This nationality should not be confused with biased, intolerant, racial or politically violent definitions of nationality. Rather, nationality in the vision of this Caribbean and Guyanese literature evokes a desired social harmony, a rapport with local Geography, and a wish to create a civilised hemisphere built on the best qualities of indigenous, European, African, Oriental cultures, all of which are the birthright of Caribbean and Guyanese people.

What is the purpose of such a creative literature if not to influence the making of better societies and better nations? It is essential therefore that literate Caribbean and Guyanese people read the works of these poets, and encourage others to read, or learn to read them.

Why is Derek Walcott considered a great Caribbean poet worthy of the Nobel Prize? Simply because Walcott paid attention to everyday Caribbean reality, its landscape and people. His greatness as a poet does not stem from any racial gift, or mixed blood condition, but from the firm attention he devoted to his Caribbean surroundings.

Any local poet of any race or ethnic culture can devote this same attention to his local surroundings. The Oriental-Guyanese poet, Monar is proof of this. Individual temperamental and local viewpoint count more than folkloric stereotypes here.

Fairness inspires the voice of nationality in such regional poetry. We do not see this same vivid, firm, and fair evaluation of local reality in the works of many expatriate Caribbean and Guyanese poets who continue to write about their homeland. Obviously not, since if life here is worthwhile, why leave?

National life is therefore written about as reflection and memories, more than present-tense descriptions and responses to immediate observations and pleasures.

Because the expatriate writer often feels his or her condition has to be justified, negative truths and descriptions of `backwardness’ tend to dominate and define the reality of one’s homeland, which comes to be portrayed in weak comparative platitudes. We see this in numerous expatriate poems (and fiction) published abroad. For example, a poem like `Letter from Mama Dot’ by Fred D’Aguiar which uses a clever two-part letter format, one with complaints from Guyana (easily obsolete), the other equally a disillusioned expatriate complaint from England.

Other expatriate poems retain national imagery and references mostly as crutches of personal dignity and comfort in immigrant life abroad. For example, `Wherever I hang’, `Tropical Death’, among others and the very negative `Blackout’ by Grace Nichols; or Cyril Dabydeen’s `Dubious Foreigner’ and `Patriot’, among many similar examples of depleted nationality echoed abroad.

What is missing in most expatriate poetry like this are immediate national environments where everyday pleasures and pains are both lived and felt as an inclusive closeness which national citizens continue to enjoy, or dislike, as tangible facts, rather than exotic stereotypes. Such inclusively shared truths are not written about by the expatriate writer because he or she is not present to experience them in their original locales.

Many expatriate creative writings also tend to become mouthpieces for disillusions, complaints, social rhetoric, and derisions of local life, whereas poets like Walcott, Braithwaite, Brown, Hendriks, McWatt, Monar, MacDonald, Seymour, Carter, and the new home-based Guyanese poets of today, maintain a vital realistic balance between felt pains and pleasures and useful criticism and analysis, thereby delivering fresh values of familiarity, honesty, and affection, with which a better nationality can be built. This is the humble success desired by such poets.

Building better nations also concerns other creative literatures outside the Anglo-Caribbean such as in the French-Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Aime Cesaire of Martinique is, in fact, the first truly great internationally recognised and honoured poet of the Caribbean.

Since 1930, Cesaire, with other poets, formed the creative concept of `Negritude’ or black dignity and pride, which has nothing whatsoever to do with despising or thinking oneself superior or better than other races, pure or mixed, and their cultures, but rather with a black contribution towards making a better world for everyone.

Cesaire, along with other black artists like the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, were also part of the great Surrealist arts tradition which contains a huge amount of some of the best and most original poetry ever written by European, Latin American, and African poets, such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnoes, Benjamin Peret, Philippe Soupault, Cesar Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Leopold Senghor, Leon Damas, among others. Surrealism, championed by the highly cultured French poet, Breton, who launched Cesaire’s professional career by instantly publishing his work upon reading it, refused to regard European or North American culture as superior to the magical, exuberant and nature-respecting original cultures of the American Indian, African, Oriental and Polynesian peoples.

Cesaire’s long famous poem `Return to my native land’, is not about a return to Africa, but Martinique, his homeland. Cesaire refused to regard himself as a homeless alienated victim of slavery. Instead, all his magical, pensive, and erotically life-giving poetry applies Africa’s wisdom and perceptive sensitivity to a Caribbean nationality in the making.

