The 2002 Guyana Prize for Literature
The notion of belonging counterbalanced
with the issue of placelessness
Arts on Sunday
by Al Creighton
Stabroek News
February 23, 2003
The eighth award of The Guyana Prize for Litera-ture was made in Georgetown on Sunday, February 9, when President Bharrat Jagdeo presented the 2002 Prize for Poetry to Michael Gilkes, for First Book of Poetry to Stanley Greaves and for First Book of Fiction to Ruel Johnson. In addition, it was announced that a Guyana Prize Special Award for 2002 was to be made to novelist and theorist Wilson Harris, who, although unable to travel at this time, will be in Guyana for the presentation at another Guyana Prize event later in the year.
Chairwoman of the Jury Denise de Caires-Narain, a Vice Dean and Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex, who is researching for a book on Post-Colonial Women’s Writing funded by a Leverhume Research Grant, commented on the high quality of work exhibited by the eight books that were shortlisted for the prize. She announced the verdict and presented the Judges’ Report on behalf of the 2002 jury - John Barnie, Welsh poet, editor and musician; Edward Baugh, poet, Public Orator of UWI and Professor of West Indian Literature; Adeola James, Head of English at UG, author and critic. George Lamming, one of the most acclaimed West Indian novelists, had to withdraw from the panel before the final meetings.
The shortlisted works were Gilkes’ Joanstown, Greaves’ Horizons, Johnson’s Ariadne and Other Stories, and The Enormous Night, Saisnarine Persaud’s The Hungry Sailor, Fred D’Aguiar’s Bloodlines, Deryck Bernard’s Going Home and Other Tales and Andrew Jefferson-Miles’ The Timeherian.
The authors all exhibited effective techniques and an interest in craft in both poetry and prose, exploring not only a command of language and styles but a range of experiences, issues and concerns. Across the books there was a strong sense of place, an interrogation of the notion of belonging counterbalanced with problems of placelessness, identity and history. Themes were pursued both in the Guyanese diaspora among ‘exiles’ as in the case of Persaud in particular and at home in the cases of Gilkes, Johnson and Bernard. Gilkes’ range is expansive using the city as location and metaphor while Johnson and Bernard relived experiences of growing up and belonging in their different ways.
D’Aguiar went into history for different voices out of the experience of slavery, for the roots of a bloodline into present being, not unlike Derek Walcott on whom Johnson leans, taking full artistic advantage of the mixed race descendants of that haunting era. On the other hand, rooting himself in the present realities, Greaves explores a wide range of paradoxes and dilemmas of the psyche. While Walcott is a source of strength for Gilkes and Johnson, Jefferson-Miles turns to Harris for his experiment in form. Not only is his novel steeped in Guyanese myth and archaeology (particularly Amerindian) but his narrative style and use of the fictional biography are borrowed from Harris. Dr de Caires-Narain finds this a promising feature of new Guyanese literature in which the writers turn to other Caribbean authors for influence. She feels that this helps to establish the great recognition accorded to the senior Caribbean writers and perpetuates the new forms started by Harris.
This business of influence is both interesting and controversial. It is not a straightforward matter to draw conclusions about Jefferson-Miles and Harris. It appears that the Harrisian technique is much too obvious in The Timehrian, yet the novel has a life of its own and the writer has a sufficiently confident command of the style to make it a worthy book. The Guyana Prize judges saw it that way in deciding to make it a strong contender and shortlist it.
As a writer, Johnson is very conscious of his reading. It is evident that this voracious reading is a part of his apprenticeship as a writer and it is rewarding him with positive dividends. Yet, while Neruda, Maugham and Walcott fortify and enrich him, they still colour his work with a certain self-conscious sense of literariness. It is good that he is such a talented writer with an intelligent understanding of craft that the influences have not begun to taint his output.
Ironically, many critics have waded into the early Walcott, saying he “echoes almost everybody.” As he developed, however, the ‘influences’ became the poet’s engagement with literature, his interrogation of intertextuality. His first acclaimed book, In A Green Night, for example, takes its title from Andrew Marvell’s poem The Bermudas. Walcott’s own title poem is based on Marvell’s lines “He hangs in shades the orange bright/ Like golden lamps in a green night.” The poem then goes on to take its rhythm and structure from Marvell while exploring the transience and the seasonal changes reflected in the metamorphosis of the orange, a tropical fruit of temperate changes growing on an evergreen tree.
Walcott’s preoccupation is, among other things, with the metaphysical quality found in the Marvell poem about the West Indian islands, whose recent explorations were influencing Europe in Marvell’s time.
Walcott acknowledges this manner of influence in a much later book, this time fully original and assured, claiming the use of influences without any reservations. That book is The Bounty, written in his capacity of a Nobel Prize winner, celebrated as arguably the best contemporary poet in English, though some promote his Irish friend and fellow Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heany. Walcott claims these literary influences as parts of the bounty of the earth upon which he has drawn in his tribute to his deceased mother.
As if to lend support to the opinion of the Guyana Prize judges about the nature of influence, David Dabydeen, in his novel Disappearance, pays tribute to Naipaul by his intertextual engagements of that writer, particularly of Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. There is a similar reflection of Harris, particularly of The Secret Ladder.
Dabydeen sees this as a part of the continuing engagement by West Indian writers of West Indian works as a development out of previous homage paid to European authors such as Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness must rate as the most influential of novels.