For the Old Guys, Old Ghosts

“We are never where we are, but somewhere else”

- Derek Walcott, “In Italy”

In Haiti these days, according to a recent report in the NYTimes, there is growing nostalgia for “the old ghosts”, Papa Doc and his son Jean-Claude Duvalier. This wish to return to the good old days is in response to mounting social problems which have turned the country into one of the poorest places in the world. In the old days there was a stronger economy, security (of a kind), lower food prices and, for the privileged, scholarships to study abroad.

It was also a time of pitiless oppression; but for those who miss “the old ghosts” there’s a convenient amnesia about that; and the torture of political prisoners in those prisons near the presidential palace.

This longing for harsh but quieter times, the column suggests, is fuelled by a “nostalgia for the strong hand”. A “voodoo master” hougan, it’s also reported, has returned from the US to restore the supplementary powers of the old religion. Peace at any cost would seem preferable to the disorder and despair that’s rife across the land.

“Looking back” for many Guyanese can assume bitter, uncompromising forms. Something about the way newspaper columns routinely demonise the years of “the strong hand” (Burnham) or pine for the integrity of “the good heart” (Jagan) reveals how deeply unforgiving and irreparable the fault lines of thinking (about colonial politics) still run.

Through the mind’s back windows (where we gaze and wonder what the future holds) many Guyanese – young, worried or ambitious – still prefer “looking out”; still dream of moving away, using metaphysical sea ports if necessary. Migration from our shores – with its feverish planning, its promise of “freedom” from those phantoms of terror at night, and the precariousness of wage-earning each day – has been described as “one of the healthiest” per capita in the world.

Once overseas – huddled for security, and content with “looking on” from the margins – there’s the compelling wish with the passing of years to “give back” to the old country. Gifts and sentiments are packed tight in barrels or remittances, poetry or social commentary. Recent fiction by some of our overseas-based authors could be read as “give back” memory-based narratives, intended for “those whom we first [knew and] loved”.

Godfrey Chin is not a literary man. His book, Nostalgias (2007), a sentiment-loosening compilation, is written with infectious enthusiasm mainly for Guyanese old-timers, settled or adrift in unfamiliar spaces; in Canada and the USA, or the UK.

The book is chock full of tiny descriptions, most of it familiar stuff; and it’s fizzy with name dropping – names of people, names of places, names of nicknames, of foods, rituals, discos, songs, cultural totems, social events, street characters, sports personalities.

There’s so much naming, what some might recall as the coastal-choked, youth-wasted days – trapped in “an infinity of endeavour”, as Derek Walcott might say – are sorted and wrapped like confectionery for the reader. If, by chance, you grew up outside Georgetown – across wide rivers in places with no electricity – you might, with some justification, feel marginalized and faceless.

Housing the nation’s historical memories has always been a thorny issue. Decades of indifference and neglect had resulted in crumbling and serious loss at the old Archives. An article recently In Stabroek News questioned the seriousness and intent of the resource managers in the shiny new building on Homestretch Avenue. It wondered quite rightly if they were up to the task, or mere occupants of another grand illusion.

It expressed the hope that facilities for a sound archive there would be used to capture “for posterity” the voices of our past leaders, their pronouncements at important milestones in the nation’s history.

Sound archives might also preserve the days when radio funneled the world into our lives. Beside the radio voices making history, one could hear again the voices of ordinary folk talking about their lives, the radio programs and the music they listened to. Chin’s Nostalgias reminds us how bare our sound archive shelves might be when it comes to music.

Unlike, say, Jamaica where one reggae song could link emotions & lives to specific decades of homegrown creativity, our music reservoirs for the most part were filled from dawn to midnight with imported sound: Mohammed Rafi (syrupy but ethnic-soothing) at sunrise; through an assortment of island or (US) pop, or Country & Western, and dreary servings of Euro-Sunday sounds; to Jim Reeves (deep-voiced and syrupy) at sunset.

