaries created by the social pattern in which he finds himself, he will then have to do something to bring about the change in that very social pattern. It is then that he enters consciously into politics. Of course, itmust be stated here that whether the individual likes it or not, he begins taking partin politics from the day he is born. Here itis only a matter of direct or indirect, positive or negative, conscious or unconscious activity. For the sake of clarity however, the word politics is used in a direct, positive conscious and purposive sense But to return. From the argument above, it can be seen that far from politics being an hindrance to individual development, it is in fact, the means whereby the individual may release himself and others from a crippling social environment. For political a ctivity is not an end in itself, but only a means to an end, the end of social change. -48

PAGE 54

KYK #44 Of course people can COllupt anything and politics is no exception. As a matter of fact, because of its importance, politics attracts the best and worst of men. What is necessary then, is that no one should confuse politics as a social instrument for politics as a social disease. In the long run, the individual simply does not have the choice of merely remaining an unattached indi vidual. He may remain unconscious or negati ve, a piece of wood floating on the tide, changing position as the tide changes. He may thus share the same individuality as a piece of sea wood. The following analogy may help to clarify the idea. When a child is born, he is absolutely helpless and his parents have to do everything for him. tcaching and moulding him into humanity When this child grows up, he 100 will marry and beget children. In tum he will have to do everyt]ling for IllS children, teaching and moulding them a, he was taught and moulded hv his parents. But now let the child take the name of Individual and his parents and children the name of Society It is eas ily seen that iustas Society moulded the Individual, so must the Individual mould Society, transfOlming it into the shape and the structure he desires It is only through political activity that he can do this 49-

PAGE 55

KYK#44 No Separate Salvation Thunder Editorial, March 5, 1955 Everybody living in this country ought to know that people of African, Indian, Portuguese and Chinese descent dwell here only because in the past sugar lords found it necessary to bring their ancestors to this part of the world to work in the cane fields. While Indians, Chinese and Portuguese came as indentured immigrants, the Africans carne as slaves. All of this is well known, but some people behave nowadays as if they simply do not know these facts, or that even if they do know them, they still do not I ealise what these facts signify. There are some peop le who are using the split in the P.P.P. as an opportunity to foster racial feelings among the mass of people. Some of these people claim that the Party has broken into two sections an Indian and an African. And some on the one hand call upon the African element to support that wing of the movement led by Mr. Burnham while others call upon the Indian element to support the wing led by Dr. Jagan Presnmably both of the groups of racial minded -people believe they are acting in the best interests of the particular racial group to which they belong. But far from acting so, these people are only acting in the interests of those who brought them here and who have kept them down ever since. All of this without being understood, in the same way as people may know a man is dying without understanding what he is dying from. Before going further let u s see the racial composition of the leadership in the two Wings. On the one wing we have Mr. B Dr. Lachmansingh and Mr. Jai Narine Singh and on the other Dr. Jagan and Sydney King. Looking at it we can observe that on both sides are Indians and AfticiUls working together, unless of course Sydney King moulted overnight like some grass bird, or Dr. Lacbmansingh has s uddenly been transfOImed into another man. When we come to the broad masses of people the situation is somew hat different. For example, among the people of African descent there has been a history of a feeling of superiority over the Indians because it was felt the Indians came to Guiana to do the work the slaves refused to do after Emancipation. On the other hand there has also been a history of feelings on the part of the Indians that the people of African descent were inferior because at one time these people happened to be slaves. Further the cultural position of the two groups is important in this matter. Indians proudly retain certain ties with India in religion, custom, etc. while the people of African descent torn 50-

PAGE 56

KYK#44 from Afi ica as they were with bleeding roots had to build right up from the ground. These positions give confidence to the Indians while to the Africans they lead to a certain self-pitying attitude and consequently to. an emphasis on rather than to a resolution of the problem. Further to all of this is the social and economic grudges which exist. It is claimed for instance that Indians occupy all the big positions in commerce and the professions. So therefore, the argument goes, Indians are getting on while those of African descent are stagnant. This argument seems to ignore the fact that Indians are the majority in this country and though some seem to be doing well, thousands are seeing hell. Nevertheless because Indians happen to be in the majority there is a tendency for some of them to believe that of necessity they must assume the dominant role in everything. While little argument can be brought against the fact of nnmerical strength, Indians must realize that under colonial rule only the British Govelllment dominates. Indians complain that on the other hand Africans dominate the Civil Service, the police force and the teaching profession and that appoinunents are limited where Indians are concerned. Witness the appoinunem of all Negro interim ministers and realise the trick in the thing. But repeating these facts is one thing. We can see quite easily as shown above that historical circumstance and social accident have more or less laid a foundation out of which serious racial antagonism could emerge. Instead of contemplating this reality we must master it. And the achievement of the P.P.P. in the past gives us hope for the future. The P.P.P. succeeded in uniting the people of Guiana because it showed that only unity among themselves would make them strong enough to fight the imperial government effectively. This was demonstrated at the General Elections when P.P.P. candidates of African descent won seats in decidedly Indian constituencies against Indian candidates. That means if the people would only understand the major issue of the people's struggle against imperialism some good will be done. Thus it would be better for a person of Indian descent to support Mr. Burnham for ideological reasons than for the s ame person while agreeing with Mr. Burnham to support Dr. Jagan only because he happens to be an Indian. The same holds good for a person of African descent. For this would mean that the action was dictated by reason and not by racialism. In the long run r e ason would l e ad to the tru th while racialism would lead to a disaster. There is no separate salvation for Indians in Guiana, no separate salvation for Africans. There is only salvation for a united Guianese people fighting as a people again s t imperialism for National Independence. Let those who advocate racialism in any form among the people confute thi s -51 -

PAGE 57

KYK#44 What is a Politician Thunder, March 12, 1955 As we can see in our political situation here, most people, when confused usually do one of two things. Either they regress to some previous belief, some previously held principle of understanding, or they move forward, eager and anxious to learn. This is true for the majority of human beings, whether they live in Africa or in China or Greece, whether their colour of skin is black or brown or white. That is why we must not feel that our people are the most backward in the world when we hear some of them saying in this period of stress that, "this is white people country and we can't do nutten about it," "what is the use of struggling and suffering, things will always be bad," and other bits of wisdom in the same strain. On the other hand, there are some who, feeling at a loss over the confused state of affairs, do at times honestly and sincerely attempt to understand and come to grips with the tangle of things. But a lack of information, inaccurate thinking, insufficient knowledge and little experience of certain types of activity, land them right back in the suck sand. Because politics concerns everybody, everybody has something to say about it. One very popular idea in this country, as in other countries, is that to be successful, a politician must be dishonest, must be tricky, smart, slick, must know to say one thing and mean something else, and do something absolutely different from what is said or meant. No one can deny, of course, that politicians by their words and deeds have done everything to create such an attitude of suspicion among the people. Now what is it that causes politicians in particular to acquire such unpleasant reputations? It cannot be merely personal or individual attributes, since as we know every human being carries within himself the genll of every human quality and also, that no man is an angel. It is necessary then to go beyond the personal and individual level if we are to understand how politicians act and why they act as they do. In our time politics has come to have many meanings. But there was a time in human history when nothing like politics as we know it ever existed. At one time among the American Indians for instance, there was social life based noton the conflict of economic classes but on the principle of communal cooperation, in which the leaders of the people were like real fathers, because the people they led had common interests and common aims. Difference among leading members of the group would not be difference in interest but difference in tactic, difference only in the ways and means of achieving an end. -52

PAGE 58

KYK#44 This could be so only because the long teIm aim was fully accepted as the end to which everything and everybody moved. With the arrival of slavery, the flrst form in which class society appeared in history, the human grouping is broken into two classes, master class and slave class. And it is here that politics as we know it begins. From then on to now class struggle has been going on incessantly taking different fOlms at different stages of development. Politics then can only be one of the fotals in which class struggle manifests itself, and politicians only the symbols of this manifestation. Politicians then are symbols of the class struggle. In Guiana we flnd ourselves engaged in political activity, precisely because the society in which we live is class society. And our political outlook is deteImined by our class interest. For if we happen to be company directors, our political deeds in the long run will be directed to the strengthening of our business interests, to the strengthening of our class interest as company directors. This is the key to open the door of understanding why people as politicians behave as they do. For just as at Christmas time masquerades put on painted masks, so too in politics do politicians put on false faces to hide their faces to hide their real motives, to fool the lookers on, to pass in the same way as well made counterfeit coins are passed. Because this type of thing has been going on for so long people are always suspicious of politicians. But why is it that politicians find it necessary to hide their real motives and intentions? Certainly not because they are ashamed of them; not because in themselves they are repulsive. Politicians hide their real motives and intentions because they want people whose interests may be different from theirs to support them, because they dare not show tile cards in their hands les t the people reject them. So rather than being open and clear, or unrealistic as they say, be smart and tricky and realistic as they say, and success will in inevitable. Such ideas about politics emerge from the bowels of capitalistic and colonial society where the binding tie of human relations is the profit motive, the exploitation of man by man in economic, moral and social life. In such surroundings moral principles are as stray dogs in a butcher shop So now if all this is true how will it be possible to produce honest politicians, politicians who are not smart and slick? In the frrst place it will be necessary to find some standard of value which is independent of personal and individual desire, a standard which cannot be challenged anywhere by anybody. In this Guiana it is easy to flnd the standard. The standard is national independence, not so-called personal independence, not the independence of one class at the expense of another class, but of all the people from something outside of them. That something of course is British Imperialism. And even if one of the classes in the colony has to suffer a little, has to swallow a little -53-

PAGE 59

KYK#44 of its pride, then that class will have to abide by the greater good. In any case, however, every class in the colony suffers in some way from alliance with other classes. But what is gained outweighs what is lost. Therefore what counts more than anything is not the tiny gain, the temporary victory, but the final gain, the final victory. If at any time the tiny gain, the temporary victory becomes more than the final gain, the final victory, then clearly everybody is no longer working on the generally accepted basis of struggle. Clearly somebody will be agreeing in thought at least with Omar Kbayyam's verse: Olz take the cash and let the credit go Nor heed the rumble of the distant drum In order to produce ordinary straightforward politicians it is necessary to get a principle accepted, a principle of action which holds it that the final aim of struggle must never be sacrificed to the success of the moment. For the sacrifice of the long tel m aim is the tactic of the politician whose real interest lies not in the people's liberation as such, but only in the temporary progress of some one class in the alliance of the class forces fighting for National Independence That is all. -54-

PAGE 60

Portrait of Churchill T hund er Ap ril 16, 1 955 KYK#44 If Shakespeare happened to be aliv e nowadays and had to read all the eulogies of Winston Churchill p rese nted by certain newspaper editors, historians, columnists etc. he might certainly feel like revising those famous lines: the evil that melt d o lives after them, the good is oft interred with their b ones. For allhough Churchill is not dead, llot pbysically de.1d at least, the uncritical outpouring about "his greatness and eminence" would put to shame many a long drawn out, space filling obituary. After 60 years of politics Winston Churchill resigned on Tuesday, April 6, as Prime Minister of Great Britain. Starting off as a young war correspondent he ended up as an old war monger betraying a consistency in this field which no one can deny But by li ving in lhe era of lhe colonial liberation movement and the disintegration of world imperialism and by playing such an important part in the fortunes and misfortunes of the British Empire, C hurchill has come to be r egarded as the vt:ry personification of all that imperialism stands for. In dealing with the political pers onalities writers c u s tomaril y trace careers, fum ish purple patches from writings and speeches, point out intellec tual strong points and so forth, then conclude with high nights of flattery We however canllot do that since what we want to know is how Churc hill stands in relation to us and the colonial people in the worldwide struggle for national liberation. Nevertheless fo r purpose s of information if is important to know that Churchill entered politics at the age of 24 and that he was defeated in a by election in 1899. The next year he ran successfully as a Tory candidate for Parliament. By 1904 however the Tories were losing out so Churchil l became a Liberal. In 1922 he lost his seat for Dundee as the Liberals were being moved outofthefrontseats, Churchill decided to become a Tory again in 1924 When the Baldwin Government was defeated in 1929 Churchill went out of office and stayed out for ten years. Everybody knows of course that he w,-,s British Premier during the Second World War which began in 1939 During all this time Churchill practised with enthusiasm the politics of the imperialist, whose attitude to his countrymen and to colonial people is one of suppression, repression and oppression. It was only during the war that he could fmd a common cause with all of these people and this was so because Hitler was everybody's enemy including Churchill's. Other than that, Churchill looked upon the working class of Britain with -55-

PAGE 61

KYK#44 hatred and fear. In 1911 for example the railway workers went on strike. As Home Secretary, Churchill demanded that 50,000 soldiers be called out to smash the strike. When the soldiers attacked a demonstration, two railway men were killed and several others wounded. During the 1930s when the struggle of Indian people for National Independence mounted in intensity Churchill was among the wildest of the wild in calling for the suppression of the Indians by raw brute force. "Give me a ship, a few hundred men, some guns and I will quell those rebels in India" cried Churchill. On another occasion Churchill said "I did not become Premier to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire", all of which is in character. Where Churchill really excelled however was in his hatred for the Soviet Union The triumphant revolution of the Russian people led by Lenin in 1917 roused in Churchill his most bellicose instincts Churchill realised only too well that the worker triumph of the Russians would inspire the working people of every country in the world and would show to everybody that socialism was possible and could be won In his anxiety to hold back the tide, Churchill helped to organise expeditionary force which he hoped would go into Russia and crush the Bolsheviks Thanks to the heroic residents of the Russian s and the support of their allie s among the working people in Britain the expedition s failed. Churchill had to s wallow his bile This was in 1919 During the thirtie s Hitler rose to power in Germany. The Tories were all f o r him because they fell that Hitler would wipe communism off the face of the earth But Churchill was s harp enough to see that Hitler would not stop at the Soviet U nion. Y e t the war was no sooner over than Churchill was at his o ld games again, this time ordering Montgomery to prepare to arm the Nazis to fight the Soviet power. And in 1946 Churchill made his famous speech at Fulton, in the U.S.A. demanding united action against the Soviet Union This was an official declaration of the cold war which today keeps the world in perpetual ten s ion. We can even see from these few selected points that Churchill's career was detelmined not necessarily by some innate quality but rather by the circumstances of the times in which he lives. Standing as symbol of the rotten past in the constantly changing world Churchill appears to us a figure representing that social element which burst into power after the bourgeois revolution of 1688 in Britain, and which since then has maintained itself by strangling the working people of Britain and the subject people of the Empire OUf experience of 1953 bears the mark. Although Churchill has resigned, those forces which he represents are still very much in power and are still hankering to use war and death in order to survive. This is what we who live in Guiana will always remember. -56-

PAGE 62

A Dark Foundation Thunder, April 16, 1955 KYK#44 Following in the wake of our political confusion, what can be described as a general bad-talking of black people has become quite a regular feature of street comer gossip Statements like ""hlclt people can never lead anyt11ing" and so on are quite popular. People of African descent are sinners in this respect just as much as anybody else. We know of course that this sort of thing has along history in Guiana, deriving in pan from slave psychology and in pan from the disgraceful behaviour of some of our own leaders in the past. On the other hand among some sections of the middle-class community like school teachers, civil servants (lower bracket type) of African descent a peculiar tendency is developing. Some time ago for instance a member of this sec tion was heard saying that the black race is a master race. Since there is nothing in Guiana's history to show that anybody other than the European ruling caste and class has ever been master here, this statement can serve either only to expose the fantastic complexes resid ent among some of us, complexes which seek to mask themselves in their opposites, or to lay bare the sec ret wishes of some people, whose clac;s interest s find reflection in such utteranc es For it is quite likely that the person who made the s tatement quoted above is really wishing the class to which she belo ngs will some day becom e the master class in Guyana By deliberately confusing race with class this person seeks to give all people of African descent a middle-class identity and ambition. By using racial argument a given class attempts to masquerade as a racial champion while low down in reality only the sordid selfish intention is the motive power behind everything This applies to every racial grouping in this country Apart from all this however, it is high time for us to wresl from history what history has for us. Having been brought here like cattle bereft of the significant relations of our cultural patterns, we had to face a hos tile and alien world without any weapon otllerthan sheer physical life and strength We were born in slavery raw and wounded, borrowing everything from the ver y culture that tortured the Light out of our life. Our position then and now is somewhat simi lar to that of a prisoner who on entering prison has to fit the clothes handed to him by a prison warden, consequently there is still a lot of space between skin and garment, s pace which only self knowledge can fill out and round off. And all that we have to work with is that which we have created right here in this country The history of our existence from the first days of slavery is tlle verv earth on which we stand in this world. Dark is our foundation 57 -

PAGE 63

KYK#44 Instead of abusing each other therefore, instead of giving ear to absurd claims of racial superiority, let us rather examine our background and pick some sense out of it. The two passages quoted hereunder should be useful as a start. This is from John Smith who saw slavery with his own eyes. The plantation slaves, are of course employed in the cultivation of the ground. The field then, is their place of work. At about six o' clock in the morning the ringing of a bell, or the sound of a Iwm is the signalforthemto tum out to work. No sooner is the signal made, than the black drivers, loudly smacking their whips, visit the negro Iwuses to tum out the reluctant inmates. much in the same manner as you would drive out a number of Iwrses from a stable yard, now and then giving a lashortwo to any that are tardy in their movements, Issuing from their keMels, nearly naked, with their instruments on their slwulders, they stay not to muster, but immediateLy proceed to the field accompanied by the drivers and a white overseer When a slave commits anything worthy of punishment, he is ordered to lie down with his face to the ground. Slwuld he slww the least reluctance. a couple or four negroes are called to throw him down, and Iwld his hands and legs, stretched out at full length. In this posture a driver flogs him on his bare buttocks till his superior tells him to desist. In punishment no distinction is made between the men and the women; the latter being forced to strip naked are held prostrate on the ground by the men Against this let us place the achievement of 1763 when the slaves in Berbice rose up in rebellion and drove all the slave owners and overseers and rulers clean out of the county of Berbice. The Governor of Berbice wrote thus of this matter:-Today now (sic) the 4th of October andwe see no appearance of our deliverers as yet; nar do. we receive word or sign your Iwnaur; what will became af us all, should yaur honours have entirely fargotten us? We have c ome to the end a f our tether here, and are at our last gasp .ffwithin a short lime there is no. deliverance, Iwillbe for ced a ccording l Q .tlJe,a.dvice a/the C ourt and the Sentence-so/the War Council .to maloerarrangements to. abandon this post and again return to the extreme bo.undaries a/the sea coast. ( Hoogenheim ) These words indicate the position of the Dutch rulers in Berbice at that time, and illustrate the power wielded by the slaves in unity Theberoes of -58-

PAGE 64

KYK#44 these years were Accabreh, Ana, Coffy and Accara who were the leaders of the insurrection. Needless to say when the insurrection was put down they were all executed. From these two very brief quotations covering the misery and revolt of the slaves at different times, we can see how very much there is for us to learn about ourselves, how very much there is that requires attention if we are ever to stand erect in this world. And the present state of things makes such attention an urgent n ecessity for al l of us. -59-

PAGE 65

KYJ(#44 From Babylonian to British Thunder Editorial, May 21, 1955 After a week or two spent in drill and marching practice, hundreds of innocent school children turned out on May 23rd, the day before Queen Victoria's birtbdate, to sing songs of praise to the British Empire, the "empire on which the sun never sets etc. etc." If these children could have witnessed even in imagination, what torture and pain the founders of this very Empire inflicted on their ancestors in Africa and India, they may perhaps have gone to sing but remained to waiL For beneath all those platitudes and cliches uttered by the officials representing the rulers of this Empire, bullets and skeletons are scattered in profusion. About seventeen years ago, by the old fish koker in Kingston, a fisbetDlan was once overheard saying that just as the Babylonian, Greek and Roman empires fell, just so would the British. That was a time when the Second W orId War had not yet broken out, at a time when the liberation movement in these parts was as yet a spasmodic and unexpressed flickering in the hearts of the people. And while the fisheullan's wish migbt well have been the father to his thoughts, nevertheless, his thoughts were true to the direction of history. Because today, seventeen years after the fishetDlan spoke his piece, there are visible and definite signs that the British Empire is on its way out. Just as a house has to rest on pillars, just as a man has to stand on his two feet, just so do Empires have to rest on specific human, social, political and economic relationships. And speaking about the British Empire, Lord Roseberry, a noble imperialist, once had occasion to say "some empires have rested on atDlies, some on constitutions; it is the boast of the British Empire that it rests on men," endeavouring by this word play to obscure the realities involved. Because, in truth, everything reste; on men, but it is another matter when men are uniformed soldiers committed to the job of holding down other men, and killing them too in the bargain as in Malaya and Kenya, those ever quoted examples of modem British imperialism. As for Lord Roseberry's reference to "some empires" resting on Constitutions, the case of Guiana is a case of the British stamping down a constitution, which is much worse than resting on it. But let us consider the relationships that the British Empire reall y rest on, using Guiana as an example. Politically it is a relationship of controller, something like commodity controller, where Guianese men and women are commodiljes Socially it is a relationship of superiors and inferiors, of ad\';{nccd and backward, developed and underdeveioped or so Ibey say al 60-I

PAGE 66

KYK#44 least. Economically it is a relationship of plunderer and plundered, robber and robbed, cheater and cheated, profiteer and helpless consumer. And in human relationships it is a case of cultural serfdom, and ugly indignity. So far, so good. However, as we have seen here in this country since 1953, the very imposition of total misery has brought about a searching in the minds of thinking people for the real meaning of freedom. The lack of freedom has convinced nearly everyone how great and precious a thing is freedom, how worthy itis of effort and sacrifice. And similarly, as the fisheIUlan said about the Babylonian, Greek and Roman empires, reaching insidiously into every crack and crevice like some gross spider, it has brought about in every one of it.;; colonies a searching and quest for new life a life on which nothing like an Empire can rest. Because the searching and the quest, the intentions and the acts of millions of British colonials in different territories is simultaneous and continuous, we can say with the fishelman, mending his net over seventeen years ago on the fish koker, that the British empire like every other empire is bound to fall. And here it is not the case of a wish being father to a thought, but rather historical necessity being a process -61 -

