Guyana - Land of 'strange' grandeur
by Rickey Singh
Guyana Chronicle
December 7, 2003
THE vastness of its size, meagreness of its population, richness of its natural resources, and potential as the food basket of the region, have long combined to place Guyana in a unique position among the states of the English-speaking Caribbean.
It is a country of 83 000 square miles but inhabited by a diverse ethnic mix of merely three-quarters of a million (750 000) people, including its indigenous Amerindians who form the single largest population in the hinterland regions.
The great majority of Guyanese are huddled along a comparatively narrow coastal strip, struggling for survival - against natural and made-disasters - and virtually separated from the awesome beauty and challenges of its fascinating and intimidating landscape of the sprawling interior region.
On Tuesday evening (December 2), the Guyanese-born Professor of West Indian Literature in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature at the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill Campus), Dr. Mark McWatt, presented through literary eyes - his and those of a range of writers of the region - a very arresting examination of the interior and coastal landscapes of Guyana.
McWatt, steering clear of the social and political problems that so often dominate the news about Guyana, and speaking with 27 years of teaching experience in the fields of language and literature, offered a mix of romance and fear in his estimated hour-long lecture on Landscape and the Language of the Imagination - Reading Guyanese Literature.
He made good use of slides to take his audience at the campus' Law Lecture Theatre on his journey through the "strangeness", "grandeur", the "peculiar dread", as well as the "vastness and emptiness" of the interior and coastal landscapes of Guyana.
Landscapes that agents of colonialism of the likes of Sir Walter Raleigh glamorised as the discovery of El Dorado but about which he had seen and known very little.
"The literature of Guyana", said McWatt, "shares many common features with the literature of the islands of the English-speaking Caribbean, especially with having the same history of slavery and colonisation and a common educational and literary heritage".
Nevertheless, he said, readers often perceive and remark on a certain "difference" or "strangeness" in much of Guyanese writing.
Writers like Edgar Mittelholzer and Wilson Harris are obvious examples of such writings. And critics and others usually point a finger at the country's physical landscape in their attempts to identify the source.
He was to offer various explanations for this perceived "strangeness" as he went along in what was the final public lecture - for this year - in the Professorial Inaugural Lecture Series to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the UWI.
For example, Jamaican writer, John Hearne's essay on Wilson Harris, The Fugitive in the Forest, in which he wrote of the Guyana landscape as being "one of the primary landscapes of the world...
"And it can crush the mind like sleep. Like sleep it inspires the dreams by which we record the progress of our waking life...."
For McWatt, the founding editor of Journal of West Indian Literature, perhaps the most "disturbing feature of much of the Guyana landscape - to the mind that confronts it - is its size and scale, which seem beyond human needs and desires...
"Its relative emptiness of human population - especially in the interior - can appear to emphasise an indifference or antagonism to human life and values. Perhaps this is what Hearne meant by its power to 'crush the mind'..."
At the same time, argued McWatt, the mind has to devise ways of confronting or explaining the landscape, and this is where the "language of the imagination" comes in.
For instance, one way to deal with the landscape - particularly in the interior region, he said, "is to see its indifference and emptiness" and "the sheer difficulty of negotiating it as a kind of disguise or concealment - to imagine that the landscape itself harbours some secret, contains something of great value hidden in its unreachable centre. ..."
McWatt was later to share his perspective on the coastlands of Guyana where the great majority of Guyanese live on a flat landscape that has its own "peculiar associations and myths and challenges to the imagination".
The most important fact about this flat alluvial plain (that stretches for some 250 miles), is that it is below sea level - an average, it is said, of some eight feet below.
It requires, as McWatt pointed out, an expensive network of sea defences from the always threatening invasion of the sea, which remains a prominent feature of the coastal landscape with the population living with "a peculiar dread" of the sea breaching the defences, over-topping the country's famous "sea wall" at spring tides, and flooding and destroying crops, livestock and homes.
In the language of McWatt's imagination, the invading sea "creates a very powerful image suggesting danger and loss. And the threat," he reminded his audience, "is constant, repeated each spring tide, and reinforced in recent decades by people's awareness that the sea-defences have not always been properly maintained...."
He was to frequently quote Guyana's and one of the Caribbean's foremost poets, Martin Carter, in capturing various facets and moods of life of the Guyanese coastland dwellers.
"Just as the size and grandeur of the Guyana interior landscapes appear to diminish or exclude the human person," observed McWatt, "so the vastness and emptiness of parts of the coastal plain seem unwelcoming to the peasant farmer who must struggle against the forces of nature to survive...."
Apart from the rationally perceived dangers of the flood and storm, there are, he reminded, "the irrational fears as well as, it seems to me, that the coastal landscape imposes a strong sense of foreboding, or dread".
This causes the imagination "to project onto it the kind of supernatural paraphernalia one encounters in the literature (for example) of Mittelholzer's jumbies, spirits and the restless ghosts of Dutch planters...."
He concluded his presentation with a reading of one of his poems, Gorge, that looks at a waterfall from both up and down, from the lip to the gorge below, to illustrate some of the aspects of the imagination he shared with the audience. (Reprinted from the Barbados Nation of December 5, 2003)