Beside the sound archive, one imagines a gallery of visuals. A call has gone out for Guyanese to send home photo memorabilia of the old days which could be studied for clues to how people coped every day with colonial life. In Chin’s Nostalgias, among the pics of family and city life, there are two photos worth a thousand and one words.

One of the Botanic Gardens in the 50s, back when it was proudly maintained, when its Edenic, ordered beauty was a powerful attraction for Guianese on Sundays, a place for the spirit to getaway from the dusty yard and “the smell of history”. And a photo of the old Queens College assembly hall, with orderly rows of students, reminding one of the disciplined learning & distinctions that once defined that institution. (The Latin teacher who’d quote Epictetus, “Only the educated are free.”)

Chin’s Nostalgias is a generous-hearted effort at “preserving golden memories”. He knows the date and the hour when the paradise that was his Guiana fell to ruin. On February 16, 1962, he writes, during the anti-Jagan Govt riots, “Around three p.m., the police at Brickdam went on strike, refusing to patrol the streets without firearms, and in that instant law and order broke down, and, in my opinion, “Choke and Rob” entered the pages of Guyana’s history.”

“In the next 25-30 years,” he continues confidently, “300,000 would flee their homeland.”

Chin can be forgiven his flyover views. “Carpe diem!” he says, had been his guiding motto in those colonial years. True to his word, Nostalgias is a stirring metemgee of day-seasoning, with humour and spice and all things nice. Nothing too “deep” or too disturbing to spoil reader pleasure. (There’s a moving tribute to Dr. Walter Chin – “a devoted patriot…a legend in his time” – which might set some readers off in search of at least a passing reference to Dr. Walter Rodney).

Nor is it too probing. An observation of the “right-angled streets” in Georgetown could have prompted some thoughtful reference to the grid-like road system designed & laid down by the Dutch. And while as a boy or young man growing up in the colony Chin might have been unaware of the imperial “strong hand” arranging (or moulding) Guiana’s choices from overseas, as an old man “looking back” that sliver of forgetfulness might strike some readers as a little odd.

Memory – the opiate of the transplanted masses, you could say; or their educated reps – remains the most swollen part of our nation’s intelligence. With our future still in the hands of international funding forces, you could enter, through columns in G/town’s press, retro rooms that encourage readers of Stabroek News, for instance, to think about the travel observations of Schomburgk, explorer of Guiana’s interior; or those anniversary messages in the Guyana Chronicle that feed the faithful by, for instance, hailing Dr. Cheddi Jagan as more virtuous and heroic than anyone before and after Independence.

You could follow along as some pot-stirring writer takes you back to his favorite cauldron of upheaval & loss – the slave rebellions, the anti-colonial 50s, the Burnham 80s. Either way, while the truth & its complexity stays submerged for now, argument and counter-argument about victories & villains in Guyana’s past will not leave you feeling like a fatherless child.

Given Chin’s sunny disposition it would be mean-spirited to rain on his Nostalgias – unedited and snippety as they look on the page. Like 45 or 78 rpm vinyls his old days collection seems very important and precious to him. They provide the only clues to how Chin himself is doing these days, so many years & miles away.

All told, Nostalgias offers a cozy, cheerful message to older Guyanese in the diaspora (their reading habits intact), who never quite severed ties; who on snowbound days might welcome the company of ghosts; or conversations in any form that brings them full circle to their halcyon growing-up years.

The message is this: the rootless life is not your fate; you can go home again. Climb out that basement, dust off the old identity. As it grows late in your remaining afternoons, you can reconnect your beginnings and end. No “give back” patriotism required. In this book you could skip pages, and still enjoy the flight.

Yes, comrades, through the mulch of time, gather ye rosebuds.

Book Reviewed: Nostalgias: Godfrey Chin: CKP Publishing: Florida, USA: 2007, 259 pages.