PAGE 67

KYK#44 Bribes for What'? Thullder, July 2. 1955 How much talk has there been since the pr o posed payments recom mended by Hands-Jakeway became public knowledge From different quarters have come ditferentcornments, all expressing r ese ntment and dis gust over the whole affair Now, in any part of the world, the payment of a large sum of mon ey. in the Hands-Jakeway context, is either made a-; a l o an, as a gift or as a bribe Since the payments under Hands-Jakeway are neither loans nor gifts. Uley can only be bribes. This is clear. But the question that still remains to be answered is Bribes for what? The intention of the British Govenml ent in making the se payments is to create in this country a super class, a class of colonial aristocrats who will be living examples of the benefit s that can be gai n ed by all well behaved natives in due course of time The idea is that thi s class of car -drivin g s upellllen will serve as an inspiration to the non-car-drivin g ordinary men in ilie service who will become so obsessed with the idea of ge ttin g on in lif e iliat they will do anyUling and sooner or later acquire absolute immunit y from any infectious idea relating to politics or national liberty. The deep tide of national feeling that flows s o powerfully througbout this land ha s frightened tile British Govern ment into making those payments. And while the s e things may serve the intention well enough in a limited sphere, the proposed payments have served also to increase among the mass of people, feelings of deep and intense hostility. As the say ing goes "monkey mek he pickney till he s poil urn". But what has been the s ource of even sharper resenUTIent is the proposed payment of increased salaries to the members of the Interim Legislature retrospective from lanuar y 1 954. These nominees are not hke the Civil Servants discussed above, as you cannot very well make a silk purse o ut of a sow's ear. But it certainly does appear that even the s e have to be bribed It is difficult to believe. but the Administration s urely knows what it is doing. And there seems to be some urgency involved LOO: when it is remembered that the Bill to make these payments possible was hurried lirough at one session. There is a desperation somewhere along lie line Never before have lie local rulers of Guiana found iliem sei ves ill such a bappy circumstance. The rule of force, the emergency, lie s uppression of large scale protest by lie p eo ple is a condition liey once dreamed about. And now liey have it, liey do n o t want to let it go. So liey must keep lieir own 62 -

PAGE 68

J I f KYK#44 interim servants in cotton wool, lest somebody get out of band and attack. Tbe U.D.P.' s callfor lifting of tbe Emergency was a warning. Soon perbaps, wbo can tell, tbe D.D. P. will make one of its members like Mr. Kendall or Miss Collins demand tbe lifting of tbe Emergency Regulations, not on paper as done before, but in tbe sacred midst of tbe nominees, at a session of tbe Interim Legislature itself. -63-

PAGE 69

KYK#44 Our Newspapers and What They Stand For Thunder Editorial: July 16, 1955. The first newspaper ever published in Guiana was in the year 1793. On Friday July 8, 1955, however, with the publication of Bookers News, the number of publications now available comes up to a round dozen. And these are: Thunder, P.P.P. Thunder, Torch, lAbour Advocate, Clarion, Sandesh, Sunday Times, B.G. Bulletin, Bookers News and the Graphic, Argosy and Chronicle. In a country with a population of only half a million, this is truly a remarkable thing. And there must be some strong necessity operating to bring about this journalistic bombardment. It is as if a crowd of people were \ collected at the bottom of a hole in the ground, on the rim of which are poised the snouts of cannon, discharging simultaneously salvos of opinion, comment, lies and facts. The publications named above may, for clarity"of understanding their positions, be classified in the following manner. On one extreme, the extreme of the ruling force, supporting the local and imperial rulers stand the Graphic the Argosy, the Chronicle and the B. G. Bulletin, broad-sheet of the Government InfOImation Service. Playing a special role in this line-up is Bookers News of which more will be said. At the other extreme, the extreme of the ruled population, giving representation at different levels stand the Thunder, P.P.P. Thunder, Torch, all organs of political parties. With these must be included the lAbour Advocate, which is a Trade Union publication (M.P.C.A. ) In the no-man's land between the ruling and ruled, stand the Sunday Times, Clarion and Sandesh, or so it appears to be. The Editor of Bookers News was once the Editor of the Clarion, as everybody knows. But now let us look at the condition of the people to whom all these publications are directed. Even apart from the all too obvious, political economic misery and strangulation, although a consequence of same, there does exist here among us a gross overburden of conuption, social injustice, cultural sterility, racial friction, dishonest. practices ill industry and com merce, tlagrant police frame-ups and all the rest of the vile filth that bubbles so happily in this colonial backdam. With so much material that needs airing out and bringing to light, there can never be too many newspapers, publica tions and so on. Wbat do we find however when we examine the twelve publications? The organs of the political parties and the trade union are necessarily unavoidabl y -64-

PAGE 70

KYK#44 critical to matters of specifically political and trade union significance. The organs of the rulers like the Argosy Graphic and the Chronicle are always too busy trying to keep the population in a state of intellectual vertigo. Bookers News, organ of Bookers is dedicated to the impossible task of trying to make capitalism look virtuous and cannot therefore find time to talk about anything else. So what are we left with? Only the denizens of no-man' s land, that is to say, the Clarion, Sandesh and Sunday Times. When we come to these hopefuls, in keen anticipation of some long overdue exposure, some breath of disinfecting air, all we meet up with is a shallow cynicism keeping company by and large, with sensational tidbits and trivialities. Making out to be freelance, these publications at bottom, only echo the political line of the ruling class newspaper. All that makes them different in effect is a question of approach. just as burglars may differ in approach, one going through the open front door while the other creeps through the kitchen window The fact that these newspapers have corne into being at this time in addition to such reactionary stalwarts as the Graphic, the Argosy and the Chronicle gives some insight into the political situation. Even after all the guns, the people are still thinking. And so the newspapers are out to confuse issues, to divert and canalise the people's furious disgust. By distorting infOllllation, telling fantastic lies and utt ering contemptible slander, some of these editors and publishers hope to succeed. But what they seem to forget always is that the people do not necessarily have to read to see oppression. For itis like the sky-always visible. And when they do read the people want facts, for facts are the best propaganda and we always stick to them in Thunder. -65-

PAGE 71

KYK#44 Hamlet Thunder, August 20, 1955 The production of Shakespeare's Hamlet last week by a group of EngJish and West Indian actors, was culturally significant but artisticall y weak. It was significant in so far as it brought home to us the possibilities of a West Indian theatre. It was weak in as much as the actors, save for a few at times, seemed to be only now learning the techniques and finesses of acting. Of course drama is something new to the West Indies and we are accustomed to seeing some of the best actors in the world like John Gielgud on the cinema screen. So we must not be too severe. Queen's College of course is not a theatre. Stage property and acoustics were at a minimum. What seemed to be lacking especially among the West Indians was, what I would call a sense of theatre using "theatre" in a special way. This indeed is understandable in our context. Errol Hill, who played Laertes at one time appeared to be representing rather than creatively interpreting. And it is certainly embarrassing at times to hear an actor saying his lines in the tone of a school boy reciting 'The boy stood on the burning deck", something which happened all through the course of the play. John Ainsworth, who was not only the leading actor (Hamlet) but also the producer of the play seemed to be over burdened. During the first act he was straining for effect. He hardly modulated his tone at all, and some of Shakespeare's most beautiful lines were lost in the general imprecision. He recovered in the second and third acts, but did not seem to capture the essence of Hamlet. There was too much gesticulation and too little contemplativeness in his portrayal. The flash of brilliance from time to time makes one believe that Ainsworth could only grasp as an actor, some of the facets of HamLet's extraordinarily complex character. Graham Suter (Claudius) was effective and at times quite convincing. He did not maintain this standard all through the play though. James King, (Polonius) a West Indian, wasrewarding. Asa foil to Hamlet he had a good part to play. Perhaps Ainsworth's interpretation of Hamlet assisted him here. At ,my rate he succeeded in capturing the spirit of the old busybody, the "wretched rash intruding fool" and was perhaps the most successful actor. Barbara Assoon (Ophelia) was fairly good, with a clear voice and good enunciation standing out above the rest. But as she was brought in late to take Greta Mayer's place, we may not have seen her at her best. The sword play was good and both Ainsworth and Hill deserve commen dation for their handling of the rapiers. -66-

PAGE 72

KYK#44 All in all, remembering the intention behind the production, this presen tation was valuable. It shows us where we are and how we are in the West Indies in this respect. Because we are in a void, however, we should not let sheer novelty and strangeness blind us to the shortcomings we observe. And that is why we must criticise as accurately as we can, so that we may set up our standards and maintain them. Among us, as we know only too well, there is far too much gushing and uncritical acceptance of anything novel or well publicised. We must attempt to transform such an attitude into one of serious appraisal, giving credit where credit is due and vice versa. May I add that the applause at the end of the play on the first night served also to awaken some of the members of the audience. 67-

PAGE 73

KYK#44 This Race Business Thunder, September 10, 1955 Imagine a community of people, in wbich everybody is of the same racial stock. Everybody let us say has a green skin purple hair and lilac eyes. Let us say that this community lives in the Western world, the world in which we live. Now if this imaginary community is like all the communities we know about then we will find in it people who are greedy, envious, rich, poor, employed, unemployed etc. There will be also, distinctions of class, occupa tional and educational differences and the rest o( it. So then, in spite of the racial sameness in our imaginary community, there will be a wbole network of conflicts, a network of antagonism between everybody, those in the ranks of the unemployed, those in the ranks of the employed, those in the ranks of the ricb and those in every single rank. This is given. We can see that even without introducing the elements of racial dissimi larity, all buman beings wbo live as we live, are always in conflict. If what we are saying is true, then the racial ricbness in our particular Guianese community makes our story a very complicated one. Because if in our community wbere everybody is of the same racial stock there is already cause enough for conflict, what is to bappen wben in addition to this the quarreling parties are of different racial origin? Take an example. A man of Indian descent was driving bis car down one of the streets of Georgetown one morning. A little cbild of African descent ran across the road in front of the oncoming vehicle. The driver pulled hard on bis brakes and barely saved the cbild. Immediately from a yard the child' smother and neigbbours poured out into the street. "AI you want to kill out black people nuh?" shouted the child's mother. "you all coolie b want to kill out black people nuh?" "You black a the driver shouted back, "why al you black people don't keep your children off the road? Likpyou don't live nowhere, always got your children on the road." In this case, i lean be seen that the incident onl y served to release atti tudes, to provide symbols whereby each of the two persons involved fell back upon a system of belief. This system of belief, has it.s origin, not in tbe barely avoided incident, as is obvious, but in the wbole social,economic, cultural reality of the life lived by both car driver and the mother of the child. Now take the child's mother. Terrified by the danger ber cbild was in, she immediately sought to give protection But to protect her child in this instance -68-

PAGE 74

KYK#44 meant to attack the source of danger, as she understood it. Thus, picking out the most obvious thing the racial origin of the car driver she blames everything on that. Had the car driver been a man of African descent, she would most like l y have said, that because he could afford to drive a car, he (the driver) believes he could do whatever he likes, putting the blame in this case on economic fact. As for the car driver, his knowledge of the conditions under which most of the people of Gill ana live, whether Indian or African, gives him a defence, which although economic in origin, ends up in expression as racial abuse. This very much over Simplified example gives an idea of the complexity of the problem we are dealing with What we can very easily see however is that the racial antagonism usually expressed is not just due to what is s ometimes cal led bad-minded ness. This instance cited above is only an accident that nearly occurred. How much worse must it be when things like property and jobs are involved ? With all this burden in front of us, we tend to become pessimistic and retreat into s ilence. On the oth er hand, realising that the only profound solution is the creation of an equitable social order, we tend to repeat womout cliches, until even we ourselves stop believing in their value Preaching is not going to help u s very much whe n all the raw causes remain Be that as it may however, one thing we must rememb er. Without racial cooperation in the face of imperialist menace, we go nowhere. And that is the most significant point at this moment ill our history. 69-

PAGE 75

KYK#44 But Where is Burnham? Thunder Editorial. September 10, 1955 The Right Honourable Patrick Gordon Walker, Member of Parliament, is a man well versed in what some people describe as diplomacy, but what we denote by using a much more offensive word This Member of Parliament visited us some time ago, and since his return to Britain has been writing articles on the Caribbean. One of these articles, reprinted locally, created some thing of a stir in local political circles. And we are not thinking now about Mr. Walker's opinion of the Interim Legis lature. We are thinking about whathe said about the political situation in Guiana, and of Mr. Burnham's position in this sit uation. From Mr. Walker's position as a British politician, whose political philosophy so far as colonial people are concerned does not differ from that of Sir Winston, Lyttleton, Lennox Boyd and other philanthropists who control the British Empire, we can only expect one thing. Whatever contains within itself any support for British imperialism is blest. That is all. In the article we are talking about, Mr. Walker announced that Mr. Burnham is the key to the who l e problem of British Guiana. What does this mean? It means that if Mr. B umbam so desires, he could become the darling of the British in Guiana. What must he do? "Break openly with the Jagans and declare his readiness to work a Democratic Constitution." How easy? Mr. Walker knows very well that in February 1955, the Party br o ke into two pi eces, one led b y Dr. Jagan and o n e led by Mr. Burnham. He also knows that both Dr. Jagan and Mr. Burnham would welcome with open arms anything lik e a r e ally Democratic constit ution in place of the present mon s tro s ity. So what i s he making all the fuss about? Apparently what has Mr. Walker so unsettled is this The b e haviour of Mr. Burnham after the split in February is not a t all sa ti sfactory. Mr. Walk e r i s notatal l sure a bout Mr. Burnham, so while h e calls him an opportunist with one br eath, h e kisses him with the other. Not exact! y blackmail, but certainly n ot s urface mail. Andso, as w e think a littl e mor e, we are forced to invest wit!} a meaning those words of Mr. Walker: "Break openly with the Jag,ms and declare his readiness t o w ork a Democratic Co nstitution For this i s a statement i n code In ordinary E nglis h it means, sell out, start witch hunting and all the o ther practices that go so well with imperialism. Why Mr. Walker almost says i t point blank by allegin g that Mr. Bumhamsaid b e bad split with Dr. Jagan because he (Mr. Burnham) was anti-communist, 70-

PAGE 76

KYK#44 while Jagan was communist. If Mr. Walker's allegations are true to the facts, then Mr. B certainly has to explain. Because inP.P.P. Thunder June 18,1955, in dealing with that startling young man who voted against his own party, Mr. Leigh Richardson of British Honduras, Mr. Bumbam wrote: "The P.P. P. reiterates that it is not a communist organisation but it refuses to start witch hunting." And in the same article he wrote that it is a dull intellect which cannot distinguish between a Party or movement being non-communist and being anti-communist. We are not prepared on principle to use the assessment of Mr. Bumbam given by Mr. Walker. Because if we do that, the next thing we will do is to quote from the Robertson Commission and the speeches of Sir Alfred Savage. Of course we know that some people are already doing that. But that does not mean we will do it too. But where is Mr. Bumbam? -71 -

PAGE 77

KYK#44 Wanted -A Great Obeah Man Thunder. October 22, 1955 From time to time over the past two years we bave been bearing laments over the absence of great l ea ders in this country. These laments have come for the most part from the editors of certain newspapers visi tors from Britain and America and various others who either do not understand what is really going on around bere or in the w o rld at large, or wbo deliberately shut their eyes to facts. On Sunday the Argosy publisbed an Editorial under the caption "Wanted Now: Leaders", as thoug b leaders were thin gs like stamps or coins, only waiting to be collected. Written in round Victorian style, this Editorial contains the following interesting statement: "There is as yet in Britisb Guiana no o n e at least we do not know bim who speaks with the voice of the people, wbose words fmd an ecboing thrill in the bearts of the people, whose leadership and magic personality are acknowledged by the people." If by the word people" the writer of the Argosy's editorial mean s everyone in Guiana, that is to say, from the most humb le fishelluan to the m ost arrogant Police Inspector, then the search will never end For the words that bring hope to the unhappy cane-c utt er are words that terrify estate managers. And id eas that lodge in the h earts of the weary masses are ideas considered subversive by tho se who co nspire and intrigu e to suspend constitutions, victimise fathers of cbildren and hold the whip of starvation over their beads like a curse. C an any man wbo under s tands all this and takes his place among the littl e men, the wretched and the poverty-stricken. be a great leader in the eyes of the privileged or in the eyes of one who occupi es the position of editor in a local capitalist newspaper? Quite obviously not. All this argument has appeared in Thunder before. It's necessary to repeat it now so as to prev e nt ourselves being taken i n by myths. The history of the buman race is full of great men. But these men had a very hard time of it in their own lives and some of them were even crucified as Jesus Christ was. One of t hem, Giordano Bruno, a scientist in feudal Europe was burnt at the stake as a h e retic Another one, John Brown, the friend of the slaves in America, ended up with a rope around bis neck. John Smith, the Demerara Martyr, was imprisoned right here in Guiana. And the great slave rebels like Accabreb, Accra and the others were burnt to death in Berbice. For the truth of the matter is tha t it is a dangerous thing to be great in this world. Those who are great are loved by some and hunted by others. Unfortunately -72-

PAGE 78

KYK#44 for our generation at the present moment in the Western Wodd, the hunters occupy powerful positions. And that is why they bark so coldly and bite so savagely. The Editor of the Argosy can continue calling for the great leaders but none will rise to fithismeasurements. Because what the Editor and others who think like him really want is not a great leader, but a great obeahman, one who can defend the interests of the people without affecting the lords of the land. Messrs. Sugar, Bauxite and Chamber of Commerce, the strangers of freedom, the authors of misery and despair. And we have not even mentioned the imperialists -73-

PAGE 79

KYK#44 Where are the Heroes? Thunder, November 26, 1955 Speaking at a meeting beld at the L.c.P. ball in Tbird Street, at which the Hon. E. Williams and M.E. Cox of Barbados were guest speakers, Mr. Cox said that Sir Alfred Savage was a Cbristian wbo bas done mucb for Barbados. In using the teIDI Christian, Mr. Cox, like many others in the West Indies today, was attempting to forestall criticism by erecting a barricade of religion The reference to the instance quoted above is made only to draw attention to this practice of certain newspaper editors politicians and others, who, whenever they are faced with unsavoury facts, try to escape from answering by calling upon Christianity. But as a man in Water Street said the other day, if Jesus Christ himself was to come down on earth, there are some people wbo will be only too anxious to crucify him. In speaking like this the man was drawing upon his experience of the world with all its corruption, dishonesty and indecency. The moral tenets of Christianity are of course beld to be unchallengeable, inasmuch as they crystallise the best feelings possible in men. But the conditions under whicb men have to live in a world like ours, make it difficult for them to uphold these things which they so profoundly believe in. We have innumerable examples of men who go to cburch on Sunday, full of piety, and who on the other days of the week practise all sorts of dishonesties and injustices. And it is not so much that these men are born with bad minds or anything like that, but rather that the world they live in forces them to behave as they do. Those who can lie and deceive the best are considered the smart ones, while those who attempt to play fair are considered fools. As a matter of faclthe whole situation can be summed up in an equation: Decency equals Stupidity. This kind of thinking is not only confined to com merce. It permeates politics and lead s people to tbe e'ctnclusion that to be a politician tbe man must be a damn scamp and a villain. Who has n o t heard people saying that if the P.P.P. was a pack of rascals, willing to accept bribes and so on, no suspension of the constitution would have occurred? And some people go as far as to say that the P.P.P. was not to accept bribes, secure itself in office, and do wbqt all the politicians do allover the world. SubSisting on a Hollywood films, trne detective magazines and other such trash; on one side by the sugar estates, and on the other by the water front, the people of the City are lik e creatures in a cage. Pressed down into the mud under tile weight of a hopeles s sky the people live hke ants 74-

PAGE 80

KYK#44 in an ants' nest, biting at each other because there is nothing e lse for them to bite at. And when a voice emerges out of all this muck, all the little lap dogs bark in furious excitement, defending the master who from time to time will administer a well aimed kick for remembrance. Those who really attempt to practise Christianity will be heroes in an environmentlike the one described above But where are the heroes? Are they hiding their lights under a bushel? For at the moment they are invisible

PAGE 81

I I I -l "Q\ -. .-. -, "- C" - -. - ---.------------ ' . . . . .;. ... .... __ - -, J -. ..' - __ ________ ____ ______________________ ______________ __ ----l GEORGETOWN YMCA, Camp Road 1925 Dr awing by Kenton Wyatt, after photograph by Edward Rodway

PAGE 82

Other News A rticles Sensibility an d t he Se arch Argosy, January 26th, 1958 KYK #44 There being no such thing as society in general, or a reader in general, I propose to introduce our subject by dealing first of all with ourselves who, as we must agree, are particular peopl e in a particular place. By dealing with ourselves first I think we would be putting ourselves in a better position to deal with the writer, the reader, and society today in as much as, having started with ourselves, we would have taken up a particular position, a particular vantage point. And from this vantage point I think we will be in a better position to assess the meaning of writing and reading as activities having rele vance to the human condition. To recognise and accept a st.andpoint in this connection is of special importance. For just as the man on the peak of a mountain sees a different world from theman in the valley ,just. so should we, from our particular context. of being, see something more and something different from anybody else. And yet I do not propose bere to offer any detailed study of society All I will try to do is delineat.e the experience of the people from whom we spring. And in doing so, surely it must. be unnecessary for me to trace the chronologi cal developmen t of life in this ten i tory to an audience such as this. For a long time the pattern of experience I am talking about has been clear to me and I bave written about it time and again the institution of s l avery which remains for us the unknown land, the source of our sensibility. And of course colonialism and the status colonialism connotes is an inel u ctab l e concomitant. Thus to Ii ve here and ba ve our being here denotes immediatel y a particular kind of sensibility, derived from the actuality of slavery, and a particular kind of status, deri ved from the actuality of colonial life. I contend too that the sensibility of the slave and the status of the colonial combine to make us what we are. in the innermost. meaning of the t.erm. Thus our statu s as colonial will change when our se nsibility is transformed, and with the transfonnation of our se n sibilLty will come the birth of a people I hesitate to use the word 'nation' for a variety of reasons, chief among which is the possibility of controversy arising as to meanings. Professor J.H. Parry of the University College of the West Indies, in an article in one of the issues of Caribbean Quarterly, a publication of the U.C.W.I (University College of the West Indies), wrote as follows: -77-

