The Guyana Prize and its critics

The Guyana Prize and its critics Arts on Sunday
by Al Creighton

Stabroek News
January 19, 2003

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This week we again address a number of ongoing issues raised by readers from time to time. Most recently the letters have discussed further matters concerning the Guyana Prize, Guyanese Literature and Wilson Harris.

On December 1, 2002, we responded to criticisms aimed at the Guyana Prize as well as at overseas-based Guyanese writers and critics. This provoked another letter from Mr Ruel Johnson in which he repeats his personal distaste for Wilson Harris, whose identity as a Guyanese writer he questions, and changes his position on what constitutes "Guyanese literature", offering a much better and more worthy discourse on the subject than was contained in his previous letters. Mr Krishna Nand Prasad also addressed the subject in his last letter, reaffirming his assertions that Guyanese writers should write for their own people and should not care for an international audience.

Attention to the concerns raised by both these writers takes us back to our reprint (August 18, 2002) of an article first published on December 10, 2000, pointing out that all the major literary prizes around the world routinely have panels of judges who at other times have been winners or administrators of the same prize. This restatement was prompted by queries from some local writers who expressed the suspicion that there was something irregular if not sinister about the practice. The article was reprinted because, in the two years since it first appeared, these queries continued as a part of the series of criticisms, debates and controversies surrounding the Guyana Prize contained in correspondence from local writers. It was repeated because of its relevance to some of the fundamental issues and arguments put forward by the local critics of the Prize.

One of the most prominent factors in the arguments is that local writers feel that most of the awards have gone to foreign-based authors because something is wrong with the adjudication. The system of judging is accused of unfairness to local writers who claim that it becomes controlled by an incestuous clique of foreign-biased writers/critics. Moreover, the arguments continued, long residence, socialization and orientation overseas have rendered these persons incapable of producing or evaluating Guyanese literature. These 'reasonings' never ceased, but were reiterated from time to time by the local writers.

Despite their continued repetition, Mr Johnson writes (Aug 20, 2002) that "the issue of winners acting as judges . . . is not, per se, [one of] the major point/s of contention". But many critics of the Guyana Prize still seem to feel that it is. It has been at the root of local discontent; it is related to and has led to many of the other quarrels. It was therefore necessary to document the evidence showing that other major literary prizes followed the same procedures as the Guyana Prize. Mr Johnson complained that this evidence was too thorough. (He said it was "dealt with at length ad nauseum" and his bout of sea sickness is understandable. Floundering in such depth, he could find no refutation.) But, apart from being overwhelmed by the thoroughness of the supporting data, he fails to recognize the complexity of the issue. Many of the other problems arise from the local writers' disaffection with or distrust of the system, which they feel was specifically designed to suppress them. This much was suggested by Mr K. Nand Prasad (SN, Aug 22, 2002 and Dec., 2002) and Mr Colin Jordan (Aug. 31, 2002)

It is important to point out that, while it sometimes happens that past Guyana Prize Winners serve as judges, there is no rule that this must or will always happen. We detailed the close comparisons between the Guyana Prize and the other major awards in an effort to reduce these attitudes of suspicion. Nevertheless, Mr Johnson has a valid point when he refers to "the different goals of these awards". A goal of the Guyana Prize "is or should be recognition and development", and, according to him, "the administration of the Prize . . . runs counter to [that goal]". Incidentally, the Commonwealth Writers Prize has a similar goal of recognition and development. It was established "to encourage and reward the upsurge of new Commonwealth fiction", but the point is taken that it includes many developed First World countries where writers are more privileged and have less need of developmental strategies.

We can, therefore, agree with Johnson that the local Prize has not been entirely successful in realizing that goal of development and there is much to be done in that area. But, ironically, his own attack on foreign-based writers and on Wilson Harris in particular, arises from the same issue that he finds unnecessarily repeated, and deserves further attention.

Wilson Harris
There is really no issue or serious debate in the wider literary community about Harris' credentials as a writer and there is hardly any need to defend him against Mr Johnson or any of the few critics who call him "a fraud". Any individual is at liberty to have his personal dislike, or to find that they have difficulty reading him. But are these individuals gifted with such extra special perception denied the rest of us that we must accept their critical judgement above that of the many others who understand his work? Johnson will need to tell us, employing the necessary critical analysis, why the difficulty many readers encounter in reading James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett or Salman Rushdie is the result of the authors' genius while the difficulty in confronting Harris is the result of fraudulence.

When a writer of Harris' "maverick" quality (a description used by critic Michael Gilkes) reaches certain heights of acclaim, it becomes fashionable to swipe at him in the way Johnson does. But the wave of recognized criticism is more in keeping with the verdict of Kathleen Reine, rating him one of the most original writers of the past century. Reine argues that he has shaken up the complacent form of the English novel which had remained static since the end of the nineteenth century. His recognition has been sufficient to earn him nominations for the Nobel Prize.