Anatomy of a Marriage (1920s Georgetown)

A newspaper columnist in British Guiana writing a Sunday column (February 1922) makes the following statement: “Georgetonians are of two kinds: those who live in Queenstown and their unfortunate neighbours who inhabit the remaining part of our garden city.” That newspaper columnist is a fictional character and the statement sets the stage for Roy Heath’s first novel From the Heat of the Day (1979).

The Queenstown part of the city was apparently not fully developed at the time. From a home on Anira Street you could hear the “incessant roaring of the waves at floodtide” coming all the way from the seawall. Heath describes the area as “the unblemished district with its tall houses and blossoms on year end, and painted palings like flattened spears embracing yards darkened by thick branches of fruit trees.”

Residents hired gardeners to tend all those blossoms. New Garden Street was remarkable for its fine houses with large gardens in front of them, “in which flourished roses and dahlias, their stalks maintained by a staff to which they were tied.” A pipeline sewage system was set up in the early twenties foreseeing dignity and plumbing for the fortunate (and the end to posies under the bed). Who could resist the dream of moving to Queenstown upon hearing of this?

The aesthetic order of the city has crumbled over decades; parcels of dilapidation and vacant grassy lots remain. New fire-proof structures tower over old eyesores, and new residents moving in have established a kind of equal opportunity ethos. On Peter Rose Street jostling with once elegant homes there’s an Auto business, cars or vans packed tightly in a paved yard, with streamers flapping in the wind across the road. Of interest, too, is a mosque and a house turned into an office for taxi service; and a fruit vendor’s shack set up at the entrance of an Oronoque Street home.

You could argue these are buoyant signs of post-Independence development in the city; a messy kind of free for all residential zoning that disdains old vestiges of colonial respectability, even as a new moneyed and political class finds greener pastures elsewhere, with finer prospects of manicured grass on which to build.

Today minivans take short cuts through Queenstown’s narrow, quiet streets, honking in anticipation at evening strollers. And Bastiani (“the undertaker” in Heath’s novel) has long gone, as is the smell of horse manure from the shed housing his funeral carriages; his Forshaw Street business has been replaced by a more upbeat entrepreneur selling bridal accessories.

But colonial Queenstown was where Roy Heath moved his 1920s characters, Armstrong & his wife Gladys, in From the Heat of the Day; the old Queenstown with alleyways well-maintained by “men spraying the gutter-water with cisterns of oil”. Heath examines what happens when their marriage falls apart in the Forshaw Street property they occupy.

The flush of romance in the marriage wears off after two years and two children. As early as page 20, an inexplicable “rift” develops. Gladys Armstrong, a woman of healthy appetite, faithful and pledged “to breed and obey”, cannot understand what she’s doing wrong. Suddenly she must cope with “a wave of irritability that seemed to have no cause” sweeping over her husband.

Armstrong is doing very well; he gains promotion to Post Master at a Georgetown post office; but he wraps himself in uncompromising “silences” and her attempts at conversation are cut short by reminders, for instance, that he is “reading”. A third child on the way brings some respite, but the child doesn’t survive and the marriage continues to falter.

Beneath the first emotional awkwardness that blossomed into love, Heath suggests their marital union was seasoned in sexual desire. Gladys Armstrong recalls “the sweetness of copulation which became for her the heart of their marriage”. What she finds unbearable is the coldness of her bed at night.

Heath offers her no religious faith as solace; she doesn’t consider returning to her father’s home; she chooses the long-suffering wait for her husband’s isolation to end, absorbing his “outbursts” and deflecting his irritability.

Armstrong is himself somewhat mystified at the downturn of his marriage. He considers procuring a mistress, but Heath gives him a “conscience” that reproaches him for contemplating this move. He blames his wife’s “passivity”; he notices “her thighs becoming thick, and her breasts flabby”. He is sufficiently intelligent to reflect on what’s taking place, but libidinal priorities overwhelm his thinking. Most nights he stumbles home sullen and inebriated, sometimes slipping into the servant’s room; the barely literate girl is too powerless to fend him off.