This identity is open to non-African influences, and seeks a freedom similar to Cesaire’s poetic style, which achieved local truth and tone by ignoring styles of imposed colonial schooling in writing, such as the composition of Sonnets, which Cesaire disregarded in amusement. His poems achieved national truths which do not become obsolete because they represent positive acts and aspirations.

Not surprisingly, Cesaire’s poetry influenced Martinicans and other French Caribbean islanders, who elected him Mayor and spokesman for French Caribbean social life, which is far more peaceful, simple, and productive than any Anglo-Caribbean territory today.

The good and constructive influence of locally oriented Caribbean and Guyanese poets to their fellow citizens is as necessary as social or political influences which seek to attain fairness and tranquility in such nations. The commitment of local poets to such values, and the receptiveness of citizens to their poetry, are complimentary acts with benefits for everyone.

Two great Guyanese novelists

THE Guyanese novel, led by Edgar Mittelholzer and Wilson Harris since the 1950s, established nationality as a central theme and value based on the effect of geographic (or natural and social environments), and historical acts on a population comprised of various races or ethnicities. These unavoidable realities, born of history, established the Guyanese nationality. Mittelholzer and Harris did not invent such a nationality, they simply recognised it in the reality around them, and demonstrated it in their works.

Mittelholzer first recognised the problems such a nationality could pose for various races, or individuals, with old original customs and cultures now put together on a fresh landscape, and with no prior experience of living together. Mittelholzer’s brilliant trilogy of novels `The Children of Kaywanna’, `Kaywanna Stock’ and `Kaywanna Blood’, are really fictionalised dramas of Guyana’s early immigrant history which spared no one their bigotry and barbarity, and was portrayed as far worse than actual truth in order to make us feel.

In writing those novels, Mittelholzer faced the problems of a budding Guyanese nationality bravely, and with a purgative realism. He knew that the same problems of social co-existence Amerindians, Dutch, and Africans first faced were examples of the same problems later English, Oriental, Portuguese and other immigrants would face. Mittelholzer was not English, but mainly of Swiss-African descent, but he wrote in English as a Guyanese who was born and grew up colonised by England after Holland ceded Guyana to England in 1814.

In writing the first Kaywanna novel `Children of Kaywanna’, he obviously invented the fiction that Kaywanna was a mixture of English and Amerindian in order to place English ancestry at the root of the fledgling Guyanese family tree, which really commenced only with Dutch-Amerindian union. He probably did not want to alienate his British publishers by omitting their Anglo blood from the inception of Guyanese nationality. Kaywanna, in reality, was a pure Carib Indian woman whom the Dutch pioneer trader-frontiersman, Adriensen Groenwegel, took as his wife and with whom he had two sons in the Essequibo region of early 17th century Guyana, like numerous other Dutch pioneers. This historical fact is proven by the published records of John Scott, an English pirate who sacked and ruined Guyana’s Pomeroon River settlements in the 1660s briefly holding Adrien Groenwegel and his mixed family hostage.

In Mittelholzer’s Kaywanna novels, and in his other excellent Guyanese novels, Guyanese nationality is born from the new experience of diverse people gradually coming to know each other through daily human activities in a hot tropical geography, as they endeavour to cultivate wild terrain and build upon it. No matter what their original beliefs or customs, they cannot ignore the thoughts, desires, attractions, dependencies, dangers, hardships, etc., that develop among themselves on this new soil. Neither can they successfully reshape the humble but real and natural identity of the new homeland into the same identity of their original countries and cultures.

Mittelholzer’s Dutch settlers try hard to hang on to their original exclusive behaviour, prejudices and racial purity; but human passions, needs and intellectual logic prevail, nurtured by new social circumstances. These emerging Guyanese must now either consolidate themselves into a nationality, or ignore, control or segregate themselves; either deny their latent love for each other, reminisce endlessly about “the old country”, or leave. None of this means that people of similar race and customs disappear.

In Mittelholzer’s and Harris’ Guyanese novels, all our inherited cultural biases, whether Indigenous, European, African, Oriental or of miscegenated origin, are exposed, especially in dialogue. No one is spared frank discussion, even each author’s racial types are portrayed as bigoted characters at times. The authors use these biases to expose what is hidden within ourselves and to awaken our conscience, not to proclaim that such biases are normal in Guyana and have their support, as some naïve uneducated analyses and interpretations of their novels have claimed.

