When I say Guyana, I mean the particular Guyanese landscape, and the cosmopolitan mixture of people upon it. These two realities - landscape and people - have given the best Guyanese literature a stamp of originality which differs from most creative literature in the English-speaking Caribbean islands, or West Indies. This distinct difference of Guyanese literature has already been pointed out by important critics of regional literature such as Kenneth Ramchand in his: “The West Indian novel and its background”.

But this distinct difference of Guyanese literature has not found any literary critic, as yet, who recognises and reveals it with detailed focus.

What give Guyanese literature its particular mark of distinction is how the English language becomes subjected to Guyanese reality, particularly the landscape, history and people. These three factors affect how the best Guyanese prose and poetry writers choose what they write about, and how they write about it. Even though they are using the English language, they are not following the English tradition of prose and poetry as defined by the likes of Chaucer, Pope, Arnold, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Yeats or Eliot, despite whatever renown they may possess.

Such an English literary tradition originated on specific landscapes with specific cultural sensibilities, and only rigid academic critics would seek to use such a single linguistic criteria as a yardstick to decide the literary merit of other literatures today written in English. I am not simply speaking here of the legitimate use of colloquial or Creole English, or of correct grammatical use of the English language, because even when writers in any language invent phrases they must still be correct, or possible. What I am speaking of here is how a certain number of Guyanese prose and poetry writers see their country as a voice speaking through the linguistic form and content of their works.

This tradition of Guyanese reality finding its distinct voice through the prose and poetry of its writers goes back to Edgar Mittelholzer, A. J. Seymour, and Wilson Harris specifically. But even before them, the peculiar tropical beauty of the Guyanese landscape, and the complex historical mixture of peoples upon it, had intrigued and mesmerised historical and travel writers such as Adrian Van Berkel, Storm Van Gravesande, the Schomburgk brothers, Henry Dalton, Charles Waterton, William Veness, the Americans, William and Mary Beebe, Vincent Roth, etc.

Even these ancient writers grappled with descriptions of the peculiar landscape and its effect on their human senses. This same geographical and social reality would develop further into the prime inspiration giving a distinct and powerful new form and content to two Guyanese creative writers in particular: Mittelholzer and Harris. Today, there are other new writers with the same geographical and social inspiration from Guyana, but let us focus first on Mittelholzer and Harris.

There are no novels in the English-speaking Caribbean which emphasise the effect of landscape and social history on the human character as those by Mittelholzer and Harris. You cannot find novels similar to: ‘Children of Kaywana’, ‘Kaywana Blood’, ‘Shadows move among them’, ‘Latticed Echoes’, or ‘Thunder Returning’ (all by Mittelholzer) in the English-speaking Caribbean.

The American critic Orville Prescott, writing about Mittelholzer’s ‘Shadows move among them’ in the New York Times in 1951, said: “This beautifully written, subtle and intellectually challenging novel defies classification”. Another critic in England’s Sunday Observer wrote: “Here is a book owing nothing to contemporary literary fashion”. Why is this? Simply because Mittelholzer is concerned, even obsessed, with how the Guyanese landscape, the rivers, jungle and its sounds, the rain, the heat, the land’s social history, etc., affect the human mind and body.

Whereas Mittelholzer was obsessed by how the Guyanese landscape and society is affected by its past, Wilson Harris in his early Guyana-based novels is concerned with how Guyana’s wild and often ungovernable landscape frustrates human efforts to ‘civilise’ it, and exploit it for present and future commerce.

The novels of both these writers are not written in the usual conventional, straightforward, traditional manner, as one finds in traditional 19th century English literature, because such approaches to literature emerged from specific literary formulas concerned with other landscapes, other histories, other societies, unlike Guyana’s. Nowhere in the English-speaking Caribbean can one find novels of such distinct linguistic originality as in Wilson Harris’s novels like: ‘Palace of the Peacock’, ‘The eye of the scarecrow’, ‘The whole armour’, ‘Heartland’, or ‘Tumatumari’.

Apart from the effect Guyana’s landscape and society had on these novels, what about literary influences, or similarities with other international writers of prose and poetry?

In Mittelholzer’s prose style and daring content, we can find a shared power of descriptive insight with exceptional French writers like Zola, Huysmans, Baudelaire, and unique English writers like Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. With Harris, we can find shared stylistic values with writers like Lawrence Durrell, William Faulkner, Claude Simon, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. So it is not that these two Guyanese writers are completely unique in literary style; it is simply that the same emphasis on language influenced by the physical world and the inner sensory world found in these foreign writers, can also be found in Mittelholzer and Harris.

This same tradition Mittelholzer and Harris share with such foreign writers mentioned here, is being continued today by certain Guyanese writers of imaginative literature. I am one such writer. For us, poetic description is of paramount importance, because all literature is description anyway, whether of external reality, or internal mental states. What is important for us, as the great French writer Gustave Flaubert demonstrated, is the sentence. Each sentence must echo in our minds with vivid visual descriptions of outer or inner reality, or both combined. Sentences are not subservient to some superior process of character build-up, plot, and surprise endings. We are not impatient children who need to rush to the end of novels, stories or poems to see what it was all about. No, each sentence is what it is all about, and makes us linger, because that’s where the pleasure of reading and writing lies.