He turns to houses of prostitution, pouring out his soul to a young woman (being careful to gloss over details); her response is so “insensitive” he leaves the room. A good friend with similar marriage woes offers sympathy and conversation. Key to his stimulus plan for his faltering Georgetown marriage is a younger woman “kept” miles away in the village of Plaisance. (He visits her every Sunday, defying social conventions, always fearful he might lose his job if the arrangement is found out.).

Armstrong’s conversations with himself stir a hive of self-pity and class anxiety. He had plucked Gladys from a well-to-do, genteel household respected for its piano playing, embroidery and sketching. He could have done a lot worse; he could have settled for a woman from his village in Agricola, “one of them big-batty women with powerful build who kian’ tell a piano from a violin.”

A dramatic layer is added to the novel through inquisitive visits paid by Armstrong’s sister in law. Armstrong’s own sister distracts him with argument over family inheritance after their father dies. These developments deepen Armstrong’s introspection. He begins to think he might have married above his station; he suspects he’s being constantly “judged” by his wife’s family, viewed as “an intruder”, a man lacking in adequate “background”.

To compound his dilemma, the colony is plunged into economic turmoil. The collapse of the sugar market starts the spread of fear among workers. There’s talk of “retrenchment” (a word as frightening then as “recession” today) among Civil Service employees, and though Armstrong hangs on his job security eventually falls victim to budget cuts.

Gladys responds with determined, belt-tightening courage; the servant girl is let go. Gladys holds fast to her vows of love and till-death, cutting back on personal nutrition, hoping her sacrifices would jolt Armstrong out of self-absorption.

Just when you wonder how much longer she can sustain her struggle with the inexplicable, she fades away. Heath’s prose seizes the moment to go maudlin & manipulative; paragraphs depict scenes of the husband’s grieving disbelief: “Armstrong drew up a chair and sat by the door of the room in which his wife lay.” Suddenly, thinking she might still be alive, he rushes off to find a doctor to confirm again her death. Images of remorse pile up: “the tears trickled through his fingers, down his chin to fall on to his shirt.” And after the funeral, “desolation in his heart”.

Heath is not a stern moralist, but the school-teacher side of him sometimes nudges the storyteller to dispense “lessons”, like first steps to mature thinking; or set up characters for reader sympathy or reproach. Some hearts will ache with Gladys’; Armstrong’s behavior might repulse or dismay.

Still, with subtle tracking and shading of his characters’ emotional shifts, Heath hints at encouraging news inside this extraordinary marriage. Stoically coping but privately wailing, Gladys’ commitment to her vows strikes the reader as fierce but not entirely thoughtless. And Armstrong comes across as a selfish though not callously uncaring individual, a notch or two above other men in the colony who cease quickly to care.

Heath suggests that marital relations in those constricted days were often no more than self-serving arrangements that followed a pattern of fated & faithless expectations. As Gladys mused: “Things were just so. There was a sky and an earth; there was the wind and the sun; and there was marriage.”

A comforting context could be found in the old assertion that the marriage vow in 20s Guiana – a fragile thing celebrated in logies and villages in an expense of ritual & spirits – did not always sublimate the pain & rage (and sense of fleeting mortality) left over from harsh colonial regimens. In the circumstances women dared to dream of happiness; men bared swords and plundered; the libido ruled. Children like molasses from sweet cane were often the byproducts of unbridled passion – and lucky souls if cherished in extended-family folk ways.

The modern reader might wish for deeper psychological insights. Heath prefers simply to present (what we can take as) the conventional 1920s understanding of how marriages unravelled: irritability, silence, drinking, outbursts; starved goodness, the cold bed; long-suffering female bewilderment, the male impulse to roam outside the roost.

From the Heat of the Day is the first in a trilogy of novels. Old Georgetown neighborhoods are fully realized in Heath’s not electrifying but affectionately accurate prose. Readers can follow the tribulations of the Armstrong children and their guilt-troubled father in One Generation and Genetha. (The last paragraph sees Armstrong – “overcome by great calm” – all set to make a remarkable recovery from family misery, and promising the reader some family continuity.)