PAGE 83

KYK#44 Experience in the West Indies has shown the importance of facing squarely and objectively the history of an institution (slavery) which affected all the Americas in some degree and which in some countries left deep scars in the social memory I agree with Professor Parry. I know at the same time that many West Indians shift about unfortunately when slavery is brought up as an item of discussion Nonetheless, I insist on facing "square ly and objectively" the reality of slavery. What actually is the essential meaning of slavery in human terms? Dom Basil Matthews, the Tri nidadian sociologist, in his book Crisis of the West Indian Family has put it this way: In the earth shaking upheaval, the strange new world surroundings, the new economic occupations, the African, bereft of his social c ontrols, was lost not only to his kin but to himself. I wish to stress here the last phrase of this quotation: lost not only to his kin but to himself. Basil Matthews conti n ues : The backbone of social control in West Afri can society, namely the tribal religi o n was badly broken. No alternative religion or m oral system was as yet effectively introduced. The socialjunction filled by the old tribal religion remained vacant. The results on society and the individual were disastrous. Tum to any sphere of slave activity, conduct, work, crime, folk literature, folk music, educational outlook, the reading of the cultural barometer is the same -anarchy, with a strong suggestion of cultural frustration. In a symposium on whether a West Indian way of life exists, published in the 1955 Mid-year issue of Kyk-Over-Al I wrote that emancipation in the 1830 s took the chains off the hands and the feet, but that the psychological constitution woven in the g loom of the plantation remained. And I went on to say that, to me, the essential meaning of slavery is the loss of self, the loss of identity and its inevita ble consequence, the most shattering self concept. What I mean by the loss o f self and the loss of identity is the loss of those relationships which allow of choices, the loss of those equivalences between inward necessity and external situations. And I mean too the disruption in which integration and action remains action, remote from any possibility of being transfOImed into d esti ny. That I contend is what slavery means in -78-

PAGE 84

KYK#44 human telms. After the abolition of slavery the social process took a certain direction. This direction and the results of this process are slllllmed up very well by Dr. Raymond Smith who in his book The Negro Family in British Guiana writes: Since the white group is the apex of the social pyramid and extremely close to the cluster of positively evaluated elements it forms the most isolated and solitary sub-group. Numerically small and culturally homogeneous (at least within the colony) its membe rs participated solely at the executive, managerial and administrative levels of the occupational structure ... it preserves its social distinctions vis a vis the rest of the population by means of an intricate and usually covert mythology of racial purity and superiority. But it is equally true that the black group retains a good deal of social solidarity, not so much as a large cohesive group extending allover the colony as in small territorial clusters such as villages. Once again this solidarity is maintained by an elaborate mythology, this time of inferiority ... Portuguese, Chinese and East Indians all came /0 British Guiana after the foundations of the colour class system had been laid and all are in a sense marginal to it. The quotation I have used from Dr. Smith refers to the "colour class system", but I wish to confine them to the slave actuality, in which the social pattern is bounded at one limit by the "nigger yard" and at the other limit, by the "Big House", to use Gilberto Freyre s tenninology. And if we examine our experience in this context many things seem to emerge. What stands out most forcibly during slavery and at the abolition of slavery? The tlightofthe slave from the plantation Who hasnotreadof slaves escaping from estates and attempting to set up homesteads in the jungle? Who has not heard of the desperate flight of the slaves from the plantation and the hunting down of these slaves by Amerindians hired for the purpose by the slave owners? And after abolition too we see porknockers leaving the estates in haste and going to the jungle in search of precious minerals. Some may say this is something natural and to be expected I suggest that this generalllight from the plantation is not only a simple flight but also a profound search. it is, I contend, not only a search for identity as such, but indeed a search for the sel f lost in the circumstances of slavery. I go further and say for example, that the emigration of West Indians to Britain is not purely and simply an economic affair. I suggest that here too at a certain level, a search is implied, although of course by now this search has lost the marks of its origin and assumed new masks and disguises, even as the slave who was taught carpentry by his owner makes out in due process of time that it was always his ambition to become 7 9 -

PAGE 85

KYK#44 a carpenter. Purely for illustration and with no claim to argument I refer to the Freudian concept of childhood conditioning and its relation to individual motivation. "The Flight of the Slave and the Search" is the essential meaning of West Indian life, I believe. I invite your attention to the music and the poetry we call West Indian. What actually is the secret.of the music, the native music? All I can find is therhythm. But even this rhythm is not our own, in the sense of having been created by us. For are these rhythms not actually the germ motifs of African music? We certainly didn't create these rhythms. Far from it. All we have done, so far as I can see is to batten or hem and repeat them over and over again without developing them; without allowing them to challenge us to creation. I am not, of course, by any means, trying to argue away their value or any such thing. All I am trying to do is to put them in perspective. Again, look at the poetry w e call Westrndian. What has the larger part of it been, other than a series of poor imitations of English models? If, for instance, at a given period Tennyson is the leading E n glish Poet, the n the poems written are poor copies of T ennyson. If Swinb urne is the leading English Poet, then the poems writte n are poor copies of Swinburne. It is, of course, true that all artists go thr ough a p astiche period, and further that th e world of the arts must have its great f am ily spirit and resemblances: Dy lan Thomas for examp l e and Geral d Man l ey Hopkins are remarka b le poets i n their own right, though the infl uence and b ackground of Hopkins and Thomas is plain. It is well known that the French Sy m bolists were heavi l y i n fl u e n ced by the literary theories of Edgar Allan Poe, th e American poet. But th is cert a in ly is a fa m ily s piri t -a kin sh ip not a r e l a ti onship between mast er and s l ave. The van tage p o int spo k e n of th erefo r e at th e beg i n nin g of thi s introdu c ti on is th e s tandpoint of th e slave which we must l e arn t o accept as a reality Acceptance of th is realit y will be th e first ste p to s e l f identity, the first step on the journey in s earch o f ou r s elves But this is no easy task. It will call for th e emerg e nce o f men o f gen i u s men who by a gift of nat ure are able to as s imilate the experience of their heritage and transform it into meaningful symbol s and imag e s, s o that all o f us on looking at those symb ol s and images, will b e l o okin g into a mirror and seeing our s elves for the first time. In thi s conn ecti on w e can prepare ourselves by considering the word s o f Salzberger who in an es sa y on Holderlin the German poet, wrote: Genius, the agen t of the dialec tical process of history, has to trans gress against the laws of moderation which govern the lives o f o rdinary men, in orde r to bring to a crisis the conflicts of his age and restore a healtlzy equ ilibrium. Unfortunately, however the circumstances obtaining here and now d o 80-

PAGE 86

KYK#44 not give rise to feelings of optimism in this respect. For the slave is still in headlong flight and the flight has not yet consciously become the search. And that is one aspect of the human condition in the world today. -81 -

PAGE 87

KYK#44 Recent Events Sp ring From Social Undercurrents Chronicle, March 23, 1962 Many people are writing and speaking of recent events here as though B.G is the first country in the world to have had a massive strike, or widespread rioting, or arson, or looting. But this is precisely the state of man in our time, and rather than taking up self-righteous positions, we should at least try to understand what is really going on among .us. And let no one think that he is exempt. For all are involved and all eqruilly responsible, guilty and innocent. The history of this country began with slavery and from then until Emancipation the slaves carried on a running fight with the plantocracy and the administration After Emancipation, as we a1llrnow, the fOlDler slaves refused to work on the sugar estates and indentured immigration had to begin. But before the indenture system came into full swing the pattern of Guyanese society had already been down. And that pattern was founded on the master slave relationship. Every facet of life o r ganised around this relationship, lik e iron ftIings around a magnet. As time went on and the indentur e system began in earnest, all the newc omers to Guiana the Portuguese, Chinese and East Indians had to adapt them selves to this relationship And while the Portuguese and Chinese were soon assimilated, the scope of East Indian immigration, and the fact that these immigrants were concentrated on the sugar estates, made them a group which for other important reasons too, remained on the periphery of the society, outside, as it were the direct master-slave relationship and, consequently, beyond the pale in many respects. Now, between Emancipation and the turn of the century, two riots of considerable relevance to the present situation occurred. The first was the Angel Gabriel riots of 1856and the second the Cent-Bread riot of 1889. In both cases these riots took the fOllll of clasbes between the people of African descent and the people of Portuguese descent. My contention is that these riot s occurred because members of the Portuguese community bad become well assimilated into the master-slave relationship, and on account of various factors, had moved up the scale of relationships in the direction of the masters. And it was the resentment of the descendants of the slaves at the appearance of what seemed to be a new ruling group that smouldered beneath the surface and found subsequent expression in rioting and violence. -82-

PAGE 88

KYK#44 Meanwhile on the sugar estates, the indentured immigrants and their descendants were beginning to rise up against the planters and the adminis tration, spasmodically it is true, but vigorous none the less .The passing of years brought about a stronger solidarity within the ranks of this group, which as I have said before, had not been assimilated into the essential relationships obtaining within the society. It is my further contention that our present situation had its beginnings in the emergence of this group as a power in its own right. Challenging the whole traditional structure of Guianese society by its mere existence, this g roup isolated as it was by social circumstance, developed on the sidelines of the traditional fabric of relationships and made its entry into the society not as emancipated slaves, or indentured immigrants, but as a possible ruling group. And the process which led up to the events of February 16 is the same, in character, as that which brought about the revolts of the slaves the Negro Portuguese riots and the sugar estate disturbances, all of which stand like mile in Guiana' s history One conclusion to be drawn from the above is this: None of the groups in Guianese society is prepared to have any other group ruling it. Not until each group is confident that no other group will rule will there be real peace in tlli s c ountry Thus although recent and contemporary events manifes t themselves in political telll1S we should try to understand that they spring from even deeper social and psychological undercurrents. For what we are witnessing is the transfOllllation of a whole society. And the apparent complexity of local politics, expressed in what passes for ideological c o mbat, serv es to ob scure rather than explain the factors at work beneath the surface of thing s While this may sound strange in the local contexl, an exanlination of international political activity, with special reference to the cold war as it affects underde veloped territories, will make it clear why, although irrelevant t o the issue at hand, Communism plays such a big part in the give and take of local political rivalry It is now that, for the first time in the history of the country, we have a chance to initiate things, and to fashion them to our own purpose And without in the least condoning the tragic events of February 16 and their unhapp y co nsequences, it may be, after all is said and done, that what happened on that day is certainl y not the worst that could have happened to u s in this time and age. For now at the very least we know what can happen. And also thaI the old days have gone forever. The new days arc for us to make. Are we good e nough ? -83-

PAGE 89

KYK#44 If a Man Li es to Hian self, The World W ill L i e to Hi m! Guyana Graphic, April 1973, Radio Broadcast, April, 197 3 It was the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca who said and I quote: "Th e light of understanding makes me very careful." Living in a world distinguished by its capacity for producing lies, personal experience and theoretical reflection combin e to el e vate Lorca's self-advic e to the status of serious wisdom. For one can as well believe in a lie as in a truth; and th e real problem seems to be not s o much what one believes in, as why does one believe in anything at all. Believing in anything is having a certain kind o f relation with that thing beitaconcept, a value or else. And depending on the position of the observer, this concept or value or else can be a good thing or a bad thing. What for my purpo s e is more important here, concerns what believing itself means: what meaning it establishes in connection with life. Arnan who habitually tells lies is also habitually presenting a truth which i s that lying is one of his habits. But we can o nly know this w h e n w e fin d o u t that a certa i n kind of disc r epancy exists b e t ween what he is telli n g u s and w h at the truth is, in s o far as this can b e asce rt ained in th e e n v ironment o f h is utter ance And whil e s uch a c a se ma y b e path o l og i cal o r ex i s tential the point the e x a mpl e make s i s that w h e n s uffici e nt infOimati o n i s available, the tellin g of lies b ecomes th e p r esen tin g of a truth In like manner, what a man believe s is contain ed within the signiticanc e of what he co n s ist e ntl y d oes; so that thou g h his d e claration s of belief ma y point in one direction the b e lief-meaning of his con s istent activity may well point in anoth er. Whil e the latt e r may make cle ar what h e really beli e ves the fOlme r ma y ju s t b e a hab i t of expre s sion of the co diticati o n into acc eptable t e llll S of pra c ti ces that ar e ind efe n s ible. Agai n iti s o ft e n claimed tha t c ircum s tan ces pr eve nt men from doing that whic h they fee l they o u g h t t o do i n k ee pin g with wha t the y c laim they beli e ve. But w he n we ex amin e this caref ully w e will see tha t we ar e n o t i n fact dealin g with a co nfli ct b etwee n circums tan ce and b elief, but r ather with a co nfli ct bet w een dou bt and bel ief-that is, doubt as t o the so u ndness of the h eld b e l iefs. When such do u bt i n creases beyo n d a certain point belief ceases to be belief and becomes something of the order o f the truth that lying presents. In a word, doubt is the b e lief. I believ e th a t if a man does n o t lie to himself, the w orld will not lie to him 84-

PAGE 90

KYK#44 and he will then be in a position to try to find out what the truth of the world is. On the other hand the man who lies to himself will find the world lying to him; and he will not be able to find a position from which the truth of the world may possibl y be apprehended. When this happens, lies would be the only thin g available for him to believe in. What is important here is that the man who does not lie to himself would know that he sometimes lies; while the man who lies would not even know that he is lying. The question that leaps at us here is not simply: How is it that some men manage to fail to lie to themsel ves; but, how is it that some men find out what are the things they should not lie to themselves about? The crude answer to this question is that a man may lie ornot lie depending upon whether lying or not lying serves to accomplish his purpose. And are there purposes such as can redeem lies? Only actual life and living can provide answers to this question. And imagination affl1ms that life does, positively and vividly. About ten years ago during what we have come to call our political and racial disturbances I happened to be on a street in Georgetown when I noticed what seemed to be a tugging and scuffling among a group of young peopl e a little distance away. In the context of the crisis at that particular time and place, such behaviour could only have racial implications; and the facts indeed were that a group of young men of one racial origin had come upon another young man a boy really and were attacking him with fists and feet. For some r eason the attack ceased rather suddenly with the group of young men going away in one direction and the boy running in another. Subse quently, in a conversation I mentioned the incident and was told of another one in which a boy from a coastal village had come to the city "'. d with misplaced confidence gone walking as though the quiet disposition of the road way and dwelling houses was all there was to the city. An attack like the one I had witnessed ensued. The boy this time, however, recognising the racial character of the event, had instinctively claimed to be of the same racial s train a s hi s attackers. But his attackers, s uspicious, removed his hat to look at the kind of hair growing on his head. Upon noting it, one of the attackers bad cballenged the boy's claim of racial identity. And upon his admitting that his parent s were each of different racial origin the attack had commenced to the accompaniment of tlle attackers stated inte ntion that they would "beat out" that part of the boy's existence that owed its origin to the in the eyes of the attackers wrong racial strain. Thus, a beating took place. With hat on, hi s appearance wouldhave saved him. With hat off and his bair' s evidence of a relationship with the ex istence of a human being of a certain racial strain, he was trapped. What was bein g -85-

PAGE 91

KYK#44 attacked was not just the racial origin of the boy, but human existence itself in the shape of a parent possessing certain characteristics. And if this is indeed the reality behind this example of racial antagonism then what is at stake is not just political, economic, social or cultural issues as such, but rather the very basis upon which these are built, that is, that taken for-granted belief which includes the human as an animal species, a species governed as a species by ways of behaviour that work for species preservation. But let this pass for the time being, and let us consider if, say, someone had asked one of the attackers why he had beaten up the boy. A sure reply would have been, because other people had beaten up other people on racial grounds. But this could only be accurate if all the victims had had the identical racial composition as the boy, which would have not in fact been the case. To seek further, what would the position be .if the attacker himself had happened to be a person of mixed racial composition? Would his attack on someone be carried out by only a part of himself, that part which did not match his victim's racial composition? The apparent absurdity is far from absurd. For it discloses the nature of the void that can exist between what men actually do and what they believe they do and in that believing, proceed on their journey of lies. In may be argued, of course, that what I am calling lies are only the unfortunate consequence of ignorance or a lack of understanding. But this reall y is not at issue, since I am talking about positive not negative, ignorance. And positive ignorance isa dangerous thing. That it is, may be readily reduced from the implications of the example of racial conflict I have cited For if racial grounds are presented and accepted as reasons for certain actions when in truth the real grounds are elemental and not reducible to attributes, then what really is at stake is not likely to be taken into account at all; as can well happen if, and, or when political, or economic, or social, or cultural targe ts, which are meant in the same way as race is accident, become confused with what creates them -human life. It is most often in times of crisis that some beliefs, uncritically accepted in their self-presentation, come to be exposed for what tbey really are. This is why it is possible I think, to suggest as I have done in the example I used that the connict was notjustamatter of a local aberration but rather one which directly connects with the universal condition; with the fact of human contlict itself, which deri ves from the clash between what human beings have and what they want; from the tension between what they are and what they want to become. Inheriting by birth the human way of dealing with this contlict, together with the triumphs and dis asters that have accompanied this way, we fail, I think, to realise that these triumphs and disasters have their origin in the same thing that is, the human c ause. -86-

PAGE 92

KYK#44 And when in the pursuit of any purpose, men find it necessary to resort to challenging the very right of the human existence of any human, it is the body of belief which leads to such a position that must be examined, because the meaning of these beliefs is self-destruction. And destruction of the human as we know it in human life, does not connote regression to the state of tlle animal as is asserted. It connotes rather a departure into the realm of the monstrous. Over twenty years ago, in a different yet similar vein, I wrot.e this poem: This I have learnt: today a speck tomorrow a hero hero or monster you are consumed! Like a jig shakes the loom; a web is spun the pattern all are involved! an are consumed! -87-

PAGE 93

KYK#44 Open Letter to the People of Guyana Dayclean Special, 1979 Like other regimes of similar character, the PNC's main preoccupation is self-perpetuation. In principle the pre-occupation with self-perpetuation is understandable, since it accords with the fundamental idea of self preserva tion. But whilea truly democratic regime would try to ensure self-perpetuation by acting in a way such as wou ld make it acceptable and needed by the people, what does the PNC, which poses as socialist, actually do? The PNC's method of ensuring self-perpetuation consists of indulging in a deliberate policy of degrading people. And the reasoning behind th is is that degraded people are incapable of effective resistance. Hamilton Green's statement, published in the Chronicle of August 4, to the effect that a certain unnamed Roman Catholic priest was responsible for the death of Father Darke, is the latest flagrant example of this deliberate policy of degradation. It is so because it expresses contempt for the intelligence and humanity of people. Green's statement is in character with the PNC's deliberate policy of degrading the people Of this policy, the following examples should be kept in mind: Item: In the rigging of elections in which many ordinary and by no means vic i ous people were caj oled into doing indecent things, and were thereby compromised. Item: In corruption as a way of life, in w h ich people w ere made to accept that steal ing cheating, ly i ng bearin g false witness, infOlming on each o ther was a positive sig n of loy al ty to the r egime; was what was expected of them and w e r e thereby f urther c ompromised. Item: In the budget of i nfoImation presented to th e peopl e by the r eg ime's rigidl y controlled mass m e dia in which the very lan g uage u se d is perv e rsion facts f alsified; threats a g ainst individuals and groups openly advertised; internal events of s igni fic anc e ign o red; local events of signifIcance s up pressed; all contributing to the whole proce ss of moral and intellectual hone s ty, one end of which is to make m e ntal independence a crime, and mental subservience to the regime the highest qualification in th e land. And the greatest damage done in this area is t o young people who are led t o believe that they can do anything, no matter bow se lfi s b, bow intolerant how mindle ss, how coarse, since they iden tify this attitude with the attitude the r egime underwrites. The resul t is the warp of p e r so nality the degradation of -88-

PAGE 94

KYK#44 the spirit that is so much abroad in the society. Item: In the militarisation of the people in which poorly fed children are made to march in the sun like soldiers, playing militia at the expense of their lessons; in which paramilitary forces enjoy a spurious social prestige at the expense of the rights of their fellow citizens, thereby putting a premium on authoritarian bullying in clear mirror image of the behaviour of the leaders of the regime, all serving to bring about in the consciousness of people and their children that parading is more important than learning, and uniforills more important than respect for law. These are but a few examples, but for the people they have come to constitute to some extent what socialism, as the PNC endorses it, signifies to them. Socialism is a system based on lofty ideals and its end is the liberation of man: the enloft of being. What the PNC regime bas brought the people to experience as socialism is a system based on degradation, the end of which is the regime's self perpetuation. The ideology of the PNC is not based on a philosophy of man. Itis based on disrespect for people. The only way to deal effectively with this proce ss of degradation is by example. The example required is the example ot' resistance, the very things the degradation is designed to prevent and to destroy. Resistance has to be on two fronts. Resistance to the brute fact of degradation itself. Resistance to the exp l oitation of this degradation D Y the regIme. The fust front is refusal to be further degraded, as individual and as group. One goes with the other. Thus individual repudiation and civil disobedience. The second front is exposure of the PNC' s ideology of self-perpetuation as this ideology can be perceived to have its base on the degradation of the people. Thus the waging of the p sycho logical offensive, the continuous "war of nerve s." Who do we think we are? -89-I sign my name, Martin Carter

PAGE 95

-KYK#44 A Note on Jagan Stabroek News. December 11th. 1987 Wben in 1947, Cheddi Jagan was fIrst elected to Parliament, the prevailing state of mind of sophisticated and unsophisticated Guyanese alike, was marked by an inherited subservience to white colonial offIcialdom and uncritical acceptance of the labels posted on people. By the time of his election, Jagan had already spent six years in the United States, had studied dentistry, had married Janet and had become acquainted with the ideas associated with Marxism. The effect of these ideas on the content of his thinking and the substance of his activity he has openly affu med. Chief among the ideas associated with Marxism is that which relates to class struggle as the force that brings about really important social change. Given the specific social stratifIcation obtaining in Guyanese society it would be no accident that Jagan s insistence on the primacy of class struggle in political thought and action would, in the minds of supporters and opponents, acquire the status of superstition, in the sense of a questionable applicability; a superstition displacing-such other superstitions as the political re ponsibility of the native educated stratum or the political benevolence of colonial administrators. The events leading up to and following the suspension of the constit ut ion in 1953, showed however, how little the two latter superstitions had been displaced. By which lime the notion of class struggle had itself been displaced by another superstition, that is to say, race struggle again a superstition, in the sense of questionable applicability It was even as this transition took place that another one did; the tran sition in emphasis on Jagan's part from th e notion of class struggle, as a rallying call. to the advocacy of social i sm and its economic doctrine, public ownership of the means of production. Already branded communist, he would now be baptised Russian, the intended manipulation being that in as much as soci alism was something Soviet, the absurdity followed that to advocate Socialism and be a socialist, was once to be Sovietist. Under the burden o f these accumulated confusions Cheddi jagan' s political work strained for resemblance to the work of other English speaking Caribbean leaders Yet, even before the careers of lagan and his contempo raries had begun, there was already a particular difference in place, and thi s had to do with the fact that while the other Caribbean leaders' critical years in poli tical education had been British oriented, Jagan's had been American, a comparatively unu s ual thing for any kind of e ducation in tho se times. -90-