Guyanese Literature
Mr Johnson then turned to what he calls "the more important issue of Harris being a Guyanese writer". And he is right, since, although many readers do find Harris difficult, his own disaffection with the author is a personal problem. He quotes Harris in "one recent article" as saying "I am not English but I don't think I'm Guyanese in any categorical sense". Johnson seems to accept this as proof that Harris is not to be considered a Guyanese writer, but it is insufficient. No proper source is cited and one does not know the context in which this statement might have been made.

Moving to more general statements, Johnson writes in his last letter (December, 2002),

Mr Creighton errs in his analysis when he says that I "restrict Guyanese fiction to include only works set in Guyana about internal matters written by persons who live in the country for the exclusive readership of an audience which lives in Guyana". This is a far too facile and simplistic summation of my views, one that allows Mr Creighton to get off with a just as facile and simplistic response."

There was no claim that description was a summation of Mr Johnson's views. It was an attempt to capture the general tenor of the position articulated by the collective of writers who have expressed themselves on the subject. If the summation is "facile and simplistic" it is because the view expressed by these writers is not only facile and simplistic but limited, parochial and inadequate as a definition of Guyanese literature. To go to specific examples, Krishna Nand Prasad declares:

'Did Tennyson write for Guyanese unexposed to standard English? He wrote for his people. North American writers do not say: "I must write so that the Caribbean can understand". It is incidental that we understand. We are writing for our people. I am not of North America or Britain. I am a Guyanese and I do not care for an international audience once as a Guyanese my fellow Guyanese can gain maximally from my efforts.'

Although Johnson in his letter of December 2002 provides a more satisfactory understanding of the issue, with his mention of a "Guyanese sensibility", the recognition that one cannot be prescriptive about themes and the acknowledgement of a foreign readership, he did not entirely liberate himself from the limitations. He still remains guilty of imposing restrictions when he defines a Guyanese sensibility as "one which is in constant interaction with the people and the environment, one that relates through intimacy . . .". Here he returns to a notion previously visited that Guyanese writing must reflect the Guyanese environment and writers "in exile" who are not in "constant interaction" with it cannot produce Guyanese literature. Among the points raised by the local writers is the conviction that these exiles who are out of touch with the Guyanese landscape cannot reproduce it with any accuracy.

Mr Johnson goes further into subject matter, implying that a work dealing with local subjects is somehow more Guyanese than one on a foreign topic. Despite his reaffirmation that much of his own prose and poetry concern "settings and situations outside of Guyana", Johnson argues:

"When, for example, an immigrant writer John Agard writes a poem dealing with bovine spongiform encephaly and by extension British agricultural policy, I feel justified in thinking that my own poem about the already forgotten story of two young brothers being electrocuted during the relatively innocent and boyish act of stealing mangoes adds a bit more to this nebulous thing called Guyanese literature than Agard's."

Johnson then proceeds to ask rhetorically "should I follow the thematic flow of what is currently misnomered as Guyanese literature and work on novels brimming with exile, or write some poems on the Thames ?" First of all, he purports that works by Guyanese on these themes of "exile" are not Guyanese literature (they are "misnomered"). Secondly, the answer is no, he does not have to write anything brimming with exile since that is not his experience, but if he chooses to write on the Thames, so be it. Agard will write as an immigrant in Britain since that is his experience. Guyanese literature is not limited to works set in Tucville or work that can reflect from intimate contact the subtle ethnic dimensions of an East Indian visiting his Black girlfriend in contemporary Buxton. It may be about a Guyanese trying to relate to his Canadian neighbours in Toronto. It may be about the identity crisis facing a British born girl of Guyanese parentage in London who has never visited Guyana. One can say that Guyanese literature is literature written by Guyanese set anywhere on any subject in any style. It may be written by or about Guyanese at home or in the "diaspora" or it could be about a trip to the moon. A poem about the tragic state of humanity does not have to be set anywhere except somewhere within the ambit of human experience, yet, if written by a Guyanese, it is a Guyanese poem.

Debates of this nature have long ago taken place about West Indian literature and the clear consensus has been that we should be wary of prescriptions. Edward Baugh discusses the development of the poetry from the early imitative variety to the attainment of verse that is independent and fully aware of its own audience. What is important is that it speaks to that audience as confidently as it does to the international community without any self-consciousness about identity. None of the writers say consciously that I am going to write a West Indian poem or this one is going to be international. They simply write whatever they wish, placing no limitations on their language or subject, not caring if any Englishman or American does not understand the Creole.

They have done this regardless of place of residence and, what might surprise many, Naipaul continued to write lively, accurate reproductions of Trinidadian Creole with the right syntax and rhythm decades after having fled Trinidad. Good literature will find an international audience without the writer consciously seeking it. Similarly, readers can relate to it without belonging to the culture that produced it. The same goes for Guyanese literature, which, we repeat, a writer does not have to live in Guyana to produce, nor a critic to understand.