Heath’s 1920s Guiana is in essence an imagined world but, like the still standing structures from the old Queenstown, many of the issues explored in From the Heat of the Day resonate today if you pay attention to distress signals that sometimes breach marriage walls; or listen to male talk about copulation.

Book Reviewed: From the Heat of the Day (“The Armstrong Trilogy”): Persea Books, New York, 1994, 150 pgs.

The Hangmaiden’s Tale

Yet another plantation novel has come among us. David Dabydeen’s indentured labourers in The Counting House (2005) must make room for Karen King-Aribisala’s emancipated slaves in The Hangman’s Game (2007) in what would seem to be an academic penchant – delving into libraries, researching our history and reanimating incidents and people through fiction.

King-Aribisala (“All my writings are dedicated to God.”) was born in Guyana and is now an English Professor at the University of Lagos.

The journey motif is integral to this kind of novel. This time in place of the middle passage or the kali-pani or the overcrowded barracoons, an airline flight takes the central character from Guyana to Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos. Her mission is simple: “I want to find myself”. More persuasively, she wants “to understand the reasons behind ancestral slavery”.

In this day and age you’d think there’d be abundant literature in libraries to satisfy this wanting. Unhappily Guyana at that point in its development seemed lacking in secondary sources. The central character had read a Guyanese-published history of the Reverend John Smith and the Demerara slaves (“That had made me mad. It was so unjust.”) A study grant took her to England but uncovered little of significance. A trans-Atlantic journey to the source nation seemed the only solution.

The moment in history that fascinates the narrator is the last slave insurrection in Demerara in 1823. “Whites were murdered in their beds and as they walked. Slaves were executed. Blood ran. The militia was brought in to restore order and a curfew imposed on the colony. But it was the last slave revolt. The emancipation of slaves became a reality. I am that reality.” So much action packed into one historical moment was apparently too rich for the narrator’s blood. And (post-Burnham) Georgetown as a defining context was doing little to expand her reality.

To make the central character more interesting King-Aribisala converts her into a writer. In the writer’s head there’s a cast of characters; her subject is the 1823 slave revolt; a title, “Three Blind Mice”, is set. But the narrator/writer can’t get the book started. The trip to Nigeria, she hopes, would unblock energies, inject lofty aim in the narrative and release the characters.

After hurried pre-ambling pages The Hangman’s Game takes off and elevates itself to higher ambition: it will be “a drama of Nigeria/ Demerara histories”. Characters from the Guyana past – a Governor Murrain, a runaway named Quamina, a fat slave woman named Auntie Lou, a Captain Mc Turkeyen, assorted “buckras” – take to the stage in 1823, even as our narrator/writer gets acquainted with Nigeria (by pure coincidence going through a “brutal” military coup) in the 1990s.

The narratives are told in alternating chapters. At some point they’re expected to merge into one sulphurous glow of a long traveled for “fusion”. But King-Aribisala’s prose has a first-time earnest grind about it. David Dabydeen working in similar plantation territory revitalized his Indian labourers in orhnis of mellifluous sentences. King-Aribisala displays neither his poetic gifts, nor his flair for designing scenes that shimmer within enriched contextual commentary.

In The Hangman’s Game Quamina (“He had been a good husband. Unlike so many he did not sleep with other women. His real woman was the desire for freedom.”) runs away for the second time only to be captured in this overwrought line: “Quamina gasped at the length-stretchedness of the land, the openness of the sky.” You imagine him swearing and waving his machete in fury at the author for ensnaring him that way.

He is rewarded later with sentences of clean, cinematic slave action: “He turned around just in time to see a white youth drawing a sword. He threw his machete aiming at the man’s chest and the youth fell with the blade still in him. He cried for mercy and Quamina extracted his weapon and stood watching the blood spread over the man’s shirt.”