PAGE 96

KYK#44 Jagan's own m e morials of his life as a child of, and on a plantation, depict a privation and remoteness which could not be less of a preparation, although possi bl y more of a differentiation than a childhood in a town or city would have inured. The urban and British, rural and American contrasts involved here must have much to do with the difference in political style between Jagan and his contemporaries; that style that so many have commented upon, and so wrongly interpreted as a function of ideological orthodoxy. It was in keeping, offensively, with the anxiety to find some reason that would disparage, that, in the earliest of Jagan's political days, it was to the white American lady's, Janet's, Cheddi Jagan's wife's incitement that many of Jagan' s opponents would attribute what they saw as Jagan' s intransigency The antecedent implicit in both of these instances of refusal was and remains a commonplace of colonial psychology, that inver sion of the accep tance of domination. Of the latter it remains to Burnham's credit that he did not countenance or exploit such and like canard. It was after Cheddi Jagan again became Premier in 1957 that the nature of clllloS struggle as such manifested some of its more intractable demographical and productional contrarities. The observable partition of urban as against rural interests that hardened after the split in 1955, was a contilluation of partisan resolve to rectify that disappointment of the prospects raised by the PPP victory in the election of 1953; that, rather than a conse quence of thorough-going ideological con11ict as made out at the time by thesis contriving experts and colonial office spokesmen. The point was that ideological affairs by then had become things that leaders argued about which would then also have to mean that it was not ideology that made leaders, but leaders who made ideology. But even such a fOIllmlation would be inadequate. For, with the advent of what, in the crass idiom would be called Jaganism and Burnbamism, had come the imprison ment by mentality of whatever aspects of ideology might have happened to be engaged. With accession to virtual parliam e ntary control following the elections in 1964, and with accession to actual State control following electio n s in 1968, the PNC and Burnhamism would fuse into leadership paramount.cy This in tum would conduce to a demand from Jagan's supporters that, above all, he shou ld look out for their interests since the paramountcy in place would dispossess them. And political struggle, s!lch as it was would dissolve into rampant opportunism, impenetrable and self-justifying. Intimately bound up with political activity over forty years the outstand ing characteristic of Jagan's involvement has been a s inglemindednes s commanding admiration. It is as a pioneer in a community's education that Jagan has come to be accepted. Tbedismissively intentionedclicbes borrowed from an obsolete reactionary vocabulary and wantonly applied cannot dimin ish the value of what be bas done. -91 -

PAGE 97

I I -, t , ,. , -1 1 ./.., ,,' "'_ .. !-.:.. 1. '0> I .... f i 1'1' ,--::--==,La:"" ",'" <1> I 4 \ I< 1 t:. t' . . , r' .' .' .. ".." -" , , . . , -... ,-" I , .. L -,":'=:='''' . ". -_. _ _._-----_._---_. ---_. ._-----------------_ .... _----. _ SOVEll HOUSE AND PHARMACY, Skeldon Corentyne Drawing by Kenton Wyatt after photograph by David Ford

PAGE 98

Es A Note on Vic Reid's New Day Kyk-Over-Al, No. 24, December 1958 KYK#44 When Vic Reid's book New Day ftrstappearedit was warmly greeted by some and rudely challenged by others, in both cases for extra-literary reasons. Those who greeted warmest were those who felt that Reid had created or at least led the way to the creating of a "West Indian literary style", whatever that may mean. As Arthur Seymour expressed it: "Reid's adaptation of Jamaican dialect points the way for a distinctive West Indian style". Now it seems to me that the idea contained in the tellll West Indian style", derives from a preoccu pation with something other than literature. For the tellll West Indian" presupposes of course "West Indies" and the telm We st Indies" presupposes a community. Thus "West Indian style" must mean a style infomledby the co mmunal life of those who live in the West Indies. While this is so anthropologically speaking, I do not know if it is in telms of literature. So far as I know a book, a piece of literary art, is produced by an individual, who no matter how much influenced by the W'e around him is still an individual, before, during, and after working on a book. The life that exists around him is material to be taken and transforllled into art. It is his raw material. It cannot dictate what he must do. It yields to him even as he yields himself to it. Thus what he created is the particular irreducible un-analysable consequence of a process in which what is external and what is internal combine to make something new. And what matters most in the process is the artistic power of the writer, the individual at work. If in the process of wOiking the writer stops to worry about whether he is creating a West Indian style or anything like that, it seems to me that he will be interfering in the very nature of the process, which has nothing to do with what people want but rather with what people are going to get. But perhaps what is meant by the wort1 "style" in this context is really language, literary language, and what Reid's .. dmirers, seek is a West Indian literary language. If this is so it is perhaps time to take a look at a sample from the book. I quote, quoting a sample used by Arthur Seymour in one of his essays. All of us are waiting to see Father strike Aaron Dacre. You can see shoulder muscles a-talk to my father's arm underneath his coat; worry rides Mother and ManueL; Naomi's mouth opens wide, a 93

PAGE 99

KYK#44 meccabackfishbeing shored in net. Fora long time myfather's hand stayed on the Bible he was carrying. Then his head shook a little, the shoulder muscles stopped talking. All this time Father's and Aaron Dacre's eyes were making four with each other ... Good. As Arthur pointed out, it is an "adaptation of Jamaican dialect". So now we must look forward to adaptations of Barbadian, Trinidadian, St. Lucian, Grenadian, Guianese, Berbician, Buxtonian dialects, and when all the adapting and writing is done we will have our body of "distinctive West Indian styled literature" (which even those who speak the dialecl from which it is contrived will nol be able to read, if that is the hope and intention). Then the main problem will be to decide which is the most West Indian of all, which is the most distinctively West Indian. Quite obviously this hankering after a "distinct West Indian style" is a throw-off from nationalism, West Indian nationalism. The idea is well known and popular -a nation must have national things. Bul many people seem to forgel that even poverty can have an adjective before it, for example. That doesn't make it different though, qualitatively, from poverty in general, as a condition. So whalis Reid's contribution? Itishis style created for a special purpose, for the purpose of making his book as he wanted illO be made. It may have significance outside of literature, no one denies that. But to deal with that significance is to deal with something else, something extra-literary. The problem is to avoid importing extra-literary considerations into these things 94-

PAGE 100

, Power, Race and Trouble Unpublished, Circa 1965 KYK#44 In nearly all the more illuminating reflections on the Guyana situation, the word POWER is mentioned and mentioned so often that a danger exists of it becoming accepted as just another used tel m, another inevitable unit of the political language of the day. For everyone knows what is generally meant when someone says, for example, that "politicians fight for power". Yet how many fail to realise that, in saying so, or in understanding what is said, the y are, in fact, including themselves and making a judgement about the form of activity with which they are intimately concerned. For to say or to under s tand that politicians fight for power" is firstly to admit that a certain thing called power does exist, and may well be worth fighting for. To say, orto understand the same, in derogation, is eitherto reject the value of this power or to disapprove of those who seek to obtain it. The very sa.me sente nce therefore acquires diffe rin g meanings in the mouth of th e same speaker when directed toward a politician occupying a friendly position in the structure of power, as again s t a politician occupying a hostile position within the same structure. And when the politician who is fighting for power retains a friendly relation to a given observer then that politician is, for all practical purposes, fighting for power on behal f of this observer. And when he is in a hostile r e lation the opposite is the case. The dynamic principle of power alignm e nt illu s trated by this sys tem of relationships extends through all aspects and levels of human experience. In an inverted manner, as Martin 13uber puts it, . what has a pathological charac ter in personal life is normal in the relation between the historical represenlQ(ives of the nation and the nation itself (Between Man and Man, p 186). But what makes a structure of power capable of being as a struCf.Ure in which both beneticial and harmful capacities reside ? Time, I suggest, is the question here. since in all instances, two quantities of power e xist. One, power a s available capacity, here and now The other, power a s available capacity, anytime in the future In our local context, racialism, in the crude sense of Indians against Negroes, i s made t o explain away the causal elements of this universal s ituation. And it appear s todo so because itis afoml o f behaviour not amenable to treatment by the accepted procedures of western parliamentary democracy, the only tools which local political leaders so far 95 -

PAGE 101

KYK#44 have had a chance to Iilanipulate. Biologically rooted and socially condi tioned, the brute fact of racialism is an irreducible given, containing power, measuring time, serving and being made to serve as an explanation for almost anything. Nor is racialism here an abenation. It is rather a minimum fOlm of time present. If these considerations do bear at all on the question of power, as defined and accepted by contemporary behaviour, then, for everything to be consis tent, local political parties should be organised as dictatorships, with direct command originating from the top. Such a state of affairs would continn that the present, in the fOlm of racial deadlock, is the unavoidable consequence of the future clashing with the past, that race rather than the dynamic principle of power alignment referred to above, is going to shape coming time. With all this I disagree. The development of factions within all the local political parties and the increasing urgency of tbe-cries for partition from all sides make it clearer and clearer that political commitment nowadays is les s a matter of supporting by choice than of acting against in concert. And even assuming, in time to come, the dominance of one group by another, I still want to contend that the dynamic principle of power alignment, obscured by the cover of race today will express itself, in that splintering, di s turbing way so true to its pathological character. If our time is a bad time because of opposing groups, future time will be a worse time because of the opposing interests and opposing 4imbitions brought into open conflict by the destruction of those traditional values which, up to now, still serve to mediate and act as a buffer between the old fOi illS and the new content of civil and social institutions And, as the tension between form and content grows, race will become more and more irrelevant. For then race itself would have taken its place among the traditional values standing in the way of new power alignments. Real trouble, it would seem, ha\ only now begun. -96-

PAGE 102

Why Guiana Needs Independence New Statesman: 5 November, 1965 KYK#44 The constitutional confe rence on British Guiana opened this week. Martin Carter who provides this background comment, is one of Guiana's leadingpoels, wasafounder-memberoflhe PPP, and was arrested dllringthe 1953-1954 emergency. The formation of the People' s Natio nal CongressUnited Force coalition government following the elections of 7 December 1964, s ignalled the resnmption of a historical and social process which had suffered intell uption in the late Forties and early Fifties. During those years the People's Progressive Party, formed in 1949, had mounted a serious and disturbing challenge to all those inherited slave-co lonial institutions and values which dominated and gave fOIIlI to life at governmental and civic levels. With support from both of the main ethnil: groups, with Marxists and left-wing leadership (Dr. Jagan was party l eader, Mr. Burnham was party chailman), and the re sounding victory at the polls in 1953, the PPP was able to "stOIm heaven" The suspension of the constitution in 1953, the split of 1955. and the work of the nominated interim government up to 1957, all helped to lay the foundation of the present situation in British Guiana. What the PPP had s uperflcially achieved was shattered during this period Racial solida rit y replaced ideological commitment. The PPP and the n ew PNC cease d bein g political parties and became lndo-Guiane se and Afro-Gu i anese power bJocl respectively. Only the United Force could claim to be a real political party representing as it does well-defined economi c and class int eres ts To under s tand contemporary Guiane se politi cs it i s n ecess ary 1.0 know so m e thing about Guianese peopl e At th e beginning of Guiana, the Afro Guianese, while a slave, functioned as an integral element in the masters lav e soc ial relationship His labour power qualified him ; after Emancipation. it was his historically detetmined place in the colonial structure. As against this the pbysical presence of lndo-Guianese in British Guiana, wbich began witb indentured immigration after did not at all mean automatic integration into the existing social structure with its master s lave origins. Unassimilated into the social scheme, the majority of the lndo Guianese laboured and multiplied in the economic and social wilderness of the sugar plantations. The end of the Second W orld War brou ght a new dispensation for colonial -97-

PAGE 103

KYK#44 territories, including constitutional change, and the imposition of adult suffrage by the metropolitan power. Adult suffrage and the division of the country into constituencies made it possible for the PPP, although it commanded the support of less than half the electorate, to win clear victories at the elections of 1957 and 1961 In the 1961 elections under frrst-past-the-post and imposed constitu ency arrangements the results were as follows: PPP (Dr. Jagan) 93,000 votes; 20 seats PNC (Mr. Burnham) 89,000 votes; 11 seats UF (Mr. D' Aguiar) 35,000 votes; 4 seats Thus in 1961, the PPP was able to return one representative for every 4,600 votes. while Mr. Burnham was able to return one representative for every 8,000 votes. With 4,000 votes more than the PNC the PPP was able to get nine more representatives in the House of Assembly. If not already, within a few years the Indo-Guianese power bloc in Guiana will be able to win any elections under an electoral system based on arithmetic. This is a ghostly premise which inspires foreign comment on the Guianese sit uation and obscures the cultural impasse which truly exists. The Afro Guianese power bloc comprises the descendants of African slaves aud others whose mother-tongue is. now English and whose cultural attitude is largely European. As against this, after the victory of the PPP at the 1957 and 1961 elections, there was an upsurge of activity in Indian religious and cultural organisations. This upsurge led the rest of Guianese society to believe that, if the PPP stayed in power, there would be "Indianisation" whatever Illat means of Guianese society. Much loose talk by the more irresponsible members of the PPP helped to s trengthen this belief, and to give point to the demand by non-Indians for the introduction of proportional representation At the 1964 elections held under proportional representation the results were as follows: PPP (Dr. Jagan) 109,332 votes; 24 seats PNC (Mr. Burnham) 96,657 yotes; 22 seats UF (Mr. D' Aguiar) 29,612 votes; 7 seats For the first time since elections under adult suffrage were held in British Guiana every vote had equal significance. But the results of the elections under proportional representation only confirmed the racial pattern of voting in 1957 and 1961. Contrary to what is frequently argued, PR had neither caused it, nor made it worse. The choice facing Guiana is not merely a political choice; it is a people as yet without identity. Communism and all communism implies is compara tively irrelevant. Instead, the choice is: what will Guiana be? An occidentalised -98-

PAGE 104

KYK#44 grouping of various races, or an aggregation of antagonistic racial-cultural groups uneasily surviving. It is believed in some quarters, mainly in the United Kingdom, that it is possible to work out a formula for the "so lution" of the Guiana problem. Suggestions range from sucb absurdities as the re-imposi tion of direct rule with Dr. JaganandMr. Burnham serving as ministers und er the Governor, to plaintive appeals for a PPP-PNC coalition. Bebindnearlyall these suggestions is the conviction that if Mr. Burnham and Dr. Jagan would only become reasonable and "think in telms of the wbole country", the main problem would be solved. During 1964 many proposals and counter-proposals were made and rejected by Dr. Jagan and Mr. Burnham. In all there was secreted some clause or provision wbicb presupposed the acceptance of one power bloc of the ci vic superiority of the other, or, if not, acceptance of a programme wbich would in time result in sucb a relationship. And it was because the more sensitive members of both power blocs had perceived the always menacingly possible accession to effective civic superiority by either of the contending power blocs, that the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa and the Guiana All-India League came into existence. Tbese two organisations had been for med to satisfy deep-seated anxiety and were ve rather than offens ive in their aims The fact that Guianese bad found it necessary to form such organisations, wben their re spective power blocs were still ably led, indicated a true desperate search for racial and social security. As for the calls for partition, what the advocates of this extreme position were reall y demand ing was that the reality of existence of two main power blocs in British Guiana he extended beyond politics and into territorial actuality. Against this background, some British politicians, and Guianese ones too, think that a solution to the racial and political problems of British Guiana ought to be achieved before independence be granted But in my view s ucb an attempt will only sad dle the British government with another failure. A mission from the International Committee of Jurists an Austrian, Iri s hman and a Gr ee k invited to BG by the PNC-UF gove rnment to e xamine the country's racial problem has concluded, amon g o ther things, that: The pres ent racial disharmony in British Guiana is due in n o small degree to the unce rtainties and t ensions of a community passingJrom colonial tutelag e to full independ ence. While the grant of independence will not in itselfprovide a solution to the country's racialpr oblems, andm.ay even createfreshproblems, we believe that until it is achieved the community will n o t find s e lf-reliance, the common purpose and cohesion of nati onhood that are necessary for the successful pursuit of a racially integrated society. What other argument is nec ess ary ? -99-

PAGE 105

KYK#44 Sambo at Large U npublished E ssay on Experiences of Cardi f f Conference, 1965 London : rain wet str e ets and enduring stone walIs, begrimed with the smoke of memory London: and thousands upon thousands of hard hurrying feet and set faces; and the black and not so black voluntary exiles, imitating the natives' way of walking and strangling, in a cold and alien wind, their hot sun vitality under long drab coated and masked brows. And in Le i cester Square, in a night street of gleaming motor vehicles and separate chaltering mouths, a tall gaunt and overcoated European, with a blue stubble of beard and wild-rimmed eyes stoops like a sudden hawk and picks up a dead cigarette-end from the meaningless pavement, while aU around the many worlds of London spin on in a remorseless and unlaughing merry-go-round. Easily the most depressing sight in London is the immigrant from the West Indies, pallid, down-at-heel, shuffling along and looking thoroughly unhappy. I remember looking at one of them in a pub just off Victoria Station. Actually, I am not certain whether he was West Indian or African, student or immigrant. But there he was isolated and silent, sitting like a statue, like a fugiti ve from the historical depru I ment of the British Museum. I keep imagining him sitting bolt upright at the counter, with a glass of beer before him tense and wary like a perai near a dentist. I left London for the Poetry Confe rence at Cardiff on Sunday, September 19. The day before, Gavor UIlab, a 23-year-old Pakistani had been shotin the back as he stood in a store in Edgware Road in the middle of the afternoon. As I read the report of the incident in a London newspaper, while waiting for the train, I could imagine myself bleeding in the midst of the impersonal pigeons which foul up the f ountains in Trafalgar Square. There was a black porter standing near one of the entrances to the train station and I went up to him and asked what gate the train for Cardiff was leaving from, altho ugh I knew well enough it was gate 2. But I bad to have an excuse for addressing him, since it is unusual for a s tranger to say anything to anyone, black or white, in London, unless it is functional. When he replied to my enquiry I detected from his accent that he was a Jamaican. But on his face was the same gloom. The train left Paddingt o n on time and I found my s elf in a coach with an American, his female partner, and an Australian. The American gentleman small, unpleasant be s pectacled, moustached with a face which could have been the original of a Rudyard Kipling photograph was, as I learnt subsequently a "beat poet, a hipster" and he too was on his way to Cardiff. 100-

PAGE 106

KYK#44 Also on his way was the Australian -a nervous, finger-nail-biting soft-faced young man with the eyes of an ashamed policeman. As the train sped westwards I could see the changing country side -now green level fields, now clustered concrete blocks of houses with limp and dreary lines of washing swinging like executed men in the foreign air. My coach-mate, the American "beat", the "hipster", after getting up and looking through the window a few times, begin fretting because there was no dining car on the train. His silent partner a pale thin girl, wearing ajackel and a pair of black trousers and looking like a bewildered school girl, answered his regular snarls with predictable low-toned groans and a theatrical closing of the eyes. My other coach-mate, the Australian, after stealing a few glance s at the American, settled himself in his seat and gave me his back. And I, to him another sambo at large, picked up the paper-back I had bought at a stall, and tried to read. The train sped on As the train moved through the country-side, I reflected on the relation ships which exist between people in general since I was bound for a poet's conference in a part of Europe, between European intellectuals and what, for the sake of convenience, I will calI their counterparts in the Caribbean, Aft ica and Asia. From previous experience, of course, I knew that the European intellectual in general manages to retain a special fOlm of contempt for the colonial who, i nstead of concentrating on knowing his place, forgets himself so far as to want to become not a doctor or a lawyer : this is acceptable but a man using his mind. And this I knew was partly a consequence of the European's historical position and partly a consequence of the subservient attitudes so readily adopted by the colonial. Overwhelmed by the home ground of the master, the colonial who aspires to use his mind, quickly becomes anxious to be accepted; to be considered sophisticated; and j u st as anxious, too, to be separated from his less enlightened fellow colonials. His essential preoccupation is to ingratiate himself and win a tap on the sho u lder. In his essay Black Orpheus which deals with the poets of French Africa, Jean Paul Sartre has written that, by and large, the usual European's attitude to the work produced by such as these is one of "interested contempt". It seems difficult to put it more accurately. About two andahalfhours after leaving London we arrived in Cardiff and made our way to the Park Hotel where accommodation had been arranged for us. At a first glance I could see that although the hotel staff had been warned the sig ht of u s all together Africans, Ceylonese, a Malayan, an Indian, long haired British hip ste rs ", the Aus tralian and my American coach-mate was rather too much. I could see in the eyes of the receptionists something closely resembling terror. And in spite of myself I sympathised, as I inspected the long-haired geniuses come to CarditI to perforIIl 101 -

PAGE 107

KYK#44 Apart From Both Gisra, VoL5 No.4, 28th November, 1972 The central issue of poetry as of politics is the destiny of the human personality. What I say is what I believe you can hear. But if we are without a common cause, then what I say is unbearable But I am afraid that our spiritual history has caused us to see each other in tenllS of contempt which we borrow from ourselves. Frankly, even our self contempt is not original. In another context and speaking hyperbolically, much of what history has done for us is to change a vowe l : the vowel "i" to the vowel "a" in the verb deprived. To want to be a poet and to try to be one; and to participate in politics which is what all of us do whether we realise it or not, is, when we think about it, to try to have more life; to deepen the relations we have with each other; to explore one's own and e ach other's own capacity to respond to those challenges of being and mind and spirit we issue as we exist. It is decidedly not to reduce the human person into an object of use, a convenient thing. In this twentieth century we have seen how various systems of government, founded upon conflicting p o litical philosophies have, perhaps by different methods but similar aims, provoked anarchy and despair among the young and relegated the so-called mature to a treadmill of malicious boredom. And for all of this we have none to blame but ourselves. We become what we are. And one cannot speak about poetry and politics w i thout speaking about poet and politician In thi s period of serious pre-oc c upation about sheer phy siciU survival in the crudest economic teID1S -it may seem to some a fiddling thing to speak of what may appear to be abstract concepts and intellectual refinements. Bu t I want to insist, now as much as any other time, that the values of personali t y determine the values of life, and that the achievement of a good life can only be measured in terms of the victory of the personality. A real poet is a person who, whether h e knows it or not, participates in a moral and spiritual tradition which has its foundations in that dimension of thought and feeling out of which langua ge carne. The German scholar and thinker Ernst Cassirer in one o f his works -Language and Myth -has said that language moves in the middle kingdom between the indefinite and the 'infinite'; it transforms the indeterminate into the determinate idea, and then holds it within the sphere o f finite determinations." Cassirer proceeded thereafter to speak of the "ineffables", one of which represents the lower limit of verbal expression, and the other, the upper limit; and also about the -102

