The first is The Guyana Annual, 2005-2006 edited by Petamber Persaud, writer of Pepperpot’s Literary Corner. Originally named The Guyana Christmas Annual when it first started close to the beginning of the last century, this annual magazine made up primarily of submissions of short fiction and poetry sourced through a competition has been the main outlet for new writing in Guyana for the past seven years.

It should be said that as a vehicle for publishing new writers, this most recent issue of the magazine – like the others before it – was invaluable. That said, the writing was primarily poor, something acknowledged in the Judges’ report on the Adult Short Story Competition but applicable to the entire publication. In the overall scope of this review, however, this poverty – and here again the analogy may be drawn from the country in general – is more symptom than disease.

Also, competitions – like pageants – can be contentious and their results open to debate. In the adult categories for example, this reviewer found, honourable mention awardee, Pamela Jordan’s work deserving of higher places. Her control of Creole is ably displayed in the rhythmic narrative of the short story, Audrey, the Talk Queen; and the direct, measured simplicity of her poem, Forbidden Fruit shows an understated craftsmanship that you find in the most enduring of love songs. The same could be said of Natasha Yusuf’s Umbra, which received an honourable mention even as two lesser poems of hers, Against All Odds and Hindu Woman, received the second and third prizes respectively in the Open Poetry Category.

In this, the judging may be suspect, not in its intent but its overall competence. We find, for example, a Judges’ report which takes the fifty-something poems submitted to mean a possible upsurge in poetry writing, and which also gives a list of guidelines to aspiring young fiction writers including the tip, “The writers must be closely involved in the stories.” As a rule, the poetry category usually receives the most entries in any competition simply because many writers labour under the misconception that poetry is far easier than fiction to write. And to offer aspiring writers such archaic and ambiguous advice will ultimately do far more harm than good.

At the end of the day, whatever paucity is inherent within this publication, as has been said before, is symptomatic of the state of literature and general critical analysis in Guyana. Petamber Persaud has in recent years become known for his fervour, against all odds, in promoting local literature; he has created and hosted two television programmes, organised poetry readings, and facilitated a host of other activities geared toward that end. Even the most ardent of gardeners, however, cannot cultivate water-lilies in a desert. What most literary work originating in this country suffers from is the inadequacy of the environment to support it. In the next year, there will be workshops in almost every field but literary; even a recent drama workshop in Georgetown was sponsored by the United States Centre for Disease Control, as part of the abundantly funded anti-HIV/AIDS effort in Guyana. In fact, the Annual itself is made possible by a generous contribution from Guyanese, Dr. Tulsi Dyal Singh, a proud resident of Midlands, Texas.

There are no regular publications of creative writing, hence no regular criticism for the creative writing to better itself. It happens that whenever the Annual comes out every Christmas, there is the tendency to praise the miracle of its birth rather than to see the defects in the infant. That is true of the 2001 issue edited by this writer.

We can turn for now to the second publication, The Arts Journal, Volume 2 Number 1. Dated September, 2005 – but with printing finishing earlier this year – this is only the third issue of the journal, the first being that of May, 2004. In light of this, the claim on the front inside cover, “The Arts Journal is a peer-reviewed critical Journal published twice yearly,” is more of a statement of intent than a reflection of reality.

The production of the Journal, as a less democratic, more highbrow, more intellectually elite publication than the Annual, can be seen as even more laborious. Captained by Ameena Gafoor, the Arts Journal is an attempt to produce a serious critical publication concerned with contemporary Caribbean Arts and Culture. The printing stock is more expensive than that of the Annual; the cover is better designed; it possesses an International Standard Serial Number ISSN, which shows that the persons behind it are serious about copyright; it has a barcode necessary for electronic POS machines; and, more importantly, the writing is far better than that in the Annual.

The latter should be understandable. This latest issue is guest edited by noted academic, Victor Ramraj, out of the University of Calgary in Canada. The Journal’s Editorial Board includes staff from the University of Guyana, UWI, as well London Metropolitan University. The Editorial Advisors are even more impressive in terms of numbers, geography and qualifications.

The first issue of the Journal tackled the issue of Indian identity in Caribbean society as a whole and in the Arts in particular. As a topic this was timely in the sense that it reflected a relatively new critical sub-structure in the overarching superstructure of post-colonial studies; it also represented a fairly rounded view of the subject, offering a variety of perspectives primarily grounded in the contemporary Caribbean experience. The publication of Bernadette Persaud’s – an accomplished artist living and working in Guyana – curatorial statement and her artwork sort of epitomized the raison d’etre of the Journal, in that it offered a critical voice to a contemporary mode of artistic production, grounded in a particular history and existing in the particular contemporary environment of Guyana and by extension the Caribbean. The second issue was thematically more diffuse with articles ranging from social stratification in Jamaica during slavery, to the Hosay Festival in Trinidad, to Amerindian Music in Guyana.

This third issue of The Journal has lost an opportunity to be different from every other journal calling itself “post-colonial” and “Caribbean” (often inseparably) in that it has removed the geographic space of “Guyana and the Caribbean” from the centrality of its focus.