Other characters on the Demerara side struggle to intrigue us anew. You hear them speak a kind of functional playhouse talk; you see them in hitherto unrecorded positions (Governor Murrain, assisted by the fat slave woman, Auntie Lou, strips and relieves himself in a posy – “a chamber pot made of fine white porcelain” – before going to bed). King-Aribisala has evidently done her research and you turn the page thinking, yeah, she’s probably got that right; colonizer and colonized probably said this or did that to each other.

Contemporary Nigeria suffers from the author’s peripheral insight & experience. Characters and situations seem developed from a sojourner’s notebook. There’s scene at a graveside where a friend (“a traitor to the Republic”) is buried under the menacing eye of a Nigerian soldier. And several scenes in a hospital where the narrator is having a baby and holds “searching”, sometimes irritable conversations with a Nigerian nurse.

At one point, amazingly for new arrivals, the narrator’s husband garners an invitation to a dinner party at Nigeria’s Presidential mansion (“I must do my hair and nails and my make-up,” the pregnant-housewife narrator says. “I haven’t anything to wear except my one and only going-out dress, black and voluminous. I shall look like a huge black tome.”)

Midway through the novel spasms of disarray, which could easily be mistaken for “complexity”, threaten to undermine its structure. Errant musings, fragments, sketchy scenes & conversations, one white page with seven words (“Turn the page. / I turn the page.”) and a smug evangelic lyricism creep into the narratives. Not sure where to turn in a Nigeria her characters don’t fully inhabit King-Aribisala throws a spotlight on political tensions in the city.

Her narrator is invited again to a President Mansion dinner; there she listens to a speech and squirms in moral discomfort. Her husband who is involved in a Christian Outreach program is approached by Nigerian coup plotters. There are roadblocks and rifle-poking soldiers and crowds converging on Tafewa Balewa Square. Edgy but safe on the outskirts, and attentive to news reports, the narrator/author struggles to stay focused on her fictive project as players from the Demerara drama begin to insinuate themselves into the Nigeria theatre.

There may be some extractable meaning in all this – that intended “fusion of histories”, like a bridge over troubled nations – but King-Aribisala’s prose, trodding hoof by pained hoof, squishes too much knowable sentiment out of all the upturned humanity. Holding on to frayed narrative ends (or wondering what eventually happens to our fortunate travelers) could tax the patience of some readers.

For the Guyanese reader enchanted with fictions of cultural separation & spiritual hungers, or just wanting to escape a Demerara of untouchable new governors and anarchic roadways, A Hangman’s Game might serve well their getaway needs. (On the back cover author George Lamming considers this novel “a superb work of fiction kept alive page after page by this writer’s subtle and sophisticated historical imagination”.)

Ms Karen King-Aribisala, it appears, has written a second book, mixing poetry and prose, in which she “transposes” Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” to modern-day Nigeria. Not many Demerara readers may have heard of it. Her fascination with great authors and great moments in history seems far and away, beyond any residual interest she might have in Guyana. And that’s freedom for you, comrades.

Gather ye rosebuds.

Book Reviewed: The Hangman’s Game: Karen King-Aribisala: Peepal Tree Press: England, 2007, 191 pages. (w.w.)

Guyana Prize Winners: 98 & 02

Back in the 1930s when he was 27 or 28 yrs old, the world must have seemed a bleak place for a man of literary ambition; and Edgar Mittelholzer, then “totally unknown”, must have chosen to deal with that bleakness by putting aside his ambitions; perishing the thought of ever getting published, and writing just for the hell of it. After all, who would be interested in his characters – barefoot colonial labourers toiling in mud and rice fields on the Corentyne?

How could he make their narratives compelling to world readers? to local book lovers wedded to imported fiction? in a colony of botanical gardens but no bookstores? and no cultural group to award him a prize for trying?

Fast forward to 2003; walk into the Church Street bookstore, and there on the book shelves is Ariadne & Other Stories: Winner: Guyana Prize for Literature 2002, Best First Book of Fiction. Progress, if you need reminding, is as unstoppable as the May-June rains.