PAGE 108

KYK#44 opposition between chaos and creation. "What poetry expresses," said Cassirer, "is neither the mythic word picture of gods and demons, nor the logical truth of abstract relations. The world of poetry stands apart from both, as a world of illusion and fantasy but it is just in this mode of illusion that the realm of pure feeling can find utterance and can therewith attain its full and co ncr ete actualisation ... and recognise them for what they really are forms of selfrevelation. The poet Frede rick Holderlin, born in 1770, in some of his poems exe mplified the se concepts brilliantly This passage comes from his poem -The Poet's Vocation: Too long now things divine have been cheaply used and all the powers of heaven the kindly, spent in trifling waste by cold and cunning men without thanks, who when he, the Highest, in person tills their fieldfor them, think they know the daylight and the Thunderer, and indeed their telescope may find them all, may count and may name every star in heaven. Yet will the Father cover with holy night that we may last on earth, our too knowing eyes. He loves no Titan! Never will our free ranging power coerce his heaven. Nor is it good to be all too wise. Our thanks know God. Yet never gladly the poet keeps his lore unshared, but like to join with others who help him to understand it. But, ifhe must, undaunted the main remains alone with Godingenuousness keeps him safe and needs no weapon and no wile till God's being missed, in the end, will help him. Or again as Holderlin says: "Man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he reflects." The translator of the poem quoted, commenting on Holderlin's profound perception. has written that when Holderlin speaks of dreaming he means the state of mind that permits communion with Nature while reflection is the self-consciousness that cuts off the individual from the rest of creation. "It is the alternation of these states of mind," Hamburger the translator argues, "with characteristic variations of modulation, and a gradual progres sion toward synthesis or reconciliation." Holderlin himself chose an astro nomical term the eccentric orbit" to describe his mode of progression The individual perception is nothing unless there is community reception of the terllls in which this perception is conceived and expressed. To speak Latin to a person you know is illiterate is not to speak, since the speaker in speaking Latin has made it clear that he had no intention of speaking at all. But then you may ask of this hypothetical situation: Why did the speaker s peak? I suggest that all then the speaker would be doing was to make sounds that established his presence; and that in so doing he would be establishing, in acceptable human forIll, that he too is a human being. For i nvertedly in -103-

PAGE 109

KYK#44 spite of himself. he would be seeking to signal his membership of the human community. Three thousand, five hundred years before the birth of Christ, Aknaten the Egyptian, prayed that he might write, and wrote: Behold. I am a scribe. and I have copied each da\'. the words 0/ beauti:lul Osiris even as Thoth hath done ... Aknaten, because he advocated monotheism was branded by the tongues of polytheists, a criminal. But who remembers the namesofthosc who brand? This is from the Book of the Dead: He holdeth/ast to the Memory 0/ His Identity In the Great House. and in the House o/Fire. On the dark night of counting all the years. On the dark night when months and years are numhered. -o let my name be given back to me' When the Divine One on the Eastern Stairs Shall calise me to sit down with him in peace And even god proclaims his name he/ore me. L e t file remember then the name I bore' -104-

PAGE 110

A Religious Interpretation of Guyanese Proverbs Release, Vol. 3 & 4, 1978 KK # 44 First of all the material of this paper will be dealt with from the standpoint of one whose main preoccupation has been with poetics. Also of course my standpoint must be the standpoint of an individual who is located in the midst of a community of very disturbed people, to wit, the people of the contempo rary Caribbean, and disturbed in the sense that the way in which they have had their being over the centuries has tended to make what I would call lateral disturbance the outstanding characteristic of their behaviour. During slavery in submission to the master they took it out, as it were, on each other. And the more severe the downward vertical pressure, the more intense was the lateral disturbance. This process has continued and is continuing so that we are witnessing a situation, where, as the downward vertical pressure continues intensified, we find the social, political and economic relations that attend this pressure serving to disrupt those arrangements that once functioned to obscure the essential reality. So today we find ourselves in that remarkable condition where the regression that obtains is in truth aresurgence of that which was once obscured. The inter and intra personal habits and practices which over the years have always been associated in the minds of owners, and officials, with the masses of the deprived people, have become the nOll11al ways, revealing once and for all, the artificiality of so much that was accepted as truly native. And the chief factor that has helped to bring abo lIt this state of affairs which however ugly is nevertheless healthy in some ways, is what I would like to call the conflict of needs and the promiscuity of wants. Itis this combination which is at the bottom of the continuing crisis. The degree of the complexity of the crisis requires a commensurate degree of social and individual complexity of response for its containment. I have made these remarks because, as I have already said, I am to locate reflections I shall be making within an explicit context. As you are aware, these reflections have to do with the religious experience of Caribbean people as expressed in their proverbs, anecdotes and so on. Immediately, I am going to suggest that the basic interest of the proverbs is moral rather than speculative or anagogic. The central interest of allIS the human condition rather than the transcendentalism which plays so large a part in institutionalised religion. Encapsulated in all the proverbs is the continuing preoccupation with the meaning of human action as contrasted with any 10S-

PAGE 111

KYK#44 preoccupation with the destiny of human spirit as this is understood by philosophers and theolog i ans And yet, while this is s o, it is not by any means the whole story. For I can remember well over twe nty years ago during discussion with a group of people whom many would dismiss as being concerned with nothing more than the grossest material things (they were act ual ly prisoners in jaiI), bei n g ask e d to initiate a disc ussion a bout God and the meaning of the idea of God. And when I did initiate such a disc ussion I was deeply moved to see how sincere and profoun dly anchored in their minds was the idea of God. And right here at the be ginning I want to allude to our unawar eness of what is right at our feet, embedded in our origins. I shall attempt to do thi s by anal ys ing a single word which in Guyana is frequently used in colloquy. The word is zunga. It is a word that Guyanese often use to sig nify an uncomfo rtabl e state, a sense of bein g overburdened, and the image the u se rs share i s the image of a man afflicted with hydrocele, in the sense that s uch affliction causes him distress Now the expression zunga comes from the Swahili word mzunga, which dimension takes u s back immediately to plantation and colonial life. But the remarkable fac t is that when the word zunga is looked up in Swahili text books, the meaning given for itis European. It would not, I am s ure, pre sent the slightest difficul t y for any of us to enter the mind of a Guyanese of plantation and colonial times who could and did set; the European as a hydr o cele something which causes serious distress. It is this in the minds of the individuals of the group, so that it became clear to me then that the idea of God is not an intellectual thing, but some thing holy in the classical sense o f that word. I mention thi s in order to make it clear that while I shall b e dealing with the moral interest which proverbs of the Caribbean people so vividly crystallise, I am not in any way sugges ting that the moral preoccupation leaves no space for the spec ulative or anagogic in th e everyday experience of th e v e ry authors and users of proverbs. Now, it has been pointe d out by students of s ocio-linguistics, within the fields of which proverbs f o lk sayings and so 08 are included that the user s of these [OIlllS of ex pre ss io n are predominantly rural as against urban. This I think i s accurate, and s ugg e ts immediately what we have been accustomed to reco g nising that is the di sta nce, both social and psychological, which exists in the C aribb ean as it do es e lsewher e b e tween urban dweller s and rural population s This d istance is clearly refl ecte d in speech practices and th e prevalence of use of proverb s by rural populations when compared with urban dwellers In this connection I think it appropriate to refer you to what the Guyane se linguist Walter Edwards of the University of Guyana had to say and I quote : Speech acts are sharp l y defined bundles of linguistic and social bebaviour which are reco g nised as be l onging together by members of societies. In the s p ec ific cases to which I have referred, nam ely gaffing busing and tantalisin g 106

PAGE 112

KYK#44 these are acts conducted by social equals." Quick and sometimes semantically devastating shifts from the literal to the symbolic and from the symbolic to the literal which inforDl the metaphor structures of much of the speech of the people and their proverbs which I shall be trying to bring to your attention, is easier noticed. This is tum reflects another aspect of the difference between urban life and rural life. For the use of proverbs among speakers suggests a community of experience in which the participants share a common world outlook. Proverbs themselves may be considered as speech acts and constitute in fact a specific fOi ill of linguistic and social behaviour. In this respect they are of the category of speech acts which include speech acts like gaffing tantalising, busing and riddle games. One striking difference however be tween proverbs and such other speech acts is the objectivity of the fOl Iller. This impersonality, I would like to suggest, derives from the fact that the proverb in function is really a metaphor, and satisfies Bruno Snell's contention that "verbal metaphors are indispensable for the description of all intellectual and spiritual phenomena". If this suggestion is accurate then in conjunction with my earlier suggestion concerning morality, I am tempted to argue that the proverbs of the Caribbean are essentially moral metaphors. Thus any inves tigation of the proverb must be an investigation both of the ethical preoccu pations and linguistic practices of the authors and users of the proverbs in question. It may be useful at this juncture therefore to look at these two aspects. Among the things we will notice is that the proverbs are untranslatable. By untranslatable I mean that the fOlm of the utterance is as important as the content. The syntactical characteristics of proverbs are striking and unmistak able and all the effects rely on context. In this connection it is important to recall what a certain author of a text book on Swahili had to say and I quote: "Language unwritten (like Swahili) is the speech of a living peop le and so carries its own simultaneous commentary of look, gesture and tone as well as sound, thus appealing to four senses in sympathetic and intelligent relation to the speaker, and not only to the eye in interpreting a written character." Thus this proverb: Cuckabey man dehgood e seh e want/oh shake gubna hand. The very first word of this example presupposes a very specific meaning context. For the word cuckabey is a nOIDlal Guyanese tellll for leprosy, and seems to be derived from the Bantu adjective -kuu-kuu which means worn out. F urth er a man deh good in this context means that the man has become prosperous. This Cuckabey man deh good means a leper who has become fortunate. To want t o shake gubna hand is to aspire to high social status Thus the proverb's gross meaning is that when a man is fortunate he tends to become s well-headed 107-

PAGE 113

KYK#44 But the subtlety of the proverb is even neater. One of the most easily observed effects of leprosy is a crumpling of the fmgers of the hand. Thus to select hand shaking as the symbolic structure of the context of the proverb, that is to say, that good fortune has unclumpled the fingers, is a very powerful stroke of the moral and aesthetic imagination. Or take this one: A lil seed does tu 'n g()die. The last word in this proverb is of the same status as the first word of the previous example. It is the word godie which in the context of meaning of the proverb means hydrocele and seems to derive from the Swahili word ghoti which means pertaining to the knee. Thus the literal meaning of the proverb is that a little seed can become a hydrocele (a big seed). Once again we are dealing with hubris. Another example using the same word godie and embodying hubris, at a different level: Monkey wake waan maning an see e seed swell: a boast tell e matty e tu'n big man; e na know seh a godie e got. In this latter example we cannot but note the masterful economy of language and expression: three short statements juxtaposed in a way such that the proverb almost takes on the fOlDL of a syllogism. What stands out immediately in these three examples is the interdepen dence of fOIm and meaning, semantic arrangement and moral significance, an interdependence that relies completely on a community of linguistic and ethical ex p erience Another proverb which while operating on the same principle as the forementioned, takes in a different dimension of custom and subjects it to the same treatment. The proverb in question is : When hungry ketch collie e glad fuh eat poke. In this instance the avoidance of eating po rk by an ethnic group is seen not as religious pr ohi bition so much as a question of pride. This question of pride which implies hubris runs through a great number of the proverbs currently in u se in Guyana and I s uppo se in the Cari bbean. And it does so, I want to suggest, beca u se hubris and its concomitant showi n g off:;md overstepping constit u tes perhaps the most conspicuous behavioural patt ern at large in the Caribbean community. While this is so the connotation of the proverbs is Nemesis, ineluctable retribution, in its most ironic fOlDl so that the proverbs employ parody as if by reflex. At this point it might b e u sefu l to r ecal l that as Bertrand Russell has it, eve n b efore philosophy began the Greeks bad a theory or feeling about the universe, which may be called religi o u s o r e thical. According to this theory, every person and everything has his or h e r appoint e d place and appoint e d function. This as Russell says, does not d e pend upon the fiat of Zeus, for Z eus himself is subject to the same kind of law as governs others. The theory i s connected with the idea of fate or necessity ... But where there is vigour, there is a tendency to overstep jus t bounds; hence arises strife. S o me kind of impersonal super -01 ympian law punishes and restores the 108-

PAGE 114

KYK#44 eternal order which the aggression s ought to violate. This outlook is the source of the belief both in material and in human law. Itis in therealm of natural law that the proverbs seem to hold their proper place. And if we agree that natural law means the reason of the universe as exhibited in the specific moral and social character of man it means realising so far as possible the ideal ofhnman nature then my earlier contention which is employed in scientific discourse about community of experience and the unpersonality only apparent as antithesis presupposes that there is an enduring agreement among men as to the ideal of hnman nature, even though the telms in which this ideal may be expressed may range from the mystical to the ethical. Hubris and Nemesis then, I would like to suggest, constitute the root principles to be observed in the proverbs of Guyana and the Caribbean, and reflect the basic principle of human thinking, that is to say, the dialectic of reciprocity. Beyond this dialectic of reciprocity we come to an epistemologi cal impasse. Several years ago a noted chemist said that the human brain, that single organ of understanding, can go only so far in understanding its own functioning and reaches a position where the observer affects that which is observed and reaches an epistemological impasse. Commenting on this that it is hard to see that scientists are doing much more than elaborating discoveries, it should be illuminating at this juncture to recall that the Christian declaration is that God is on the side of moral goodness and that to be a Christian thereby implies and demands a God who is on the side of man's highest valuations. In a word, the Christian view of God includes as an essential thesis the possession of moral nature. This is in part some of what I mean when I speak of the offer that proverbs make about usual nature and of course of the religious implications involved. I would like to suggest here that the burden of the argument I alluded to is that the most we can do is refine the grand perceptions of God and nature, already so beautifully expressed in the world's great religions, and that this refining consists of casting them anew for us, in accordance with an ethical and religious vision of freedom and necessity. And this is why earlier I suggested that proverbs are essentially moral and that the reason why this is so concerns their ethical rather than their more intellectual provenance. For proverbs and the speech acts of the same class do not tell us what to feel. They offer rather a frame or structure to assist us in ordering our perceptions and concepts. The proverb I would like to use in connection with these rather abstract passages goes as follows: Maninja stap eolie money, but wen eolie meek taja, is at manager doe mouth fuss e a play. And although I have said that proverbs are untranslateable, I will surely for the purposes of making it intelligible attempt a rendering in less concrete telUlS. The reality is that although the sugar estate manager is an oppressor, -109-

PAGE 115

KYK#44 it is to him that the oppressed fIrst offers his homage. But this literal content by itself does not convey the contextual sense which confers the symbolic signifIcance. Because I am going to suggest that the meaning of this proverb must be associated with the idea Russell attributed to the Greeks, to wit that of the super-Olympian, and further that the idea of the super-Olympian is the idea of a jealous God and that in buman tellllS, in the perception of the oppressed of his oppression, the same principle of moral and aesthetic principles obtain. Hence the idea of offering; hence the idea of sacrifice which link. this bumble proverb in an inverted way with Russell's observation about the Greek religious ethic which held that every person and everything has its appointed place and appointed function. I tis my proposition that the anagogic wbich we associate with the so called higher religions and the moral vision which I tried to illustrate, rest upon an identical base which is in essence that epistemological impasse which humans experience at bigh or low points of their lives. Tbe metaphoric nature of the proverbs is one of the ways man has employed in his attempts deal with this impasse. This epistemological construct is constituted through the encounter of the human and divine even though those who experience that encounter, like the authors and users of proverbs, may not recognise what there is that is divine in such experience 110 -

PAGE 116

The Location of the Artist Release, Vols. 8 & 9, 1979 KYK#44 The situation in which the productive person (in particular, the artist) fmds himself in contemporary Guyana is not at all unique. It is rather one manifestation of a condition which has existed in other places and at other times. Travellers and sojourners among so-called primitive peoples, for example, have noted that exhibitions of outstanding skill or conspicuously successful behaviour are usually attributed to witchcraft; and that frequently, individual exhibitors of such skills or patterns of behaviour usually ended up as victims of group hostility. Win wood Reade, the nineteenth-century traveller in West Africa, in his Martyrdom of Man tells how among certain tribes he carne in contact with, "if he ( a tribesman) builds a better house than his neighbours they pull it down". And Hannah Arendt in her The Human Condition exposes another aspect of this situation when she writes of "the prohibition of excellence" and notes that within the Benedictine order "if one monk: becomes proud of his work he has to give it up." It seems clear that the crux of the matter here is power, productive power. And the attribution of unusual productive power to witchcraft by so-called primitive peoples implies a concept of personality consistent with a particular kind of solidarity. Anything that serves to disrupt this solidarity is harmful and must be controlled. If this argument is valid, then the situation in which the productive person (in particular, the artist) finds himself, has to be inte rpreted in terms of the solidarity which obtains within the Guyanese community What is this solidarity? A few comments on the education which the Guyanese community has had should help to answer this question. F rom one point of view this education has b een part of a process of our being taught the correct way of learnin g how to read incorrectly. What has been incorrect is that we have l e arnt t o apply literally to o ur se lve s what others in teaching u s only apply symbolically t o them se lv es One re sult of thi s is that we do a lot of trying t o fit ourselves into position s for which the sy mbol s we > mploy do have application but which indeed are not of our fitting positions. Thus, we are continuously di sp lacing ourselve s This displacing, which leads not only to the confusion of priorities, but also to a failure to conceive of the very nature of priority, is among the chiefest of the factors bringing about our productive inferiority in general. This productive inferiority is reflexive, and in turn, produces creatures inferior to it, to wit, the producers, our community. And so, the exertions of these producers, in a situation such as the one described 111 -

PAGE 117

KYK#44 constitute a negative process. Negative productivit y therefore, is the solidar ity which obtains in the G uyanese community. It is in the Jight of these considerations that the location of the artist, a particular type of productive person i n the Guyanese community, has to be understood. Because the important and interesting point to be noted here is that precisely because the community sponsors a process of negative produc ti vity, the artist is the chief target. Because iIi fact art is negative produ ctivity, and presupposes a proces s of positive productivity as its proper environment. To bring about a reversal of this state of affairs seems to be the objective of much of what passes among us as "cultural imperatives", among which are propo s als for the organisation of art to serve ideological purposes, and the induction of the artist into groups with vested interests. But a word or two abo ut what is m eant by negative productivity i s indicated here. The fIrst cons ideration to be dealt with concerning art and the artist has to do with satisfac tion and fulfi lment. This satisfaction and fulfIlment has to do with the development of self-co nsci o usness. Self consciousness itselfls an i ss ue, itself subsumed by th e issue that subsumes all issues: human fate. The artist cannot change the nature of this fate: all he can do is e ndure it. At the same time it is his society which has to provide the condi tio n s that make thi s fate endurable. It is in these senses that art i s described as negative prpductivity and positive productivity suggested as the required environment of the artist. Where there should be interaction of negative and positive productivity we fInd instead only the contiguity of two negative productivities, one seeking to retain its integrity through indepen dence and autonom y the other attempting to assimilate this independence and autonomy into a sys tem which, since it does not have the requirements of positive productivity, is n o t in a position to offer co-existential status. The prov e nance of the productive powerof the artist resides to a very great extent in his independence and autonomy. In this context these two term s connote inte r-dependence which contiguity certainly is not. Not being able to enjoy inter-dependence and autonomy the artist is a displaced person, and therefore not in a situation really different from other members of his community. But while displacement is consistent in a situation which is negative when it should b e pos itive it i s not so in a situation where, through sheer environmental inadequ acy it is not negative as it should be, but rather is made into something di ff erent from what it should be that is to say, into something dependent, hav i ng a position rather than a location. -112-

PAGE 118

'SHARPLES' HOUSE Duke Street, Kingston, Georgetown Circa 1890 Drawing by Kenton Wyatt after photograph by David Ford I I

PAGE 119

KYK#44 Address Question of Fiji Address to Fourth Committee, General Assembly United Nations, New York, 1968 Mr. ChailUlan: Any considerations of the question of Fiji must necessarily begin with an examination of the ethnic composition of the population of that territory We know, as reported in document N6300 Addendum 6, that by the end of 1964 the total population was estimated to be 456,390, consisting of Fijians (about 41 %), Indians (50%) and others (about 9%) made up of members of the European community and including Chinese and others. The distinguished representative of the United Kingdom in his statement in this committee on December 2, has given us a review of the history of the development in the island. I would like to draw the attention of members to what he said about the beginning of the arrival of immigrants from India from the year 1885, and the growth of the Indian community. I quote: "By 1885 immigrants had started arriving from India, and in the following thirty years a substantial number ofindians flowed into the country where they eventually settled down, multiplied and prospered. As a result we now see in Fiji the curious situation of the Indian immigrants and their descendants who now comprise 50% of the population." End of quotation. Mr. Chai lman My delegation represents a country which has similar features in common with Fi j i Originally inhabited by American Indians descendants of those who crossed the Bering Straits and filtered into the capacious American landm ass the coming of the Europeans to my country late in the sixteenth century saw the coming of slaves from Africa, mainly West Africa, to work in the sugar plantations. When this slavery was abolished in 1833 the fonner slaves, in great measure, refused to work any longer for the European plantation owners As a consequence these sugar planters searched the world for fresh sources oflabour. They brought immigrants from Portu gal and C hina. And when these immigrants proved unsuitable they turned to India, bringing the first set of immigrants to Guyana in the year 1838. This indentured immigration was to continue until the year 1917. In her statement on December 1, Mr. Chairman, the distinguished delegate ofIndia mentioned that General Assembly Resolution 1951 (XVIII) invited the administering power to achieve the political economic, and social -114-