Highly intelligent dialogue and narrative exist in Mittelholzer’s novels like `Shadows move among them’, `Sylvia’, `Thunder Returning’; `Latticed Echoes’, where the deep psychological traits of Guyanese are explored. Exciting, observant and sensual descriptions of Berbice, Demerara, Essequibo, animals, insects, sounds, weather, the East Bank, West Bank, seawall, East Coast, West Coast, historical ruins, etc., abound.

In `Thunder Returning’, one of Mittelholzer’s masterpieces, the hilarious dialogue and soliloquies of a German immigrant in love only with his original culture and country while living in Guyana, is contrasted with sudden beautiful depictions of distinct Guyanese atmospheric moods surrounding his life: “Cook crowing comes weak but clear in the dawn, in the damp mist of early twilight, and veil reality beyond the mosquito net.”

Also, no Guyanese or Caribbean novel has so far revealed so skilfully the snobberies and stupidities of ethnic and social biases as Mittelholzer’s `A morning at the office’, based in Trinidad. Another novel, `The Weather family’, based in Barbados, remains one of Mittelholzer’s masterpieces in brilliant, clear, sharp prose evoking the effect of weather and geography on the lives of an interesting Caribbean family.

The pleasure and pain of Guyanese nationality reaches its highest creative expression in the early novels of Wilson Harris. In Harris’ first novel `Palace of the peacock’, definitely one of the most original and beautiful novels of Guyana and all the Americas, the young sensitive and idealistic narrator says of his Guyana: `They were as close to me as my ribs, the rivers and flatland, the mountains and heartland I intimately saw.’

Harris, who knew Guyana well as a land surveyor, used his knowledge to compose novels of deep, symbolic reference to the problem of creating a national identity out of colonial transplanting. In `Palace…’, the narrator wakes up in a local bedroom which feels like an “operating theatre”, a “maternity ward”, or “prisoner’s cell”; all places symbolic of healing, birth, or being kept stagnant. But Harris rejects negative definitions of the new nationality, and is excited by the freshness of its human sentiment. This is suggested intimately in another scene from `Palace’ when the narrator comforts Mariella who has been abused by his cruel brother. The scene symbolises the abuse and pain of slavery and bondage being replaced by a new national pleasure based on care and affectionate response in a distinctly sensual tropical Guyanese manner: “She lifted her dress to show me her legs. I stroked the firm beauty of her flesh and touched the ugly marks where she had been whipped. `Look,’ she said, and lifted her dress still higher. Her convulsive sobbing stopped when I touched her again.”

To read Harris’ early novels is to see and feel the beauty of Guyana as a distinct nationality. No other novels in the hemisphere have been written with such searching poetic description and insight into Guyanese realities. Sharp, vivid scenes open `The Whole Armour’, where a T&HD steamer enters Jigsaw Bay at the Pomeroon River’s mouth; emotional scenes of local colour occur in Georgetown neighbourhoods and the wild interior in `Eye of the Scarecrow’, or legendary Bartica and the Mazaruni-Cuyuni outposts with its wise mystical multi-racial characters in `Heartland’. And `Tumatumari’ is an outstanding novel which evokes Amerindian antiquity and symbolic geography at the root of Guyana’s blossoming nationality.

Amazingly, one of Harris’ early masterpiece novels `The Far Journey of Oudin’, proved how a Guyanese writer could subtly apply Oriental cultural values to Guyanese scenes and landscape. This creative use of transplanted Oriental earthiness, cosmic vision, and reincarnated human hope, made this touching and human novel sparkle like a Diwali float at night. Such a creative use of Oriental vision inspiring English prose, as in the sentence - `The tasteless dawn shone through the window, a dim radiance of ancient pearl and milky rice washed the ground’ - seems to have been ignored by many Oriental creative writers in Guyana who are concerned mainly with feelings of being dominated by Afro-Caribbean or Afro-Guyanese political and cultural attitudes.

Neither Harris not Mittelholzer, however, considered Guyanese nationality defined by a dominant Indigenous, Euro, Afro or Indo politics and culture, but by a healthy blend of all. Neither are Christian, Hindu or Muslim religions topics in their novels, since all religious worship is a private and personal matter, whereas these two artists are concerned with the collective social values of Guyanese nationality.