This different approach to creative writing in Guyana is what has also made the 2001 Christmas Annual a topic of controversy whose literary merit cannot be discovered by inadequate critical approaches.

For instance, the observant reader will notice in most of the magazine’s verse and prose that the writers keep either distant from the text, or melt and mix into it. This is because it is the Guyanese landscape (or as in Ruel Johnson’s beautiful poetic-prose piece ‘Ariadne’, a Trinidadian landscape) and its social reality which are allowed to speak up instead. The writers are using their voices as mediums for Guyanese reality to speak itself. In my two poems ‘In Georgetown’ and ‘Vreed-en-Hoop at night’, it is my EYE that writes, not my first person singular `I’.

Deliberately written in couplets to emphasise each stanza, it is the landscape, and people, with their simple, everyday lifestyle that is already poetic, and speaks through me. It is only at the end of ‘Vreed-en-Hoop at night’ that I allow my personal voice to emerge after eleven poetically descriptive couplets: ‘Spirits speak through this silent language of the land/as my hands reach into the darkness beyond, touching people.” Both poems are also written in language which is highly suggestive, or transparent.

Younger poets in the 2001 Annual, such as Shireen Ganga, Vanessa Harripersaud, Alicia Daniels, Ruel Johnson, Kojo McPherson, Sherod Duncan, and Jessica Hubbard, all share similar descriptive vision, and integrate their voices with Guyana’s natural and social reality. The two realities usually become one voice resonant with harmony.

Shireen shows this at the start of her brilliant poem ‘The Wish’. She writes, “It’s been a while; the sun has set, the moon has risen … I remember the night and how perfect it seemed in your eyes/and I remember the sound of laughter in the air and how gently it settled on my ear.”

Vanessa shows the union yet distance between the sexes from time immemorial when she writes, “I look at you/we’ve known each other for a lifetime/yet we are strangers”, in her poem, ‘You and I’, which is also the title of a charming Pop tune by Alexis.

Alicia, in her poem, ‘Morning Light’, totally offers her voice as a medium through which sunlight speaks in a stunning work of poetic personification.

Patrick Sumner in ‘Delights’ uses a barrage of tropical fruits and Guyanese edibles to stun us with a poem made of word-objects; you can eat, not only read this poem’s content!

Old Ivan Forrester returns like a master to show in his poem ‘A man, the river and the wind’, just how closely, in a Hemingway style of bravery, man’s unity with the elemental landscape can be achieved.

Ruel states his roots in Guyana’s rustic poetic landscape in the second line of his honest, yet secretive poem, ‘Adam in the garden’, when he writes: “Yes, I come from this soil … this dust, this mud.”

Kojo, in ‘Senior Secondary’, subtly demotes social prestige to a level subject to the landscape’s judgement of dusk and dawn.

Sherod Duncan’s ‘Poem 2’, in a few, sharp, precise descriptive lines, creates multiple echoes of tropical sensuality: “I ant to kiss/like rain/the virgin side of a green green leaf’.

And finally, 15-year-old Jessica Hubbard carefully observes and describes the endless creativity of rain in her penetrating poem, simply called ‘Rain’.

This new emphasis on description is therefore a style that seeks to bring forth a refreshed Guyanese reality and identity in the reader’s consciousness, rather than impose an egotistical obsession with rhetoric, and already worn-out familiar formulas for creative writing. This does not mean that the new writing is narrowly ‘nationalistic, but rather it has the ability to make our particular reality a universal theme achieved through a special linguistic style and form in imaginative literature.

With prose writers like Camille Bobb-Semple, it is her clear, transparent sentences which make her story, ‘The stranger within’ a memorable original achievement for Guyanese writing, and for female writing anywhere in the world. The late great French female novellist, Marguerite Duras, would have been excited by this story. We read Camille’s story line for line for its descriptive power, not for some final point she’s trying to make, though she does make one.

The same can be said for the stories of Ruel Johnson, Petamber Persaud, Mohamed Yasin, and Harry Narain. Such descriptive and perceptive new writing may seem unusual for casual readers unacquainted with the tradition of subtle, but outstanding writers like Flaubert, Hemingway, Cesare Pavese, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Phillipe Sollers, Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras, whose poetic descriptions are shared unself-consciously and naturally by some of Guyana’s fresh literary talent found in the 2001 Annual.

We owe Ruel Johnson thanks for selecting these examples of a new style of Guyanese writing; and when young Johnson as editor of the 2001 Annual says enthusiastically this is “the best collection of Guyanese poetry published anywhere in the year 2001”, he is emphasising ‘Guyanese poetry’, not poetry written by writers from Guyana, because such writers may live anywhere and write about other places and on any topic.

What Johnson is saying reflects the specific influence of Guyana on these works, which are unsurpassed by other works published by Guyanese poets this past year. This may sound too sweeping a statement by an editor, but so far, we have no evidence he is incorrect.