PAGE 120

KYK#44 integration of various communities in Fiji, and gave as the opinion of her delegation that the United Kingdom government has not taken the necessary steps to bring about the sense of unity, a sense of common purpose, and a sense of common destiny among the various ethnic groups in Fiji. May my delegation, at this juncture, Mr. Chairman, suggest that this is an inverted imperative, one which does not take into account the human meaning of the facts. The presence of the Indian community in Fiji is a consequence offmmer imperialist economic requirements; thatis to say, the establishment of a labour force to maintain sugar plantations. That these immigrants should work and produce sugar was the sole interest of the planters. Nothing else was worth a thought. As for the Indian immigrants themselves, whatever may have been their previous circumstances, the continuing and urgent one in Fiji at that time was to survive in what must have been for them an alien and inhospitable world. The combination of these forces, Mr. CbaiJman, served to isolate the Indian community from the rest of the population, and to force the members of that community to look to each other for help and moral succour in times of personal stress. It is in view of these considerations, therefore, that my delegation begs to q u estion the accuracy of the distinguished represe ntati ve of Tanzania when he said, as reported by the distinguished delegate of India in Document N6300/ Add. 6, that it is not proper to refer to the peopleofIn dian origin living in Fiji as the Indian community. What my delegation would like to suggest is that this is precisely what the members of that community consider the m selves to be. I f my de l egation may strain an analogy, Mr. Chai .man, the Is r aelites did no t become Egyptians in the land of the Ph araohs; and w hile my delegation is n ot at all suggesting that w hat Israel was to the Israe lit es in Egypt i s the same a s tha t w hi c b I n dia is to th e I n dians in F iji m y del egation still wants t o cont e n d that the economic circ um stance of th e ir origi n and th e social and spir itu al isolation they endured in Fiji, bave pl ayed a g reat part in creating the sys t em of social rel a ti onships that o b tai n b e tween them and others i n Fiji. In this co n nectio n Mr. Cha ilJll an, I wo uld lik e to commend to inte r es t ed members of the committee a boo k by an eminent Cey l o nese anthropo l ogist, C handr a Jaywarde n a -Confli c t and So lidarity in a G uian ese Plantati o n pub li s h e d b y Oxfo rd U n ive r sity Press, a boo k w hi ch l ends mu c h in s i ght into th e pr oblem. Mr. C b a i lll lan I a m m akin g a theo r e ti cal p ro jectio n ; a p r o j ectio n whi ch I h o p e thi s commi tt ee will u se a s a fra m e t o und e r s tand ; a s k e l e t o n to put fl es h o n And so, hav in g att empte d t o e xpr ess my d e legati o n's id e a s about th e place and c ondition o f th e peopl e o f Indian d escent in Fiji my del egatio n would lik e t o o f fer th e f o llowin g ideas to th e indi g enou s inhabitants o f F iji, those of Me l anesian and Polynesian ori g in Imagin e for yourself, Mr. Chaillllan, a p eo ple, s o to s peak, in charge of them s elve s, living their own lives, until the appearance of European traders and miss ionaries around the year 1835. The 115 -

PAGE 121

KYK#44 distinguished delegate of the United Kingdom has told us of the events that led up to the signing of the Deed of Cession in 1874 after which Fiji became a dependency of the British Crown. One can adopt varying attitudes on the means whereby Fiji became a British dependency, but what is of greatest significance to us is that the way of life of the Fijian, in an anthropological sense, was not thereby necessarily profoundly changed. Then came sugar and the arrival of the Indian immigrants; and then, thereafter, the growth of power of what, to the indigenous Fijian, must have seemed a strange interloper. And then the period after the Second World War, a period distinguished for the spreading of West European ideas and North American pragmatism to every part of the world; and the demand for political independence by all those who previously had been bending the back knee and bowing the humble head before the imperial overlord. This, Mr. Cbaitman, is the spirit which infollllS Resolution 1514 (XV) of the General Assembly. But my delegation wants to suggest, Mr. Chairman, that in the particular circnmstances of Fiji this is not exactly how the indigenous Fijian sees the situation. To him, Mr. Chaillllan, the coming of political independence in the context of his social, economic and political reality is the coming of the dominance of the Indian community; the arrival of the successor to the imperial overlord; the arrival of a new ruling group. To put it imaginatively, in general telDls, Mr. Chailll1 a n, the major concern of the Fijians: Am I to be ruled by the Indians? While the major concern of the Indian group is that Fiji is their home; that since they are the majority they should have power commensurate with their numbers and vote in the life of the territory. But between equal rights, Mr. Chaillllan, as Karl Marx has pointed out, force prevails. This is what troubles my delegation. And my delegation is further suggesting, Mr. Chairman, that all the constitutional arrangements so far implemented by the administering power are but the tactics of a Government trying to course between the Scylla of abstract democratic principles and the Charybdis of concrete ethnic suspicion, in its own interest, of course. The resolution before this committee, Mr. Chait man, calls upon the administering power to implement immediately the following, and I quote, Operative Paragraph 3: (a) The holding of general elections in accordance with the principle of one man, one vote for th e purpose of fOlming a constituent assembly which will be charged with the task of drawing up a democratic institution and formation of a representative government, and transfer of full powers to that government." End of quo te. My delegation agrees wi th all that is said and implied in this paragraph, and wishes only to remind the distinguished members of this committee that demo cracy is not mathematics, and that men are not symbols. In duty bound, we support. 116-

PAGE 122

KYK#44 Again Mr. Chait man, pemtit me to refer to Operative Paragraph 3 of the resolution before us. I quote section (c) II: "Calls upon the administering power to implement immediately the abolishing of all discriminatory measures so as to foster communal hallllOny and nationalllnity in that Territory." Of course my delegation agrees completely with this, Mr. Cbaillllan. But the point is that while the administering power may well be able to abolish discriminatory measures, it is not by definition capable offostering communal and national unity in the Territory. This is the job not only of the leaders of Fiji, but of all men of good will in that territory; and a more difficult one is not easy to imagine. What my delegation would like to commend to the earnest attention of this committee, Mr. Chaimlan, i<; Operative Paragraph 4 which reads and I quote: "Endorses the decision of the Special Committee to appoint a subcommittee to visit Fiji for the purpose of studying at fIrst hand the situation in the Territory, and request the Chai Ii nan of the Special Commi ttee to appoint the sub-committee as early as practicable." It is because my delegation's primary interest is in the welfare and well being of the people of Fiji be they indigenous Fijians or persons of Indian descent-that my delegation supports this paragraph of the resolution. From personal experience my delegation is convinced that such a visit will do much to bring home to all who are sincerely concerned with the problems facing the people of Fiji, the nature of th e complexity, and the magnitude of the difficulties involved in finding a political modus vivendi for all the people of Fiji. Again, Mr. Chaillllan, I would like to urge that the greatest care be taken in the selection of members of the sub-committee to visit Fiji, for few things could create more chaos and havoc in Fiji than a group of people who are well intentioned but who are not equipped by experience to understand societies such as ours or that of Fiji. Thank you, Mr. CbailDlan. -117 -

PAGE 123

KYK#44 The Freedom to Choose Address to Caribbean Media Seminar, Pegasus Hotel, Georgetown November 5th, 1988 Reprint Stabroek News, November 12th, 1988 In responding to your request to declare open this Seminar on Satellite Invasion and Cultural Imperialism in the Caribbean I find myself dealing with cultural identity in the Caribbean. Now, throughout the 19th century, thinking people have been engaged in much controversy over what, for convenience sake, may be telmed the conflict over the relative positions of the scientific and the religious standpoints as they mould or affect the way that things are seen to be. The great achievements of science and technology over the past 100 years have served, however, if not to quieten down, then at least to make timid those who, whether defending the religious point of view or not, have questioned the uncritical acceptance of the status of scientific and technological devel opment as an unqualified boon. One consequence of this is the interesting development that tinds expression in certain attempts to claim that religious dogma has been replaced either by scientific knowledge or by ideological dogma. Submerged here is that ghostly premise that while perhaps ideology was once something scientific, it has now become unscientific. But, just as those who would defend ideology are able to claim that there is such a thing as ideological science, in the same way those who would defend religion can say that there is such a thing as religious science, and that if consequently the latter consists in theology then the fOlmer consists in cosmology. But by themselves these things are not of much import here. It is the conclusion which I want to draw from them that is important and my purpose this morning. For the point is that both theology and cosmology are but systems which as far as I can see it and as far as I understand it, has to mean that for anyone to attempt to be scientific, given the intellectual circumstances mentioned just now, one has to be systematic. And it is in view of these considerations that I would prefer to speak. about identity in telUlS that are systematic rather than in telms that are cultural. I am positing therefore an approach which sees identity as something systematic and I use it because I think wehave had enough of vague and general talk about the "identity" of people in the Caribbean. The word has been used so much that it has become vague, and it is because these various considerations have been at work that I have used and that I have advanced this conception of -118 -

PAGE 124

KYK#44 systematic identity. Fmther, in the list of these considerations I would want you to penuit me to suggest that the systematic identity of the man of the Caribbean (and that in itself is an ab s traction which is used here only for convenience) consists in his perceiving himself as somebody's labourer. Grounded in plantation experience this self-perception brings with it a detelI lIination, however futile, to achieve the status of being nobody's labourer. Let me repeat starting with a conception of being somebody's labourer (which is not difficult to under stand taking into consideration plantation slavery and the system of indenture) the evolution has been towards being nobody's labourer. And how non-Caribbean observers (I mean people who are not Caribbean people by birth and experience) how these people have seen this ( h owever distortedly) is perhaps best represented by the American de m ographer Gordon Erikson who in his book The West Indies Population Problem had this to say -and I quote: In deeply-roo t ed cul tur es it is admittedly diffic ult to pro pose successful techniquesfor mod ification of human incentives. H oweve r in the Federa tion ( th is book w as written when the Federation ex i sted) the inhabitants a r e not so; set in their ways. Hardly more t han 100 yea r sfrom slavery and inden t u r ed servitude almost everyone is a part time social innovator, borrowing from other cultu res and re-inter preting every thing to suit his personal taste and biases. I don't think we need here to bother abou t the references to Federation or the inaccuracies or the latitude given to the time span in removal from slavery or indentured servitude the important reference is the one to borrowing and re-interpreting In as much as borrowing and reinterpreting is surely the thing that strikes us any viewer and any observer of Caribbean ways, be he Caribbean or non-Caribbean. Nor is this either of much import. For, if my thesis holds, then it would seem to follow that, in his quest to become nobody's labourer, the Caribbean man is caught up in the process of becoming somebody's i mitator. Which is for all p ractical pu rposes to say that he i s a trapped c reatu re. Having sai d that I sho uld add no n e th e l ess that w e s h o ul d not co nfu se im itation w i th b o rr ow ing. It is ab road a m o n g Cari bbean s avan ts and comm e n ta t o r s on Cari bb ean r eality th a t mimicry i s o n e o f th e m os t noticeabl e ph enome n a in th e C aribb e an today But I think w e should distinguish very car e full y b e tween mimicry and th e process of borr o wing because th e man who has not borrow e d i s a very poor man, and civilisation would not have happened without a whol e proc ess o f borrowing I think and I would hope that thi s i s an is s ue which in your deliberations 119 -

PAGE 125

KYK#44 you will deal with. Because it has been and continues to be an issue in the Caribbean which suffers much distortion and obfuscation. Now, there must be few people who have written more about the trapped creature than Bruno Bettelheim, an Austrian psychiatrist (I think ) who in his book The Infolmed Heart based on his experience in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald ( and in which he spoke of those prisoners who survived) wrote: They came to realise what they had not perceived before that Ihey still retained the last ifnot the greatest of human freedoms, and that is to choose their ow n attitude in any given ci rcumstance. I have gone here to the extreme of referring to extreme situations. Or as he had to say elsewhere in the same book and I quote again: an age (and he was speaking of our age) an age that offers so many chances for escaping personal identity because if offers so many comfo rts and distractions requires equal strengthening of the sense of identity. Such a rime (he means this time of ours) needs to understand clea rly what are the essentials and what are the accidentals. In all of this I am not (as some have done) trying to make any kind of equation between the concentration camps and plantation slavery, although there are resemblances which are astounding ... And Bettelheim repeats again that, of all the freedoms, the freedom to choose is the greatest. Now at the beginning of this talk I said that I would prefer to speak of systematic rather than cultural identity. And part of my reason, as I have already observed, is to get away from the use of a phrase which has been much abused. Nor do I feel it amiss here to repeat what has been said about putting new wine in old wineskins. The simple truth it should be obvious by now is that personal identity is syste matic identity and that syste matic identity is informed identity. Or, as Bettelheim has it in the title of his book "An Informed Heart". During the tw o days of yo ur seminar I repeat that you will be dealing witll the historical preconditions and the central circumstances that attend satellite invasion (which I understand to refer especially to television) and cultural imperialism (which I und erstand to refer particularly to the supercession of the influence of North America, specifically the United States, over that of Western Europe, specifically Great Britain). What I would like to suggest to you is that in your discussions you s hould try to locate the problems you identify in the context of a global process the propon e nts of which call i t modernisation, while its opponents call it neo120-

PAGE 126

KYK#44 colonisation or neo-colonialism. But for the moment let us forget about opponents and proponents. Let us rather ask something about the assnmption that seems to be i8scribed in both protestations, which may be formulated as two questions: two sides of one coin. To wit: is neo-colonialism an inevitable condition for modernisation, or does modernisation necessarily require neo-colonialisation as a pre-condi tion? There are two sides of the same question, and to answer one is to deal with the other. Further, if I may revert to what I said earlier, is remaining somebody's labourer an inevitable condition for modernisation? I am trying to link the concept of modernisation, neo-colonialism and the self-perception of being somebody else's labourer. Proceeding on the ground that modernisation is a desirable thing, and that being somebody's labourer is not a desirable thing, the only way out of this difficulty, it seems to me, lies in resol ving this question: Who is this somebody of whom I am his labourer? Because we have now reduced it to a formal position where whether the somebody is North America, Western Europe, Latin America, Caribbean -any "ean", we have reduced it toa fOlmalposition where the somebody could be anybody and therefore when we say whose labourer am I, we should ask the question: "W hat is that somebody of whom I am his labourer?" And this brings us back to what remains crucial, and that is, as Bettelheim suggested (and I would like to retrace), a retention of the greatest of freedoms and that is the freedom to choose. But if I may return to the theme in another way, I would like to suggest that the problems associated with satellite invasion and cultural imperialism have created a vast literature comprising diagnoses as legion and varied as the remedies. But one fact remains -and that is that satellite cannot be dealt with by censorship. It is in view of this state of affairs that, as you know, governments which want to do something in resistance to this have sought to create information systems which WOUld, in policy at least, correct such imbalances of content and emphasis in the dissemination of information on a global scale. But for a large part, however. the technological aspects have proved to be unsurmountable, and in many cases no mor e than an extension of the gene ral reality a r eality which make s nonsense of the best policies and plans. I want to end here, and I would lik e to do so by propo sing that modernisation and n eo co lonisation would be inseparable if the evolution of the self perception of the Caribbean per son offers nothing more than a transition from somebody s labourer to somebody's technician 121 -

PAGE 127

, KYK#44 The Context of Arts and Artists in Guyana Today Presentation made at Panel Discussion organised by the Guyana Women Artists' Association held at the Burrowes School of Art, October 4th, 1991. Other panelists included Denis Williams and Stanley Greaves. I am sure you have heard the name Marquez, who is the Colombian writer. And Marquez's style goes back to about the 16th century in Italian Literature, what is kpown in art tWIIS as Baroque. And the interesting thing about it is that the connection is with architecture in Latin America which is also Baroque, at least from the old architecture. So that we find Marquez using contemporary material if you want to say that, in a fOlll1 that is not superseded but a fOIm that belongs to a different era or epoch. The only point I am trying to make here is that thisjuxtaposition, this fragmentation if you like, or this breakage akin to what you have in geological faulting happens also in literature and not purely in the visual arts. But the point that I think comes out very clearly having just listened to Denis and Stanley is that literary arts have a very severe limitation and that is that they are written in words. And that is the point of no return, that is to say, no matter what you want to express or what persuasion or artistic school you belong to, you are up against words. And in our case, speaking English, you are up against words that belong to the English language and that is something that we cannot escape. What you have to do is to deal with it lexicologically, that is syntax, word or verbal order. But, just let me make a quick resume of the situation in literary arts in Guyana. It began quite a long time ago since the abolition of slavery and I think the most important factor at every level is the Bible. It is a remarkable fortune that people, who live in the Caribbean, people of African descent and non white people, should have been brought up, as it were, on the authOIised version of the Bible, which is one of the great works of art in literature. Out of that we had emerging during the years, sporadically, old school masters who would write verse. And let me be very carefulverse and prose, because what we are dealing with here is medium, a medium, the medium of the English language and what it largely was of course was pastiche work, that is to say, modelled on the most popular of the English writers of the time. -122 -

PAGE 128

KYK#44 It went so far that there was a poet called Leo, his real name was Egbert Martin. He was an invalid, had to live in a bed. And he became very adept at writing verses. So much so that he entered a competition to add a verse to the national anthem of Great Britain, and he won a prize. In addition to that he even got a letter from Alfred Tennyson, who at that time was the poet laureate of Great Britain, commending him on his facility in writing verse. So that you see even from that example that the preoccupation of people wbo wrote prose or verse was to approximate what they had come across either in primary school or high school as the case may be. And that the closer they could approximate to that the better satisfied they were. The consequences of course were obvious that if you pick up an anthology of stuff written in the latter half of the 19th century, you could almost teU without looking at the names when these poems were written because they would show unmistaIrnble signs of th' eir sources. That has continued right into this century. So we again come back to this faulting that I spoke of, where you would find a young man today writing verse with a content that only he, from personal experience in Guyana, would have put down in lines and verses that may hark back to the unknown names, names you wouldn't recognise in 19th century literature. And that is happening today, But to put it more factually more quickly; at the turn of the century you had the emergence of Ed gar Mittelholzer and Arthur Seymour And I would like to pay tribute to Mittelholzer's heroism, to have even attempted to want to write in those days. He came from New Amsterdamremember... which was, I mean ... New Amsterdam. Anyway the fact is that the environment certainly was not an aid to him and the fact that he did produce novels is a great tribute to his heroism, that is all I can call it, his heroism. Well, Mittelholzersubsequentlywentto the war, might have been the last war, and ended up in England. But then going back again we come across a: figure like N.E. Cameron. And Cameron tells us bow he came to want to write because he is a mathematician by profession. And what he said was that when he was at Cambridge and would meet his associates at the college, they would quote something from a poet, an English poet perhaps or an American poet or a Spanish, whatever it was, and he said he felt very ashamed that he had no one to quote. And, in his own words, he thought he could remedy thi s by becoming a writer. And so you see, the peculiar way we could want to beco me writers. Anyway as I said, we had Seymour and Mittelholzer.. and again I must come back to the fact that language is of the utmost importance, that is to say, that these things are done in the English language. There is a terrible mistake that people make when they say that there is a thing like a poetic language as such. Anyway together with this adherence, if you like, to the conventional fo,rmrms of verse and prose all the time you have this creeping up, a creeping in ofanattempt tousecreolese. It came to its highest point in a Jamaican writer -123-

PAGE 129

KYK#44 called Vic Reid who wrote a book caIledNew Da y in which he tried to write a whole book, a novel using creolese. The troubl e with that is that after about half of it, it gets difficul t to read because of the limitations of his use of it, it made the book "bogged down" if you put it that way. So we continue with our conventional attitude to literature, that is to say, people in Guyana would get books from abroad, read them and try to write like the books they read. Nonetheless, the difference as against the visual arts is that the people who were trying to write books were usually of the more fortunately educated stratum of the society people who would have gone to Queen's College, Bishop's High School, as the case may be. Most likely they would have joined the civil service and therefore would have had a different attitude to writing than a painter who would be using a different medium. One result is that again we have the same thing as happened in the arts two tendencies, what D enis described as the Apolloman and the Dionysiac. But it took a different foml in their case where you had the same principle involved. That is to say to approximate to what was either fashionable or current in a given moment. And to put it brutally, what we had to a great extent was pastiche without any attempt not to be pastich e In other words pastiche was considered the prop er thing to do. And as a matter of fact the critics or the people who read the books from abroad would applaud pastiche because the attitude was one of such con tempt that the reaction, the psychological reaction to a piece of pa stic he would be, he couldn' t be a savage and copy this." It's not that he is an artist trying to be something but what he is that matters, and that is to say, that he is not a savage. Well that went on until the midclle of the century I would say, and it took a very sharp tum after the end of the Second World War where a lot of people went from the Caribbean to England and to America. And they had then realised for the first time that the world of the literary arts was a very, very very fractured world indeed And there are many, many streams flowing into the ocean. And there is no one stream that is the best stream. And therefore that liberated to some extent many of the writers of Guyana. In the mid st of all of this of course you had another heroic business going on. And that was the founding and maintaining of the literary magazine Kyk Over-AI by Arthur Seymour, now ably carried on by Ian McDonald. And myself, W il son Harris, Arthur Seymour would meet every week, almost every weekjust to discuss ideas and soon. And of course Arthur continued producing Kyk-Over-Al to which young Guyanese writers would contribute. There is a social fact which is of some importance and I stress it because of its importance, that is to say that the main contributors to KykOverAl were urban people, people of mainly mixed races what we call the mulatto type of the city dwellers. We had one or two people ofIndian descent contributing I rem em ber the names like Ruhoman, Chinapen, Ramcharitar...Now those -124-

PAGE 130

KYK#44 were few and far between but the interesting thing about them was that they were even more pastiche than the earlier generation. So that all the time what you are getting is a movement up and a regression, movement and regression, all the time. A sort of backward and forward movement going on all the time. Today. and Ian lam sure would COnflllll this. there are many writers, many people who write in Guyana, and I am unfortunately reminded of something I read many years ago. in which describing a town in Germany someone said the town had ten thousand poets and a few inhabitants. I am afraid we are not so far from that. Nothing wrong with it if it were alright. But the problem with that is. writing requires craft, that is. you have to learn to write. Tolstoy once made the point. .. someone once went to him and told him they wanted to write. he said. "You don' t want to play the violin too?" And as I said, people don t seem to realize that they have to learn to do it and you le3l1l to do it by doing it. There is no text book or how-to-do-it book that can tell you how to do it. It is a very lonely business. You wouldn' t have a school of writing in the same way you can have a Burrowes School of Art and the reason for that I think is because of the nature of the medium. of words. which everyone has to learn to deal with in his own way. Stanley made the point about the intellectual aspect of it which I think is very important in the literary arts. Because unless people realize the sort of breakdown thathas to happen they would not understand what problems they are dealing with. Let me put it this way. I use the expression literary arts. But that is only half of the story. because literary structure is inextricably connected with an aesthetic function or a poetic function there is a distinction between the two but that is not important at the moment. Let us stick to aesthetic function. In any given work of literary art you have a unity of aesthetic function and literary structure. Many people believe that one can work without the other but they cannot. There must be this unity. and it is only when people come up against problems in their own work and writing that they realize there is something going on that they are not aware of. and then you get all sorts of peculiar things starting to happen. Because they believe that there is some secret somewhere. locked up in some cupboard somewhere, which, if they can put their hands on it, would be able to solve this problem. The result is that you can get people starti n g to become F r e udian s or Jungians or all sorts of "ungs" \If "isms" because they are looking for som ething to solve probl ems that cannot b e solved way. As con s equence, and it has happened in the C aribbean and in Guyana too many people change from one year to another year from adhering to one theory or ism to another one and they continue like that without ever really developing Because the end of it all is that the writer has to develop himself and he can only develop himself by working at it. There is a case and I am not being difficulthere when I quote this ex ample -125-

