CONTINENTAL VOICES: GUYANESE WRITERS ON THE RADIO

Aug 03, 2008 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

by GEMMA ROBINSON

If charting the rise of post-war anglophone Caribbean writing has become a catalogue of award-winning poets and novelists. A focus on radio and local Caribbean publishing in the 1940s and 1950s takes us back to a much less certain time.

In The Pleasures of Exile George Lamming writes about the role of radio in the British West Indies, singling out Caribbean Voices as a programme serious about the writings of amateur poets, novelists and dramatists from the region:

In an island where local radio is an incestuous concubinage between commerce and the official administration, these writers would look forward to that Sunday evening at half-past seven. It was their reprieve. Moreover, Caribbean Voices enabled writers in one island to keep in touch with the latest work of writers in another island.

The West Indian Writers would meet in the same house and listen to these programmes. Then they would wait for the closing announcement in the hope that next week’s programme would include some of their music . . . writers, furious or elated according to the critics’ recent judgment, would ramble to Down Town Port of Spain . . . and all the way they were tearing Fuller and Calder Marshall to pieces . . . . For the West Indian writer, there would have been one defect in that carnival of disputatious argument. The next day was Monday, and they were teachers, Civil Servants, or store clerks.

A respite from colonial radio, Caribbean Voices elevated the status of writers in the British West Indies from amateurs to paid contributors.

The forerunner fifteen-minute programme, produced by Una Marson, was initially composed of readings from already published work.

By February 1948, after Henry Swanzy had been producer for two years, the programme was extended to half an hour and was able to use an annual thirty pounds Sterling fund to pay its contributors.

Regardless of its intrinsic merits, the scarcity of established, prestigious (and paying) outlets in the Caribbean for creative writing obviously helped to launch Caribbean Voices as a significant forum in the publishing careers of Anglophone Caribbean writers.

The role of journals at this time was equally important, but it should be remembered that the editors of journals such as Kyk-over-Al from Guyana, Bim from Barbados and Focus from Jamaica could not pay their contributors and barely broke even from their sales.

Caribbean Voices and the Caribbean journals are united by several defining features and these features make up the conceptual threads of this paper.

The first is the distinctively discursive way that a West Indian literary tradition occupies the minds and writings of those interested in the state of Caribbean literature in the 1940s and 1950s. Caribbean Voices provided one locus for a range of conversations, arguments and agreements – both real and imagined – between writers, critics and listeners.

Lamming’s “carnival of disputatious argument” shows how provocative were the voiced opinions of radio broadcasters based in London and how useful their scripted appraisals and discussions were in precipitating an afterlife of debate in the Caribbean.

The second feature is the fluctuating importance of originality and influence within the much-debated notion of a West Indian literary tradition. By looking at Caribbean Voices, the Guyanese journal, Kyk-over-Al and the Guyanese- produced series New World of the Caribbean, I want to show the differing ways that radio and publishing coped with the pressures of reporting the contemporary concerns of Caribbean letters.
The third strand concerns public assumptions.

The call for the inception of an original West Indian literary tradition can be politically contextualized in two apparently contradictory ways: either against the radical, sometimes revolutionary, calls for political independence within the Caribbean, or against the more reactionary background of a British colonial policy that sought to dismantle its Empire slowly and deliver democratic nations to a world community.

By considering Caribbean Voices, some of its Guyanese contributors, and alternatives to it, I hope to bring into focus how media discussions of the cultural parameters of the region necessarily raised questions about the Caribbean’s political parameters, and how the redrawing of these cultural parameters proved a necessary but imprecise project.

Guyanese writers were often featured in Caribbean Voices, both as writers and as readers: Jan Carew, Martin Carter, Frank Dalziell, Wilson Harris, Edwina Melville, Edgar Mittelholzer, A.J. Seymour, Denis Williams and Gordon Woolford all appeared in the programme between 1946 and the final shows in 1958.

More often than not, work was presented with the name of the author and the specific territory in which they were born or from where they were now writing.

In 1953, a programme was broadcast specifically about Guyana and its geographical and historical background. The first report was an account of drought on the Rupununi Savannahs, the next, a piece on a journey up the Mazaruni river, and finally Canje, a verse drama by Wilson Harris.

What is unusual here is the inclusion of non-fiction prose – an editorial indication, perhaps, of Guyana’s anomalous position within the Caribbean.

As the only English-speaking country in South America, Guyana is culturally and historically linked to the Anglophone Caribbean, but its continental status also makes it a country whose geography needs explanation, even to an audience that is Caribbean.

In the 1960 article, “The Islands of Calypso” Swanzy reviews his impressions of Caribbean writing, noting, “the tone [of literature] from island to island was distinctly different”. His short portraits of work from the four largest countries are suggestive:

Jamaican writing is characterized as “middle-class”, “Parnassian” but with the folkloric work of Louise Bennett offering a populist tone. Trinidadian writing is described as submitted by “poorer, younger, livelier [writers] with a keen ear for dialect” and with the defining focus upon carnival.

For Swanzy, Barbadian writing takes as its popular focus the “contrasting city slicker and rural innocent”. He makes the further comment that British Guiana was “the only one with a recognizable doctrine, partly fostered by the poet and editor, A.J. Seymour, but mainly by the poet Wilson Harris.”

The shorthand reference to the Caribbean as an archipelago reveals the extent to which Caribbean culture is understood as an island culture.

The notion of a recognizable doctrine of literature in Guyana might in part be understood as the consequence of the geographical peculiarity of Guyana (its assumed geographical difference from the rest of the Caribbean islands might force writers to account for their particular continental form of Caribbean writing). Swanzy attempts to formulate Guyana’s “doctrine” looking to Wilson Harris and claiming that Harris’s

Inspiration came from gigantic myths – the Iliad, the stone figures of Easter Island – in which he prefigured the emergence of the black world, the organic tropics.

There is not much to go on here, and equally, Swanzy’s portraits of Barbadian, Trinidadian and Jamaican writing are too brief. Nevertheless, it is striking that Guyana, in Swanzy’s mind, is the only place where the writing seeks to exceed localized subject matter and authorial status.

In short, Guyanese writing has global affiliations. For all its pregnant resonance though, this doctrine is still more potential than active – a prefiguration of a cultural space that does not yet exist.

But why does Swanzy prioritize writing that is, by his own reckoning, embryonic? The rubric that Swanzy sets Caribbean Voices is to map the development of Caribbean literature and to test this growing corpus of writing against the standards set by contemporary literary criticism.

The emphasis upon criticism pulls in two directions. One is an insistence on the autonomy of the text, a supposedly apolitical interest in the words on the page. The second is an insistence upon the importance of a kind of “ethical criticism” influenced by an Arnoldian belief in the cultural importance of literature as a source for society’s values.

Swanzy’s encouragement to Caribbean writers and his interest in the society they wrote about was informed by a belief in the improving effects of literature: it was creative writers as much as politicians who would lead the Caribbean to its future.

To be continued next week