You might search the same bookshelves in vain for copies of Mittelholzer’s novels. They are out of print; hard to find; gone the way of the weatherbeaten logies at Diamond.

Mittelholzer, too, had hoped his first book would be a prize winner. The literature scholar Louis James, in his introduction to the Heinemann edition, tells us he had entered “the first thirty thousand words of Corentyne Thunder…in a publisher’s competition overseas.” Must have wrapped, sealed and mailed off it at the post office in New Amsterdam around 1936. Got it back – assuming they were generous enough to send it back – along with his 16th letter of rejection.

Ruel Johnson’s Ariadne was submitted in 2002, a year when the Prize committee announced that locally-based authors would be permitted to submit work in manuscript form. In other words, you could have stapled together your most inspired poems scribbled on napkins at the Palm Court Bar, they would have been given serious consideration. What charitable times we lived in then!

For readers still unfamiliar with the Mittelholzer prose flow & precision, here are sentences from Corentyne Thunder (1941) you could consider exemplary: “On the northern side of the road the wide canal of muddy water was waved like the back of an alligator, and one could smell the Corentyne rankness of it, the odour of fish and sherriga crabs, of mud and dead wild plants.” (p. 37)

Or take, for instance, this portrait of plantation worker intimacy done in Mittelholzer’s unadorned prose rhythms: “When they had slept and awakened he spoke to her in a quiet voice, his eyes looking into hers. He stroked her arm and kissed her and caressed her body everywhere. The day was without wind and the savannah a-tremble in the heat far away, and she felt very happy lying with him in the cool shadow of the mudhouse.”

And here, straining for stylistic heft, are sentences from young Johnson’s Ariadne (2002): “Silently, he cursed that sygian limboland between dreaming and waking; the inevitable, colourless river of unconsciousness that washed away the memory of dream-pain and dream-pleasure alike.” (p. 83) Like markers of cleverness & profundity, intended to catch the eye of any “dream-reader” or Prize juror, Johnson’s sentences sit on the page bloated with required reading.

Characters in Ariadne spend most of their time hanging about in Georgetown, talking and brooding. You get the sense they’re there as day labourers on the Johnson literary plantation. At night getting ready to make love, a character discovers his woman under sentences like this: “She purred another deep, guttural emission, as he entered her.” Even in bed the fellas can’t get away from the young author’s overseeing ego.

Here and there in the book, like portraits hung on the walls of his personal library, you come across references to authors Johnson considers inspiring: Derek Walcott, Gerald Manley Hopkins, W. Somerset Maugham, Martin Carter, Siegfried Sassoon, Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer prize-winning American poet; and someone named Gordon Lightfoot.

On an Acknowledgement page Johnson complains about the Caribbean’s “far-flung and fragmented geography, small population and increasing apathy towards literature.” (Mittelholzer, you imagine, might have had similar thoughts in his day, but didn’t see the need to beat that bony cow of truth on a blank page.) Since winning the Prize in 2002, not much has been heard or seen of Johnson’s “distinctive voice” outside of newspaper columns.

These points of comparison might feel like unkind jooks; in a fractured nation drained of modernizing skills young talent should be “encouraged”; but some truths are inescapable. Johnson’s prize-winning book is a 92 page booklet. It has been hyped as a local, not a diasporic, production (Printed Courtesy of Courts, Georgetown). The author is known for his pride in local residency. There are supportive blurbs from notable residents praising his “intelligence”, his “best young” potential.

Allowing for its first-book pretentiousness, Ariadne succeeds in showcasing its author as he tries out his prose tools and searches for a personal style. It is a compilation of notes, sketches, works in progress, comic book cartoons and poetry. 92 pages of itsy-bitsyness; fragments of unfinished business, the author too busy serving notice of great things to come. And it’s there on the shelves of the bookstore on Church Street. (Mittelholzer would have loved the bookstore.)