PAGE 131

KYK#44 because it is a good example, to be concrete. A young lady came to me with some verse s once and asked me to look at them. So Ilooked at them and I turned them down on the table and then started to talk to her, to ask her what she had read. And she said she doesn't read, she writes! Well now, I appreciate what she was trying to say but s he wasn't saying it the right way. So I had to become a little more cold-blooded. I said alright, so I turned it back, "What have you written here?'''She said i t was a poem. I saId "Not so fast, it's a verse." She said, "Oh yes, verse." What we call "verse to the eyes only." But the point I tried to make to her was that if her little bit of reading allowed her to do that, is it not possible that more reading would do it bet t er? I'm afraid the young lady wasn't very pleased with my attitude to that. But that is the state of affairs. And all I am trying to stress here is that there must be attention to craftsmanship in writing and I think the whole history of writing in Guyana bears testimony to a failure to appreciate this problem. Most of the work that is produced shows great signs of lack of craftsmanship and unfortunately in verse it is much worse thanjt is in prose because it can become doggerel very easily. Where people believe that all they have to do is to find a word that rhymes with another word at the end of the line, so that you can get a word that has no place whatever in the syntax appearing only because it is similar in sound to the previous word. So that my point about literary art in Guyana is that what it does require is a greater attention to the acquisition of ordinary skills of writing. Another thing that h as to be understood is that in all arts, whether visual or literary arts, there must be before you start, some amount of talent available for someone to work on. I n other words he must work on his own talent and an important part of growing up for a young writer a person who wants to write, i s to understand tha t he must discover whether he does have that talent ornot. Becau s e ifhe doesn t be may continue frustrating himselffor years until he becomes so fed up w ith himself and with literature that he becomes a Philistine in due course. S o what I am saying here repeats to a great ex tent what both Stanley and Denis said. As regards the questi o n of whether the writers nowadays are up to date, well that is a relative problem. Take a case like Marquez whose writing goes back hundreds of years And yet people can read him with considerable enjoyment nowaday s As a matter of fact he is very much enjoyed by most people that although he g oes back centuries he is very contemporary in the sense of the materials that he is using. So that one cannot lay down a hard line and say that the writer or the artist must be up to date. I think that is a dangerous thing to happen, because what we may want to see may be better said in a fOllll that may appear to be out of date but which becomes very telling used in a certain way at a certain time. I think that is all I want to say. -126-

PAGE 132

,---------------'h' I I J t I' I ,I ' , :-t ... J . ,. ;',.'-' .. ..1 rf.' ... ... .--_. -. ----.-------_. _-------, -, . , I .. t '. . . (\ .. ------------_._-----_._-_. --------------------' THE PALMS, Brickdam 1878 Architect Cesar Castellani Drawing by Kenton Wyatt, after photograph by Edward Rodway I I

PAGE 133

KYK#44 Artist As Artist* Letter, Kyk -Over-Al, Vol.8 No. 23, May 1958 In your letter you seem particularly preoccupied with what you call "bitterness". I see too that you associate "bitterness" with the "rebel", claiming that the condition of rebellion and bitterness is a necessary source of the imaginative life of the artist. I don't know if I agree altogether. And I am reminded of Thomas Mann's point about the artist being so much disturbed internally that he some times has to make out quite the opposite, externally. The core of your argument is that the "artist" is a "rebel". Don't you think we might do better t o say that the "artist is an artist", and then proceed to tell what being an arti s t means? This idea about being a rebel seems a romantic notion to me, a notion the philistines love. Because it immediately absolves them from selfcriticism. For when they do in fact encounter an artist, all they do, with this notion well behind them, is to pretend to be interested and curious and "cultured", while deep down inside they tell themselves that this animal is an artist only because he is a rebel, transferring into this context, whatever s uits them to transfer Thus they excuse themselves and sink gently back into c omplacent limbo. As I say, I feel it mig h t be more fruitful to discuss the artist as artist. If a given human being is an artist and a rebel, at one and the same time, then being a rebel is either a consequence of being an artist, or, it is a parallel situation. On the other hand a person may very well be a rebel without being anything like an artist. So therefore that which goes into the making of a rebel is not necessarily the same as that which goes into the making of an artist. But by saying that the artist is a rebel, you are implying the opposite, with which I strongly disagree. The other part of your letter deals in a way with the intellectual atmosphere of the West In d ies You say, "part of the repressive atmosphere of the colonial scheme is its i ntellectual poverty". May I extend this condition of poverty to everything? And may I say too that the job of the artist and intellectual in the West Indies is no different from the job of the artist and intellectual in every part o f the world. We are concerned always with the human condition and the establishment of value. Everything is to be taken in the hand and transfOimed and given meaning. Other jobs belong to the others. -128-

PAGE 134

KYK#44 The Paintings of Stanley Greaves Foreword to Catalogue/or Exhibition held at the US/S, Georgetown, 1978 The recent paintings by Stanley Greaves are marked by Greaves continuing reliance upon symbolic fOlms and powerful use of colour to support the importance of these fOlms in the ordering process of the artist' s sensibility. In Greaves earlier work, the use of natural symbols like leaves and ovoid fOlms had already provided clear indications of the artist s dominating preoccupations. Forest Flower which was painted in 69 Jinks up with Mango Seed wruch was painted in '76, in as much as the ovoid fOlln is the infolilling theme. In the recent paintings however, these pre-occupations are elaborated to the extent that they seem to emphasise the ideational to some expense of the pictorial. The titles of the paintings too seem to confulll this, since they seem to be deliberately phrased to startle. They also introduce a literary element, a part of the ideational preoccupations of this artist. Take for instance a title like Traffic Lights and Banana Tree in which the juxtaposition of a mechanical device like a traffic light and an organic object like a banana tree does startle the imagination and demand from the viewer, by its sheer suggestiveness, much more than a cursory appreciation of forlll, colour and organisation of material. This holds good also for another titleBlackAnts and Diamonds. These recent paintings then while consistent with Greaves work as a whole, suggest a kind of departure in the direction of valid experimenta tion; and they deCidedly support the reputation he enjoys as one of thi s country's most highly individual and original artists Artist as Arti st" was Carter's re spo nse tn A.1. Seymour s open letter on Iht: theme "G reatness and Bitterness" based o n Yeats' poem Meditatiu/!:; in Time o/Civil War (I 923) -129

PAGE 135

KYK #44 The Poetry of Christopher Aird Release, 1979 The confidence tha t infonns these poems of Christopher Aird comes, it would seem, from the ease with which this young p oet commands images: "I slip into the sea. I hav e become the sea With this ease there is power too, as for example, in the s e quence in his Colu mbus poem: "I dreamed the earth was round ... I dreamed the earth was whole. I was toothless! as the spears! of my warriors." Yet with this consi d erable verbal ease and command Aird's co n ce ntration falte r s when this is l east to be expected, as for examp l e in such lines as the guarded mysterie s of the heart"; "the sun kissing my cheek! a soft farewell"; in contrast t o passages such as: "1 remember when you paused! mid-thoughtJ to con sid er, in you r way the setting sun" or ... is it that you understand in time that, despite our tongue, death rhymes fiercely with life", etc. It is this faltering o f concentration which leads to some of the awkwardness which in a passage like. "Golden! as the queen! it leaves within leave s" disturbs the rhythm and i n so doin g mars that unity which is essential. These of course are technical p roblem s which experience should resolve. The most striking quality of these poems is the range of their content, both in a literal and symbo lic sense. It will be very interesting to see in what directions this range will develop (Born in George town, Aird was educated at Queen's College. He w o rked in the library of the University of Guyana, and now lives and teaches ill Belize. ) 130-

PAGE 136

KYK#44 The Paintings of Bernadette Persaud May 29. 1991. Introduction to Catalogue for Exhibition at Venezuelan Institute For Culture And Cooperation. Georgetown. July August 199i. Immediately notable in BelIIadette Persaud' s paintings is their surrender to and command of colour. Unavoidably, the name Renoir comes to mind ; Renoir whos e work in the exploration and freedom of the use of colour remain s one of the major achievements of painting of th e last hundred years or so Before her most recent period. as r epresent ed by th e painting of this exhibition, Persaud's work seemed, througb restraint and experime ntation to indicate a certain executive reluctance; originating perbaps in some kind of harboured anxiety as to the expressiveness of what she was producing This took an extreme fOlm in ber attachment of literary material to painterly expression; and aho in her imposition of breaks on ber surfaces. Her painting Counterpoint (1983 ) for example, has such a break on the surface and also the of a stanza from the poet Manley Hopkins That an artist like Persaud, with an undeniable gift for the employment of the expressive possibilitie s of colour should find it necessary to to such means, bespeaks some unresolved and for that matter, adventitious, dissatis factions. Wbat is relieving is that. in ber recent work she has gone beyond that. Tbere has not been before, as there is here these paintings, so much of confidence and warmth and of gaiety 100; the componen ts of wbat in a phrase is her peculiar style, that which she has so far matured into It for her to give freedom to this maturity In a n ote written some years ago, Persaud said that b elieved that so m e of h er paintin gs started off as ventures in arl attempt to escape op pre ssive co nditions But what i s a t s tak e h ere o ppres sive co ndition s or no is the impulse 131 -

PAGE 137

I ,------------------------------------------------------------ ftf-t" .. t : ...... [ ..... \ -_ I I .. ,. .. HIGH COURT BUILDINGS from Charlotte Street .. . .: -10 ''''' ..... - -, .. ... ,.. ... 1887 Architects Baron Hora Siccama and Cesar Castellani Drawing by Kenton Wyatt after photograph by Dav i d Ford

PAGE 138

In Contradiction Release, VoU, 1978 KYK#44 This interview was conducted by the late Bill Carr who was Professor of English at the University of Guyana. BILL I have always wanted to interview you for a variety of reasons one, we are personal friends, we have known each other for a long time. I've known your poetry for longer than 1 have known you, and I would be frank to say that when I read your first volume Poems of Resistance I sympathised with the sentiments, and in my fIrst couple of years at V.G. it fell to me to teach Poems of Resistance, but I found myself while sympathising with the sentiments, failing to realise (I think I have since realised) the amount of craft that went into the writing of that kind of poetry And by craft 1 mean craft as an artisan might use the word, not as cunning, but perfectly honest. I was seeing a gap between what you obviously felt and what your poetry was actually recording. What I would like you to do, is for you to comment upon that adverse reaction in a comparatively young reader s reading of your poetry for the fIrst time MARTIN My attitude is very simple -My poems are the poems of a per s on who wanted to b e a person and to be a poet, so you have a combination of person and poet. One cannot become a poet unless one works hard at it. One must dream it; dream life, dream language; dream death B ILL The second book that you've brought out contains m J c h of the Poems of Resistance, but it contains n ew poems, which came as a surprise to me not because they are good, but because you will recall that for a number of years you were in the habit of saying, "No, I am not writing any poetry I am not publishing anymore. Yet now you are, and it see ms to me that your poetry is crafted 1 hang on to that word and can perhaps explain what 1 mean a little more clearly later on, crafted. 1 am saying differently crafted. -133-

PAGE 139

KYK#44 MARTIN I think that is a good observation. Most things are only different not be tter. One is more complex or more simple. But all are different and yet alike. May I illustrate, however ineptly, what I am trying t o say: Both sunrise and sunset haw: often been scarlet and returning noontime so blue and so white. I do not yet know the name men have given that flutt ering yellow and ubiquitous butterfly whose life is not long but whose beauty is so startling. BILL That per haps helps me to explain what is craft. But you now seem to me to be using words as a sculptor, or woodcarver would use his material; cutting close to the grain of the matter and avoiding the o bvious temptations of contradictory or refulgent metaphor. MARTIN "In the beginning was the word ." BILL "And the word was made flesh." Now whoever made it flesh is not our imm ediate concern that in itself is a metaphor, of course, but it's a me tap hor that is so sparse, that it has the authenticity of truth You can hear the chisel on the wood or the hammer and the cold chisel on the stone. What I'm saying is that poetry at this stage in the 20th c e ntury, doesn't perh aps need T.S. Eliot's kind of deliberate dryness, the systematic underplaying of what he found in the 19th century We need our own lang uage, and I think our own language, whether we are West Indian poets or English poets, s hould be spare, crafted and ... MARTIN Well don e BILL Well done, yes. That's one of the things that crafted certainly means. What k ind of connection would you fecI can meaningfully exi st between someone who is both a poet and some body who might be politically involved? In putting this question, I am not canvassing y o ur own political views but many people could feel that there is a dichotomy politicians are scamps and poets are people, right, and never the 'twain shall meet. But quite clearly they have often met in many poems. MARTIN Dante, Milton -134-

PAGE 140

KYK#44 BILL You left out Shakespeare. MARTIN Oh the Cbaimlan my respect for those people is too profound, that I become emotional, but let me proceed if I may ... Iflife is the coin itself, the one side of the coin is love, and the other side is death. So poets talk about these things -life, l ove and death. B ILL And all the time we cannot make the counterfeit or act perhaps on the counterfeit assumption that somehow or the other you can split the coin down the middle and tum it into two coins. Do you think, however that political involvement could influence the poet's sensibility in an indirect kind of way, supposing he i s directly involved? MARTIN Politics you see, is a part of life and poets are interested in life. We have a very serious problem. Yet, if politics is a part of life, we shall become involved in politics, if death is a part of life we shall become involved in death, like the butterfly who is not afraid to be ephemeral. B ILL The butterfl y who is not afraid to be ephemeral, do you think the Greeks mean to be ephemeral or not afraid to appear to be ephemeral? MARTIN Not afraid to be ephemeral B ILL What do you think of poets reading their own verse? Are they necessarily the best interpreters of themselves. MARTIN They have no right to do it. BILL T h ey have no right to do it? Well, who s h ould read th em? MARTIN Other people. BILL Why do you say so? Because you say it very defmitely. MARTIN Young women must read poems written by old men: And the y bring them alive becau se they see everyth in g ... May I quote someth in g please? In the premises afthe tongue / dwells th e anarchy afthe -135-

PAGE 141

KYK#44 ear; / in the chaos of the vision / resolution of the purpose. / And would shout it out differently / if it could be sounded plain;/ But a mouth is always muzzled / by the food it eats to live. / R ain was the cause of roofs. / Birth was the cause of beds. / But life is the question asking / what is the way to die. BILL Well, I think all of us in Guyana who can respond to poetry at all, were de e ply moved by and involved in that poem. Partly because of i ts quality as a poem, but there also were clearly other reasons, which we had perhaps best evade, because you know those things, those things are insignificant by comparison with the poem you acc omplished. That's the point. The poem will survive, when the muz zlers are forgotten, or are merely footnotes in sterile reference books. MARTIN Ultimat e ly, the thing is to become civilised. BIL L Are there any foreign poets, by foreign I do not mean necessarily E uropean, but let us say poets from the French West Indies or peop le like Pablo Neruda, N i cholas Guillen, that have meant something to you in your own development as a poet? MARTIN I like N e ruda because he is very clever. Derek Walcott, my friend and y o ur friend too, isn'the? Walt Whitman, Mayakovsky and Anna Akhmatova, the Ru ss ian s ... BILL Yes, wh o unfortunately, I think felt it necessary to commit suicide. You mentioned Walt Whitman just now Martin. Now I can say that I like this poem of Whitman's or that poem of Whitman's, but basically I cannot stand Whitman. Would you like to make your c ase? What's the nature of your interest in Whitman? MARTIN He is a very good poet, recall only Salut au Monde. BILL Yes. MARTIN You see Whitman had one thing that we haven't got: total freedom. That's why he was noL respected, because he was too free. Free enough to write: Come lovely and soothing death, / Undulate round the world, s erenely arriving, arriving, / In the day, in the night, to -136-

PAGE 142

KYK#44 all, to each, / Sooner or later delicate death. BllL That is another way of saying that Whitman was an American. Now in what sense, does your conception of Whitman hold in relation to America, to hi. s function as an American poet? MARTIN Alfred Whitehead, the great English philosopher who collaborated with Bernard Russell to write Principia Mathematica once said, "If this country (meaning the U.S. and I am quoting, loosely) were to vanish whose name will be remembered?" And he suggested Whitman's. BILL Who remembered Whitman Russell or Whitehead? MARTIN Whitehead BILL Yes, I cannot see somebody as civilised as Lord Bertie, really enjoying Whitman. A little vulgar, you know Whitman, I would imagine, in Lord Bertie's eyes. How would Russell respond to somebody when, caught out in a whopping contradiction, says (it's a marvellous answer) "{ am infinite I contain multitudes". Well that's Whitman. MARTIN Yes. Poor Whitman who had no chance to become educated, remains with us as does William Blake. BILL Any poem presumably is an adventure, something which is totally unknown and in ternlS of your own craftsmanship, artisanship, how do your readers respond to what you say? Do you think of them? Do you bother with the readers when you write a poem? MARTIN No one knows -you write. You imagine an audience -an in.laginary audience, and the imaginary audience is Go who is everybody. BILL Well yes, God has the sup reme copyright, but I am sure that you do not think of God all the time when you are writing a poem. MARTIN I don't think of God, he thinks of me. BILL That's an aspiration or a conviction? -137-

PAGE 143

KYK#44 MARTIN Arrogance. BILL No it is not arrogance at all an aspiration or conviction? MARTIN Faith, F-A-I-T-H. BILL How w ould you describe faith? MARTIN Faith is a belief that the sunrises in the morning. Hemingway wrote a book The Sun Also Rises. I also rise. BILL But of all the different emotional responses one can have to God, whether one is a believer or unbeliever in the Godness of God, faith is the hardest thing of all to define or even to describe. That really is a blind act because one doesn't know. We can talk about grace yes MAR TIN And that is why puppies don't get to open their eyes until nine days after birth They are born blind BILL You have to explain that one. MARTIN All little animals or buttertlies -God touches them and they get sight. BILL What? MARTIN Get sight. BILL What yo u said a moment ago, when you are writing poetry your fum conviction is in the existence of, i s it God? I mean it could well be Go d or a God, it could be a Hindu God or a Muslim God, a Christian God, they all seem to boil down to the same thing in the long run. MARTIN It boils d own to love BILL This conditions not your se nsibility which is your own personal thing bu t your feeling when you are writing a poem. MARTIN Nobody writes a poem upon feeling. Feeling invents a man -138-

PAGE 144

KYK#44 B ILL So the poem invents the poet as wood invents the carver, as the stone invents the mason and the architect. Yes, exce pt without that primary material, wood, stone or words you wouldn't have the poet, the carver, the sculpt or, the architect. MARTIN You wouldn t have the poet, the sculptor, or archit e ct unless you have something to write or sculpt or build. It means that in the beginning there was the word and the word was made flesh. BILL Martin,as a point ofinterest we hav e talked about your poetry we have digr essed into other poets Have you yourself even thought of attempting prose, short stories or a novel? MARTIN I did, but I am too indis iciplined to write prose, because I live in metaphors. Two lines are equal to a book BILL I can assu me that you will continue to be active and productiv e as a poet. MARTIN I've just compl eted te n poe ms BILL When do we see them ? I am speaking now simply as a potential reader and hop efuUy an actual one but that depend s upon you and your publishers. MARTIN I'll tidy them up and pass them to my friends BILL Surely these ought to be mor e than a tight circle MARTIN To whom shall I give my poems? BllL But we can leave our reader s with some as:-,uranc e that although you would prefer t o limit your own publtc w hich of course is your own choice, and a perfectly valid choice for a writer to make ... MARTIN r am a poet. r don' t want t o b e a p oet. BILL Martin you joined the s taff of UG a little over a year ago the fIrst question I'd like to put in relation to your working for U.G. Have you enjoyed it or has it cramped your style in any way? Your style as a person, not merely a style as a poet. 139

PAGE 145

KYK#44 MARTIN With friends like yourself Bill Carr, I'm not afraid to speak. BllL What about your students: your relationship with them? MARTIN They want to learn. BILL Are you willing to assist them? MARTIN My life is doing this. BILL In other words, you don't feel that you are being inhibited by some soi-disant Ivory Tower academic atmosphere? Do you feel free to do what you want to do? MARTIN I'm happy to be a free person Lines quoted from Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass, Book XXII; Merrwr i es of President Lincoln (Section 14). 1 40-

PAGE 146

KYK#44 On The Reality of Independence Interview by Jean Skeete of CARICOM Perspective, April-June, 1986 CP: As a Caribbean person, writingfor many years, you have spoken in very critical terms about the "paralysis" affecting West Indian life. At the same time, you yourself have spoken out as a Caribbean person. Are you suggesting that there is afutility when one speaks about the "Caribbean person"? MC: The paralysis you mention, refening to something I said some years ago, is largely a consequence of a collective evasion of real issues. We speak, for instance about "identity", when the use of this teuIl presupposes a consensus on the reality of which the identity" is a function. The point is that, deep inside this shared belief about the reality in question, is a conviction as to its inferiority, something which raises the fear as to whether the "identity" we speak of is not in fact the identity of inferiority; not inferiority in the vulgar sense of "inferiority complex", but in the pervasive apprehension of inferior productivity, which, different from how it sounds, suggests a spiri tual condition that subsnmes the economic one. If s piritual can be taken to mean that mood of expectation which inforlllS the lives of communities, then the inferiority at issue here is the inferiority o f mood: comfortable s ubservience. This is the other side of the coin frOlll the Not Invented Here Syndrome of which Prof esso r Beaubrun spoke in the January/ March 1986 issue of Caribbean Perspective. The point here is that subservience, comfortable or not, sets the stage for complicity at the expense of co-operation. This is as much a matter of the Third W orId versus the First W orId, as of the Third World versus itself; that is, of the contest between illusion (false perception ) and reality (right perception) of itself. Occidental isolation does not only mean West Europeanisation or North Americanisation. It has and still means nigger-yardisation. The trouble is that it actually induces simultaneously both nostalgia and besetting evasiveness. What to want becomes the issue, sooner or later to be assimilated to some opportune thesis. To sound like, or to look like or to behave like. Independence, the principle indispensab le to de-nigger-yardisation is unacceptable. 141 -

