The notion of belonging counterbalanced with the issue of placelessness (Continued from last week)
Michael Gilkes, who won the Guyana Prize for Literature poetry award, is a much more mature writer than Ruel Johnson, a First Book of Fiction winner. Gilkes is unashamed of the link critics may make between him and Walcott’s work, looking at ‘influence’ in much the same way as Walcott does. He made that comment during his acceptance speech on Guyana Prize night, expressing the homage he openly pays to Walcott, but also reminding the audience of their common origin. He emphasized this in the acceptance speech by reading his poem set in St Lucia, Walcott’s native land, which he dedicates to the Nobel Laureate. In that poem they both stand on common ground studying the St Lucian landscape. But their commonality of origin rests in the image of Walcott’s Shabine (in The Schooner, Flight), the mixed race sailor who travels the archipelago of islands out of whose history and culture he is made; he is so mixed that he declares “either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.”
But Gilkes takes this theme even further. Again, without shame, he declares himself “a mudhead,” adopting the name by which Guyanese have been called by other West Indians. The mudhead is the identity he claims in his acceptance speech as well as in the book that won him the Guyana Prize. It is the declaration of belonging by a returned exile. He calls it Joanstown, a tribute paid to the city of Georgetown and to Joan, whom he married. He puns on their names in the title as much as he does upon the more infamous Jonestown.
As if to eliminate the memory of that mass murder coupled with ritual suicide, the book is in part, a Walcottian praise song for Georgetown, since in a somewhat similar fashion Walcott assumed the task of singing praise songs for the West Indies because, as he says “beauty has surrounded/ Its black children, and freed them of homeless ditties.” Gilkes sees the need to do the same for a Guyana which has, again, recently attracted a wave of bad press internationally. And yet, Gilkes is more complex than that, as is evident in the last poem in the book, which he read at the Awards Presentation, and which has a very significant open-ended closing line suggesting ambivalence, belonging and exile.
This assurance of belonging is what Johnson seeks in his own recollections of growing up and away from his home community in Georgetown. It is a belonging that gives Bernard no feelings of uncertainty as he vividly records memories of growing up in a Georgetown that he wishes to preserve. Yet, even in this kind of collection, Bernard includes the occasional questioning of the nature of these celebrated roots.
Saisnarine Persaud’s hungry sailor is at the opposite end of this theme of belonging, because he writes from outside of Guyana, a position from which he feels the need to make contact with roots. He reflects three, if not four, bases: Guyana, Canada and Miami, where he has lived, with India as the fourth place. In a situation in which one can wander around like a hungry sailor, Persaud fortifies himself with Hindu philosophy and the fabric of its mythology.
Jefferson-Miles does a similar thing in his excursions into the meaning of the Timehri rock drawings, the tale/legend/myth/history of Amalivaca in a story of the disappearance of Manchester Village. This community on the Corentyne Coast was totally submerged by a huge tidal wave.
Although Greaves has lived in Barbados for quite a while, his poems go back to his previous residence in Guyana where many of them were written. Exile is not his particular preoccupation and he explores a variety of topics which he interrogates in precisely crafted lines. His Horizons look beyond the immediate into a wider existence to which he poses questions. His poems have the ability to challenge and to disturb an audience’s complacency, as do his own remarks. Although Greaves won the prize for his first book, it represents several years of work during which time his main occupation, like Jefferson-Miles, has been in the ‘fine arts.’ One recalls the large questions raised in his recent exhibition of paintings about politics. He has won prizes for fine arts in Barbados and in his remarks at the Guyana Prize Award, expressed the hope that Guyana will establish a Guyana Prize for Art with the same magnitude and prestige as that enjoyed by the Guyana Prize for Literature.
In a sense, the Special Award to Harris may represent the crowning glory of Guyanese literature. Harris has his own past link to the Guyana Prize, having been the first winner of the Prize for Fiction and having given the first acceptance speech on behalf of all the winners in 1987. His novel Carnival, which had impressed the judges on that occasion, was the first of his most recent trilogy, known as The Carnival Trilogy. It led to The Infinite Rehearsal and The Four Banks of the River of Space. Yet, his cycle of books continued with a return to Bartica in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, Jonestown and The Dark Jester. He has already completed another work which will complete that cycle.
However, having won the first Guyana Prize, Harris has consistently declined to have the publishers, Faber and Faber, enter his other novels for the prize, which, it seems he has gracefully withdrawn from in the interest of other writers who follow him. The Special Award of 2002 is given to him for a lifetime achievement in literature and an outstanding contribution to Guyanese and Caribbean Literature. This may also be regarded as a contribution of excellence to world literature since he has been acclaimed as one of the most original writers in English and has had Nobel Prize nominations. In writing about this great contribution, Kathleen Reine has said that Harris is the writer who has introduced significant change to the form of the English novel which had been static for nearly 100 years. Indeed, its basic form has remained the same since Victoria.
In addition, the citation for the award to Harris said that the Guyanese author has also made one of the most significant contributions to post-colonial literary theory. Many books of his writings and criticisms have been published. The most recent of these is a volume edited by Bundy titled The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, which has been recognized as one of the most important texts of post-colonial criticism.