Back in 1998 the judges thought Gokarran Sukhdeo’s The Silver Lining also deserving of the award. In post-Prize statements he explained his book was written when he was 16 yrs, but put away; then sent off to the Prize committee when he was 38 yrs old. He shares this much with the once “totally unknown” Mittelholzer – the waiting, the flare-ups of doubt about the manuscript’s win ability.
Since his 1998 Prize, nothing has emerged from Sukhdeo apart from social commentary in newspaper columns. The Prize, it seems, offers no guarantee of long-term creative output. In a country of corroded institutions, where serious art like daily living often demands deep reserves of endurance and altered mental states, the modus operandi for success in writing would seem straightforward: gather your slim resources, take your Prize shot; then, with your toolkit escape elsewhere.

The Silver Lining at 184 pgs is a more substantial effort, certainly worthy of any committee’s consideration. Rearing to tell his story, Sukhdeo opens with a synopsis; then an inspirational Introduction for readers still hesitant. Once inside, however, you discover this is yet another book about “growing up” outside Georgetown back in the days; this time in the village of Patentia, “a little hamlet in the Wales Sugar Plantation” on the West Bank.

It is labelled a novel, but it’s more a documentary of what the author has witnessed or experienced as a young man: his village school days, the village “characters” (wise Uncle Panchi, cruel Fatboy, the Police Station Corporal); a village romance, family struggle, as when a mother who married at age 15 joins a weeding gang on the sugar plantation after her husband disappears; camping out in the bush with school buddies, and eating amazing meals: “That night they ate a hearty dinner of boiled as well as barbecued fish with guava soup and wild fruits for desserts, using the lotus leaves for plates and wooded spoons fashioned out of bamboo.” (p. 75)

The bonds and antipathies that develop in Sukhdeo’s small world are not so much “crafted” as explained. He wants you to read and be “informed”. There is information, in case you need it one day, on drainage systems and a West Bank road project; and how Canals Polder got its name. It is possible his village material offered much to remember fondly, but little else for the imagination to work with.

The writing grows urgent & didactic when the author (using “character” discussion or debate that would otherwise sound implausible) gives us his thoughts on issues that bothered him as a former resident: such as labour relations with the old Booker, Connell & Co., the importance of culture and family responsibility (Hindu), the pitfalls of capitalism & socialism, the National Service idea (terrible).

This village theme & territory, once considered “underrepresented” in our literature, has been explored more imaginatively by others with a mature grasp of the tools of fiction. Certainly, in Mittelholzer’s ground-breaking Corentyne Thunder. A sense of deja-written must have crossed the judges’ mind. It is tempting, therefore, to conclude that softhearted, enabling thoughts might have weighed in their decision-making. If that’s the case, then like debt forgiveness it casts a long shadow, obscuring inner deficits and fostering the illusion of achievement. And that might not be “good news” for Guyanese fiction.

The judges for the Prize, it should be pointed out, have been at times high-profile, high achievers from our university and from the diaspora, among them previous Prize winners like celebrities invited back. This has given rise to tension and unhappiness among local underachievers, as well as some race-based questioning of the fairness of the judging. To suggest there might be a lowering of the bar in years when Prize submissions are substandard, or just plain awful, would infuriate already disgruntled locals.

Be that as it may, like our shiny new (World Cup) Hotel & Stadium, the Guyana Prize for Literature is here to stay and will be open for business to awardees and judges, local and overseas, for years to come. Standards might be lowered, but they’re not entirely lost. For any plucky fresh talent, less worried these days about rejection, but wondering what to do, where to go with that first typescript, the paths to fame or shortlist glory in Guyana seem well lit, now that the worst have passed.

Books Reviewed:
Ariadne & Other Stories: Ruel Johnson: Self-published: Georgetown, Guyana: 2003: 92 pgs.
The Silver Lining: Gokarran Sukhdeo: Self-published: New York, 1998: 184 pgs.