CCLE: A Personal Journal
By Ruel Johnson
Guyana Chronicle
July 20, 2003
LAST month, the inaugural Canadian-Caribbean Literary Expo was held in Toronto, Canada, under the auspices of Toronto’s CARICOM Consular Corps. Six Guyanese writers were invited by Guyana’s Consulate General to take part in the event. These were Dr. Jan Carew, Ken Corsbie, Bernard Heydorn, Peter Jailall, Ruel Johnson, and Pauline Melville. The Sunday Chronicle is pleased to present the first installment of a three-part personal account by Johnson.
PROLOGUE
February
(Rhinestone Cowboy)
I am seated on the stage of the National Cultural Centre. I have just received the Guyana Prize for Literature, Best First Book of Fiction 2002. I feel a bit sleepy and the lights are too bright.
My girlfriend buys me a wallet and key-holder. On the wallet the word “Toronto” is emblazoned above a line-drawing of the city’s skyline.
March
I am enjoying a game of Halo with my younger brother and some friends at a “Nintendo” shop. My phone rings and a woman introduces herself as Nancy Rickford of the Guyana Consulate General in Toronto. There is going to be some literary affair, an inaugural Caribbean-Canadian Literary Expo in Toronto in June and I am invited, airfare and accommodation paid.
April
In a meeting with Vic Insanally, he suggests the idea of having my book done locally. I pick it up.
May
I finalise an arrangement with Nicole Johnson, Marketing Manager at Courts. I come away feeling considerably less belligerent towards multinational corporations. My book will be ready for the Expo.
June
My book will not be ready for the Expo. A bit despondent, I prepare to leave.
THE EXPO
Wednesday, June 18
(I watched the island narrowing the fine…)
It is only my third time leaving this country but it will be the farthest I have ever gone from it. As the plane lifts off, I begin to get slightly philosophical, the place of man in the Universe, etc. I suspect it is due to me seeing how tiny everything is from a certain height. A house that must be a mansion since it is a bit larger than the others around and it has a red roof and a blue swimming pool looks like as inconsequential and about as exciting as an empty matchbox.
I take a window seat. This first leg of the trip feels as if nothing will happen. Nothing does. When we set down at Piarco it had rained.
(Fancy meeting you here…)
When I board the plane I search for my seat. Somehow I know, before I reach it, that the annoyingly clean-cut young man who is jabbering into a cell phone is seated where I am supposed to be. I begin to inform him that he has my seat but then I notice an empty window seat behind him. I smile and tell him it’s okay, put my bags in the overhead compartment and shuffle past the middle-aged and regal Rastafarian woman in the aisle seat.
In the air, I am bored and request to borrow her Trinidad Express. I browse through and put it back. A bit later, I borrow her pen to fill up some annoying little form or the other. I notice her name, “Eintou Springer” and recognise it immediately from the info provided to me on the Expo.
By the time the amazingly tasteless meal is served, by the time I have time, I’ve exhausted my options on BWEEs audio channels, by the time “Kangaroo Jack” is over, we have become friends.
(Rocket man…)
Despite the company of Ms. Springer, there are times when an acute sense of isolation overcomes me, when the thousands of feet from the surface of the earth are multiplied a hundred-fold in my heart, when I feel estranged from my very own self…
After four-and-a-half hours of flying, we are over Washington D.C. From this height, it seems a surreal statement, a string of fairy lights strewn across some still-smouldering ashes. I think of such things like “The War in Iraq” and a movie named “Ten seconds over Tokyo” and a bomb that was named, “Our Second Piss”…
The plane descends over Toronto for what seems like an endless time. I am inhabited by a small fear that we will crash into the heart of the city. We land so smoothly that half the aircraft applauds.
The tedium of Immigration, a perky and patronising officer, an Asian man checking my bags, finding my ride, saying goodbye to Ms. Springer.
(Road to perdition)
The name of the driver is Mohamed Yasin. I inform him that I have a friend at home with the same name. He informs me that he has only several hours earlier dropped off Jan Carew and his wife, and Pauline Melville at the hotel. Yasin recalls his days in Guyana, his travels as a teacher in the islands, his escape to New York, and his settling in Canada. He holds highly informed opinions on West Indian literature from Naipaul to Wilson Harris to Kenneth Ramchand. The other half of the time he spends contemplating out loud possible driving routes and explaining to me some of the subtler points of driving in Toronto. He might as well be speaking in Swahili…
We have been driving at high speed for almost half-an-hour. I am astonished that we are still in Toronto…
The buildings seem inordinately large…
(A clean, well-lighted place)
Mohamed drops me off at my hotel, the Metropolitan. If I were writing a short story that involved a writer arriving for the first time in a big city, I would name the hotel that he stayed in, the Metropolitan.
I check in relatively easily with the only discomfort coming from having to explain to the concierge that Mohamed and I are not ‘together’. I collect my key, head up to my room, change into a thicker shirt, and head out into the Toronto night, in search of something to eat.
I stop at a place with an innocuous name like “The Deli” or something like that. The place is sterile and bright. An Asian man about my age is at the counter. I order a Black Forest Ham on white bread sandwich and a Pepsi and sit down to eat. The only other customers there are some teenagers dressed in black and an old man in old clothes and an overgrown beard. After a couple of minutes, the teenagers leave noisily. The old man doesn’t move, just sits there. After finishing my meal, I leave as well. Outside, in the cold air, I look back at the old man who still does not move.
Back in the hotel I realise that there is an extra bed in the room. Still hungry, I raid the complimentary and well-stocked snack basket. I wash down everything with the bottle of water by my bedside. I snuggle under the thick comforter and watch some TV. Somewhere in the middle of South Park I begin fading off to sleep. An image of the old man comes back to me and along with it, the memory of an Ernest Hemingway story that I had read sometime late last year and didn’t quite get until now...
My first metropolitan epiphany…