Of course the argument has been made that the geographic space means little to the Caribbean imagination. However, that argument ignores the fact that that geographic space also coincides with not only climate and culture but economics, the latter being the main reason that most writers of Caribbean (or their parents) migrate in the first place. And analyses of writing of the Diaspora, the expressions of alienation/homesickness/whatever are usually carried out in monologue, without any relation to writing coming out of the contemporary [geographical] Caribbean serving either as counter-balance or complement. Therefore, you can have Harald Leusmann’s stating in his review of Fred D’Aguiar’s Bethany Bettany that “Guyana is certainly on Fred D’Aguiar’s mind” and “Guyana itself can easily be regarded as a character in this novel, which deals with topics like exile and return, family and community, solitude and redemption”, without any challenging of the definition of Guyana or the topics deemed characteristic of it. For example, Leusmann can offer no reference with which to contrast “exile and return” – we can disregard the other characteristics as universal or ambiguous enough to be rendered irrelevant as ‘characteristic’ – as being representative of Guyana, so that must be the totality of it. It is somewhat like having a newspaper being published by residents of Bel Air Gardens, carrying only the views of residents of Bel Air Gardens, ignoring the views of residents of Sophia and claiming to be representative of Georgetown as a whole on the basis that some Bel Air Gardens residents had origins in Sophia.

If the failure of the writers within the Annual is to a large degree the failure of the environment in which they live, conversely, the ultra-fertility of the critical analyses presented in the Arts Journal also stems out of successfulness of the societies in which those writer reside. Underlying these contrasts is the basic fact of economics. In Guyana, the production of serious writing, much the less serious critical analysis, is a burden more than anything else. No one can live off creative writing here, not even attempting to do like most writers and buttress it with an academic pay cheque. In Canada and the UK, these things are self-perpetuating in that writers make a living either by creating formulaic literature by mining the still bountiful thematic ore of exile and belonging, or writing criticism of that same formulaic fiction, which turns out very often to be basically the same thing. The current issue of The Arts Journal is a text-book example of this phenomenon.

“In turning away from the traumatic history of her Guyanese birth family, Daphne struggles to negotiate a place for herself in the Canadian nation,” writes Andrea Medovarski of a character in Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin. Both writer and reviewer live in Canada, with Medovarski having “published on postcolonial theory World Literature Written in English.”

“Ultimately, as introduction to the dynamics of space and horticulture in Mootoo’s writing, ‘A Garden of Her Own’, articulates both the loss of home and Vijai’s tentative attempts to establish a new home,” writes Jordan Stouck of a character in Shani Mootoo’s book. Stouk teaches at the University of Lethbridge and has published several articles on feminine creole and Caribbean-Canadian identities. The one exception in The Arts Journal is a review of Clem Seecharan’s ‘Sweetening Bitter Sugar: Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-1966’, written by David Granger, publisher of the Guyana Review, and originally published in the Sunday Stabroek.

The thing of course with this section of literary academia – specifically concerning what is regarded in the continued absence of any antithesis as “post-colonial Caribbean literature” – is that the players do not seem to recognise the inherent falseness of the exercise they engage in, the abuse of the themes of slavery/indentureship/repression in societies they have either never lived in or are disengaged from, and exile/un-belonging in societies in which they, ironically, have carved out a lucrative, self-perpetuating niche. And ultimately this is done to the detriment of the writing that can most authentically be described as contemporary Caribbean writing; that being produced within the Caribbean by authors residing here.

It can be argued that the point of this issue of The Journal was to expressly look at new writing of the Caribbean Diaspora in the United Kingdom and Canada. The inverse would be more factual. Guest-editor Ramraj points out, “When I agreed…to edit this special issue of The Arts Journal on recent writing by West Indian authors residing in Canada and the UK, I knew, given the imperatives of journal publication – drastic deadlines and limited number of pages – that I could not produce an issue that would give a comprehensive understanding of just how abundant and how superior are their literary production.” One gets a sense that it is the availability of the writing which dictated what should be in the Journal.

As the back cover of the present issue informs us, the next issue (slated for March, 2006) will be guest-edited by Dr. Gemma Robinson and will sub-titled “A Trans-National Caribbean: British Caribbean Writing – Prose Narrative, Poetry and Critical Analyses.” Instead of The Arts Journal creating a separate critical space in which the works of writers residing and writing in the Guyana and the Caribbean can be exposed and analysed, its second and third issues are concerned with the very thing that every other journal being published out of US, Canadian or UK Universities are concerned with: the writing of the Diaspora as somehow representative of Caribbean writing. Its other upcoming issues deal with Education across the Caribbean; the bicentenary of the Abolition of the slave trade; Amerindians; and the 170th Anniversary of the Arrival of East Indians in Guyana. With the exception of the “Amerindian” issue, due to be edited by Dr. Desrey Fox, it is doubtful whether any of the others can offer anything truly new to their areas of reference.

To get the basic point of all this: in the Annual you have new fiction and poetry without an environment or even vehicle for the critical analysis with which they can become better; and with the Journal, you have a vehicle for critical analysis which has to import critical perspectives from the Diaspora to fulfil its mandate.