Driven by the Muse to write one’s self into being Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
June 10, 2002
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“SOMEWHERE in Suriname, late at night or very early in the morning, a woman is sitting in a room alone, writing. Somewhere in Guyana another woman sits doing exactly the same thing. The woman writes fiercely, compulsively, for many hours though she is exhausted and sleepy…She writes because she must. She is writing for her life. And in other parts of the Caribbean too - Trinidad, Saint Lucia, Jamaica, Barbados - throughout the archipelago all the way to Belize, and further down into South America, women are writing themselves into being. They write because the time has come when they must invent their new world.”

--Ramabai Espinet, Editor, ‘Creation Fire’.
THE process of translating thoughts and visions into the written word, which other people may read, and which might influence or affect the thoughts and behaviours of people possibly for generations to come, has to be one of the most potent and satisfying of all human experiences. To be driven by one’s favourite Muse until the pen races across blank pages filling them with words, is no doubt the best moment of a writer’s life. If it is fiction, then there is the additional thrill of seeing one’s characters assume form and flesh and personalities that are independent of the author’s express will. What Wilson Harris calls the “arts of the imagination” take control and until that first draft is poured out of the writer’s soul, he or she will find no peace. Many people have dreamt of the moment when their work would be so well considered that publishers would beat a path to their door begging for their manuscripts. After that first flush of creative ardour, and months of revision and refinement of the text, comes the realisation of the difficult process of persuading a publisher that the book will find an audience.

Many potentially enriching tomes have not seen the light of day because their authors lacked the tenacity of Alex Haley, who wandered in the literary wilderness for 12 years before a publisher took pity on him and offered to look at the manuscript of ‘Roots’. The early works of Rudyard Kipling and Walt Whitman were also rejected by several publishers. One is left to imagine the chagrin of those publishers after these two men of letters became famous. Another irony of the literary realm lies in those instances when the reputation of an author becomes firmly established after her lifetime. It is said that Emily Bronte’s fantastic work of the imagination ‘Wuthering Heights’ was not considered a success until half a century after it was first published. Who can remain unmoved when they recall the powerful characterisations that grew out of the imagination of a cloistered daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman?

Indeed, it seems that great literature emerges not only from profound human distress or suffering, or celebration. It could be a psychic gift that chooses which imagination it will inhabit. “The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself,” wrote Currer Bell (a pseudonym of one of the Bronte sisters)

The Guyana Prize for Literature, which was introduced by the then President Desmond Hoyte in 1987, has been the catalyst of an efflorescence of writing in the categories of fiction, poetry and drama. Several nationals at home and in exile have been winners of this prestigious literary accolade, which continues to be one of the best incentives for the potential Guyanese writer. While it is quite true that all the prize-winning works are not always affordable or available to the average working-class Guyanese, the fact that more and more Guyanese women and men are taking the time and effort to commit works of the imagination to written form and to seek publishers for their works is evidence enough that citizens are continuing the important historical process of writing themselves into being.