PAGE 147

KYK#44 Nor is there any room here for the rejection that nothing is indepen dent. The context defmes the term to signify self-determination: independent interdependence. CP One of Nkrumah' s famous statements declares: "One must first seek the politi cal kingdom ..... You also have been no silent critic of the arts. As one who has gone through this process that is, the political process -do you see any other way forward. Are you saying that the Caribbean man must either be engaged or be consumed? MC Nkrumab s call: "One must frrst seek the political kingdom", or as was inscribed on his statue in Accra: "Seek ye frrst the political kingdom and all other things shall be added on it", has to do with the whole national independence movement, which has as its aim national liberation, liberation of the people. In its place the call implies anti-imperialism as much as anti-tribalism and presupposes either the presence or the achievement of national unity. The facts of tribalism in African political life, like the facts of racialism in Guyanese political life, cannot however be wished away; and the theories adduced and advanced from variously grounded analyses of the facts have appeal mainly to the more educated section of the population, the members of which manipu late such theories in the interests of survival policies, rather than political objectives. The idea of politics as a means of social organisation is vitiated. Politics itself is the casualty. In the two lines quoted, viz: "All are involved, all are con sumed", the connotations of the word "involved" should not be reduced to the associations, philosophical and otherwise, of the word "engaged". CP: It has been said that you were virtually in "exile" in Guyana. Do you keep in touch with your contemporaries, for instance Wilson Harris, who now lives in England? MC: What makes an immigrant an exile, and what keeps an immigrant an immigrant? If it is involuntary absence in the former case, it is voluntary settlement in the latter. And emigre? This has to do with quittance which only formally seems close to the matter at hand. The question here however, is specific, and puts the onus on self persuasion, rather than quittance. As such, there is no general position to be taken as one mayor may not quit for one reason, and -142

PAGE 148

. KYK #44 not stay absent or not settle for quite another. These considerations apart, access to publishers and to their resources for publicity and distribution are to be seen as practical advantages. The mere fact of having been published by an English or North American publishing house makes for prestige. But many writers who are not based overseas enjoy such prestige. Whether being based overseas makes for better writing, raises the question as to whether better is synony mous with publishable. It is his own development which the writer has to persuade himself about; and every writer persuades himself differently. Whatmay seem inconsistent in what a writer does should be viewed in this light. As for writers "keeping in touch" with each other, this is best done through their works. -143-

PAGE 149

KYK#44 Interview with Martin Carter by Peter Trevis (Extract) Hinterland Caribbean Collection, 1989. PT: Martin, could you describe your own experience o/poetry as a child at home and at school? Me: Essentially, through the hymns we sang as children in primary school, that is between six and, say, ten. In addition to which we would have had texts originating in Britain of poems by people like Hemans"The boy stood on the burning deck ... sort of thing. They have a facile rhyme and metrical pattern which everyone in Guyana, of my generation, would have come in contact with. We must also remember that when slavery was abolished in 1834 the greatest impact on the population in the sense oflanguage was from the Bible because of the missionaries; the London Missionary Society, which was very active in those areas, taught ex-slaves from the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament. So you would find in speech of places like Guyana a tremendous influence of the patterns and vocabulary of the Old and the New Testament and I must say of course that one could hardly find a better fOim to learn from. PT: At what stage did you begin to /eetpat your interest in was such that you wanted to pursue it in your own writing MC: I couldn't say. What I was very interested in as a child were the references to Greek mythology, which we read in very simplified fOlm but, nonetheless, as it's clear mythology in narrative, that is what mythology is all about, that is the story of a hero or gods as the case may be. So that, whether you're learning from the Greek text or from a simplified text, what does come through is the story, the narrative, and mythology is a narrative. PT: The literature that you have described is set in a landscape very different to the landscape you must have experienced as a child. Was there a literature available to all that actually took on that landscape, that experience that you'd had as a child? Was there a black literature available, a Caribbean literature? -144 -

PAGE 150

KYK#44 MC: No not at all when I was a child. As a matter of fact what you had would have appeared in newspapers, and the nearest thing to what you are calling black literature would have been versions of folklore in the vernacular, if I may use that word: the vernacular in the sense of oral speech being written down; no attempt to make it literary. That was the closest we had at the time. PT: In later years, has the literature of Latin America and the Americas in general exercised an influence on you at all? MC: The literature of the Americas, interestingly enough, that would have intluenceda lotofus-I don t say alone-were translations from the Spanish into English. Let us take for instance the case of Pablo Neruda, who would have written in Spanish as you know, heavily influenced by the Surrealists in France and then translated back into English from the Spanish; and the translator would have used Whitman as a model or pattern to translate Neruda into, when in fact Neruda s influence was very heavily Surrealist: that is the early 20th century on the Continent, the European Continent. So that it was filtered to us from many sources, and I think what happened to the many young writers in the Caribbean was a sort of unconscious selection from materials in assimilating them to our own speech patterns and way s of expressing ourselv es. PT : In the 1950s you were heavily invo lved in politi cal activities in Guyana. 1 w o nder if YOIl could briefl y outline for us the political context in Guyana in the early 1950s ? MC: Yes. In 1950, the las t warin Europe, the Second World War, had tremendous influence on the people of tlle Caribbean because many young people left the Caribbean to come to Britain to join the air force and to fight in various services. After the war was over some of them were g iv e n sc holarship s and various things and in due course they came back t o the Caribbean, toGuyanal etus say, bringing with tbem their experience oflife in Britain and on the Conti n ent, and the people at home would hav e come into contact with them: they would have brought books and ideas which would have helped a lot to liberate, if you like, Guyanese and West Indians from the provincialism of small colonial societies. As a consequence, we had in 1950 the t!mergence of a popular movement called the People's Progressive Party, led by Cheddi Jagan and his wife JaJ;let Jagan who i s an American citizen and who introdu ced, to some exte nt, Marxist -145-

PAGE 151

KYK#44 literature, mostly from Britain, from the Communist Party in Britain; and people would never have come into contact with that sort of material before. It was very simplified, over-simplified, and they took it literally. But it had a tremendous impact on people who had never before seen themselves as active people in a social milieu. So you had the emergence of the PPP, the People's Progressive Party. I became a member of the PPP, and I became an executive committee member. I was very active, and in 1953 I was invited to a conference in Romania, to which I went. On going home I was told on the ship off Martinique that I was banned from going to Trinidad, which was the place we go from to Guyana. I arrived in Trinidad and was arrested, a prohibited immigrant. In due course I got back home only to arrive at the time when warships from Britain had gone to suspend the constitution of Guyana. I was arrested and put in a detention camp at a place called Timehri not long, for three months We came out and continued agitating and talking to the people and sharing out stuff that we had printed ourselves. Some poems were seized by the British Govern ment -by the British Army, sorry on the grounds that they were subversive, but I'd written poems before all this happened and they were collected and published in Britain in 1954 under the title Poems of Resistance. So that is sort of the background to it. PT: Were any of these poems actually read at political meetings or not? MC: Oh, yes, they were. PT: What was the effect of that? MC: Repetition. People repeating lines. PT: You say at the end of one of your poems apoem caUedLoo king at Your Hands: "[ don't sleep to dream but dream to change the world. II Could y o u say a little more about that, what that actually means, those lines? MC: It means exactly what it says: one dreams to change the world knowing that the world is not changeable in the ordinary sense, and therefore what you get there is hope that other people will want to change the worl d not expecting anyone to change the world physically, but if y our mind is changed, the world is changed. If! see -146-

PAGE 152

KYK#44 the world differently, that's a different world PT: So presumably o n e of the r oles of your poems is to make people see the world differently ? Would that befair ? MC: Let's put it this way: as a result, it's not a motive because I'm talking about personal independence, independence as a human bein g -but one hopes that that would be a result, too. PT: So they're not didacti c in the sense of changing the world physi c ally that's n ot t h e crude aim of them but hopefully because you'r e telling the truth ... MC: That is it prec ise l y. That is very well put. PT: In the early poems I get a very strong sense of internationalism and of optimism: you refer to the struggles in Kenya, the struggles in Malaya the struggles in EastemEurope, and the struggle in Guyana. Has that optimism survived ? Me: Well it is not a question of optimism or pessimism, it's a question of emphasis and relevance. Speaking from a distance now and answering your questio n in critical terms the invocation of the experience in Kenya or Malaya or what have you, artistically invoked, is inexplicably bound up with what one is living, so that possibly if I were as youn g as I was then, writing now, I would speak of South Africa. So there s nothing fixed abou t the reference because if poetry is anything it is spontaneous, and that is why placed against the computer, let us say, po e try remains poetry because the computer can't be programmed to be spontaneous. It can be programmed but it can't be programmed to be spontaneous. As a friend of mine once said, ''I've never seen a computer laugh." It cannot laugh because laughter is spontaneous PT: You say that it's a question of relevance and emphasis rather than of optimism. Is there a sense that you still see history moving in a particular direction? MC: Yes PT: And that directio n i s not reversible there are setbacks on the way but it will carry on ... -147-

PAGE 153

KYK#44 MC: Not reversible. PT: You said e arlier on that in Guyana the influence of European Marxism had been very strong and there is a strand in Marxist criticism that goes back through people like Lukacs, that requires and makes great emphasis on classical definitions and the terms of classical literary criticism. Me: A great En g lish historian, a Greek authority, George Thompson, makes the poin t very clearly; and just to refer further back: Emmanuel Kant also made the point very clearly of dead languages meaning Greek of cour se that had reached their limit. Now we have an interesting poin t here between the dead languages and the unwritten languages. By unwritten I mean the lang uage of the people in the street. By dead I mean that which has been written down but not been spoken, so you geta beautiful antithesis of the spoken and not written and the writte n but not spoken. So no matter how we try to intellectualise i t away, there is a connection between the language written but not spoken and the language s poken but not written. I suspect that wh a t we are dealing with here is not language in the ordinary sense of the word, what we are dealing with is the power of speech which is only realised in words. In other words a dumb man can speak. PT: Could you give me an example of a poem that came easily? MC: ., Oh yes, I r emember exactly when I wrote that. It's a poem entitled The Great Dark. (Recites Th e Great Dark) PT: That was a poem that came easily? MC: Yes, very easily. Simpler ones are much more difficult. I suspect it's a combination of factors at work but the simple ones are very difficult because the tendency is to overwrite them. But if they are difficult when they come, you can't overwrite them because they are difficult already, if you want to use the word difficult in the se nse of complexity. PT: In an earlier conversation you talked about sculpting and carving away the meaning. Would that fit in there with the simpler -148-

PAGE 154

KYK#44 poem? You are constantly havin g to take away and take outfrom it? MC: Yes, that is correct. PT: Do you enjoy re-reading your own poetry? MC: It's difficult because one has to pay so much attention to every word and when you wrote them you were close to them but after years you become foreigners. PT: Yes, [was going to say some of these poems are over thirty years old now. Does it feel like a different man, a different person almost! Me: No. At the beginning, but the words start removing themselves and the patterns start emerging and the pattern then takes over. In the more recent ones the words dominate, but in the less recent ones the pattern takes over. So that I can t remember a poem from my head but if you tell me the first line and I get the rhythm I will be able to fit it in. PT: And what about the experiences that are related to the poems ? Do they come back with the poem? MC: They don't come back. No they're totally different. When I say totally different they are not the same things. Now and then you can remember a situation, but that is not frequent. PT: Moving on to the poetry that you. wrote in the late sixties to me it appears more private, less public and in many ways more difficult. Is that just my observation o r is that a fair obse rvation about those poems? MC: I find that very difficult because one doe s not chose to be difficulL or complex. The material you deal with requires a certain way of doing it and that is not a choice, it's a situation you find yourself in. For instance, in a sequence of poems, let u s say you wrote flve poem s in one year; four of them may be very difficult and yet the one that is necessary to the sequence may be as limpid as anything so that it's not a question of setting out to write a simple poem or a difficult poem, it's a question of having written a poem to ask yourself whether it's the right poem. I like the word right' you see Philip Sidney in the 16th century made the point about a right poem not 149 -

PAGE 155

KYK#44 good, right; and I think that is the correct way of looking at it. So, in a cluster of poems, five may be as you say difficult where one may belimpid. Butal1 the poems are right poems, right for what they have done The Great Dark Orbiting, the sun itself has a sun as the moon an earth, a man a mind. And life is not a matter of a mother only. It is also a question of the probability of the spirit, Strength of the web of the ever weaving weaver I know not how to speak of, caught as I am in the great dark o f the bright connection of words. And the linked power of love holds the restless wind even though the sky shudders, and life orbits around time, around death, it holds the restless wind as each might hold each other, as each might hold each other. 150

PAGE 156

KYK#44 Bibliography -151 -

PAGE 157

KYK#44 Bibliography of Martin Carter's Prose 1. The Queens College Apiary in 1943. The Queens College School Magazine: May 1943 -1944 Spring. 2. "A Seriallmperialism", Thunder, June 1953, Vol. 4, No.7. 3. Editorial: "Non-Cooperation", Thunder, May 1, 1954, Vol. 5 No.5. 4. "Which Side Are You On?" Thunder, May 15, 1954, Vol. 5, No.7. 5. "The Civil Service and National Liberation", Thunder, May 29, 1954, Vol. 5, NO.9. 6. Editorial: "Raving and Reaction", Thunder, June 1954, Vo1. 5, No. 11. 7 "The Power to Change", Thunde r July 24, 1954. Vo1. 5. 8. Editorial: "The Lesson of Augus t", Thunde r July 31, 1954, Vo1. 5. 9 "Yankee Eye Wash Thunde r August 7 1954, Vol. 5 No. 19. 10. "An American Oracle", Thunder, August 28, 1954, Vo1. 5. 11. "Freedom Not Charity", Thunder, January 8, 1955, Vol. 5, No. 42 12. "Pablo Neruda", Thunder. January 15, 1955, Vol. 5, No. 42. 13. Editorial: 'Time of Cri is", Thunde r January 15, 1955, Vol. 5 No. 42. 14 "Politics and the Individual", Thunder, February 12, 1955, Vol. 5, No. 42. 15. Editorial: "Surrender or Fight", Thunder, February 26, 1955, Vol. 6. No. 48 16. Editorial: "No Separate Salvation", TIlUnder. March 5 1955, Vo1. 6 No. 48. 17. "What is a Politician", Thunder, March 12, 1955, Vol. 6, No. 48. 18. Editorial: "The Bevan Explosion", Thunder, March 26, 1955, Vol. 6. No. 52. -152-

PAGE 158

KYK#44 19. Editorial: "Portrait of Churchill", Thunder, April 16, 1955, Vol. 6 No. 55. 20. "A Dark Foundation", Thunder, April 16, 1955, Vol. 6, No. 55. 21. Editorial: "Easing World Tension", Thunder, May 21, 1955, Vol. 6, No. 59. 22. Editorial: "From Babylonian to British" Thunder, May 21, 1955, Vol. 6, No. 60. 23. Symposium: "Is There a West Indian Way of Life? Kvk-Over -AI, Mid 1955. 24. Editorial: "Bribes for What?", Thunder. July 2 ]95). Vol. 6 No. 65. 25. Editorial: "Our Newspapers and What they Stano For" 71umde r, July 16, 1955, Vol. 6. No. 67. 26. Editorial: "Dr. Williams and the Caribbean Commission" Thunder, July 23, 1955, Vol. 6, No. 69. 27. Editorial: Thunder, July 30, 1955, Vol. 6, No. 70. 28. "Hamlet", Thunder, August 20, 1955, Vol. 6 29. Editorial: "West Indian Regiment", Thunder, August 27,1955, Vol. 6, N o 74. 30. 'This Race Business" Thu.nder, September 10, 1955, Vol. 6 No. 75. 31. Editorial: "But Where is Mr. Burnham?" Thunde r September 10, 1955, Vol. 6, No. 76. 32. 'The Racists Among Us", Thunder, September 24. 1955, Vol. 6, No. 75. 33. "Freedom from Imperialism ... Freedom to Evo] ve." Thunder, October 8. 1955. Vol. 7, No. 79 34. "Wanted: A Great Obeah Man", Thunder. October 22, 1955. Vol. 7, No. 79. 35. Editorial: "Of Governor and Governed" 7hunder, October 29, 1955, Vol. 10, No. 83. 36. "Penal Reform or Economic Measure", Thunder November 12, 1955. 153 -

PAGE 159

KYK#44 37. "Where are the Heroes?", Thunder, November 26, 1955. 38. "Sen sibility and the Search", Sunday Argosy, January 26, 1958. 39. Letter: "Artist as Artist", Kyk-Over-Al, May 1958, Vol. 8, No.8 No. 23. 39. "Out, Out the Fire", (Short Story), Kyk-Over-Al" May 1958, Vol. 8 No. 23. 41. A Note on Vic Reid 's 'New Day'''Kyk-Ove r-AI Decembe r 1958, Vol. 8 No. 24. 42. "A N e w Life" Short Story, Unpublished. Circa 1960's. 43. "Maccabee at Sea", S h ort Story, Unpublished, Circa 1960's. 44. Letter: "Meaning of the Arts in the Caribbean", K yk-Over-Al, December 1960. 45. "Martin Carter Says: Recent Events Spring From Deeper Social Undercur rents", Chronicle, Friday, March 23, 1962. 46. "The Race Crisis -British Guiana", (Speech) Puerto Rico, Circa 1964. 47. "Pow e r Race & Trouble" Circa 1965. 48. Editorial: "Unemployment", Booker News, January 8 1965. 49. Editorial: "Safety Competitions", Booker News, January 29, 1965. 50. Editorial: "Adventure in Reading", Booke r News, February 19, 1965. 51. "On Being a Guyanese", Booker News, Marc h 5, 1965. 52. "Catering for Changing Taste", Book e r News, March 19, 1965. 53. "Decolonisation", Booker News, April 9, 1965 54. Return t o Competition", Booker News, April 30, 1965. 55. Editorial:"The Chairman's Statement", Booker News, June II 1965. 56. Editorial: "Guianese Society", Booker News, July 2 1965. -154-

PAGE 160

KYK#44 57. Editorial: "The Story on Page One", Booker News, 23 July, 1965. 58. Editorial: "A Need for Discussion", Booker News, August 13, 1965. 59. Editorial: "Challenge and Change", Booker News, September 3 1965. 60. Editorial: "Running Their Own Show", Booker News, September, 24, 1965. 61. "Sambo at Large", 1965. (Essay on Experiences of Cardiff Conference). 62. Review, New World Quarterly, Parts 1 & 2 October 29, 1965. 63. "Why Guiana Needs Independence", New Statesman, November 5 1965. 64. Editorial: "The Case for Research", Booker News, October 15, 1965. 65. Editorial: "Accord in Athletics", Booker News, November, 1965. 66. Editorial: "Playing our Part", Booker News, November 26, 1965. 67. Editorial "Learning for Life", Booker News, Decemberl7, 1965. 68. Editorial: "A Wider View" Editorial, Booker News, January7, 1966. 69. Editorial: "Colonialism? What Do You Mean?", Booker News, January28. 1966. 70. Editorial: "Viewpoint on Adult Education", Booker News, March 4, 1966. 71. Editorial: "Of Books and Citizens", Booker News, March 25, 1966 72. Editorial: "Our Part in Technical Training", Booker News, April 15, 1966. 73. A Question of Self-Contempt", New World Quarterly, (Special Independence Issue),1966. 74. Editorial: "Science in Service", Booker News. May 6 1966. 75. Radio Interview: A Guyanese Poet in Cardiff', Kaie-Independence, May, 1966. 76. Editorial: "Two Worlds", Booker News, June 10. 1966. 155 -

PAGE 161

KYK#44 77. "Question of Fiji", Speech at the General Assembly, United Nations, New York, 1968. 78. Broadcast Statement by the Minister of Information, (M.C.), Friday, August 1,1969. 79. Edgar Mittelholzer Lecture Series: "Man and Making", "Victim & Vehicle", National History and Arts Council, Ministry ofInfOimation, 1971. 80. "If a Man Lies to Himself, the World will Lie to Him" Guyana Graphic, April 1973.(Broadcast on Radio Demerara, April 1973) 81. "Apart f rom Both", GISRA, December, 1974, Vol. 5, No.4. 82. A Free Community of Valid Persons", Speech at the University of Ciuyaml. Caricom Perspective, 1974. 83. Foreword to Stanley Greaves' Exhibition Catalogue, 1978. 84. "In Contradiction", Bill Carr Raps with Martin Carter, Release, 1978. 85. A Religious Interpretation of Guyanese Proverbs", Release, Vols. 3 & 4 1978. 86. "The Poetry of Michae l Aarons", Review by Martin Carter, Release, Vols. 3 & 4 1978. 87. Interview in Caribbean Contact, February, 1979. 88. "The Poetry of Christopher Aird", Release, 1979 89. Poems by Rayman Mandai: introduced by Martin Carter, Release, Vol. 6 & 7. 1979. 90. "The Location of the Artist", R e lease, Vol. 8 & 9 1979. 91. Open Letter to the People of Guyana, Dayclean Special, 1979 92. "The Reality of Independence", Caricom Perspective April-June, 1986. 93. "A Note on Jagan", Slabroek Ne,vs, December 11,1987. 94. "11Je Freedom to Choose". Stabroek News, November 12, 1988. -156-

PAGE 162

KYK#44 95. Interview by Rovin Deodat, Kyk-Over-Al, Vol., No. 1989. 96. Interview by Peter Trevis, Hinterland Caribbean Collection, Blood Axe Books, London, 1989. 97. "A Chat with Martin Carter, Guyana's National Poet" by Manuel Abrizo, El Universal, January 6, 1990. 98. Note on Bernadette Persaud' s Exhibition, May 29, 1991. 99. "The Changing Context of Arts and Artists in Guyana Today". Text of Presentation made at Burrowes School of Art, October 4 1991. Martin Carter was Editor of Booker News from January 1965 to June 1966. Note: (The Compilation of the Martin Carter Prose Bibliography is a work in progress being undertaken by Nigel Westmaas) 157 -