CONTINENTAL VOICES: GUYANESE WRITERS ON THE RADIO

Aug 10, 2008 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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By GEMMA ROBINSON

Continued from last Sunday . . .
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.

He may have said, “I do not know whether listeners have learned anything more about themselves from the countless little stories and sketches about aspects of present life, in country and town, in work and leisure, in race-conflict, and class conflict, in humour and tragedy”, but it was clear that he hoped they had.

It cannot be forgotten that this was also a period when the British Council was funded to maintain cultural links with Britain’s colonies and former colonies.

The Council provided one way for Britain to retain a sphere of influence, both political and cultural, within newly independent nations.

“In the long term”, wrote Sir Charles Jeffries on behalf of the Colonial office, “we want to strengthen the links between Britain and the colonial peoples so that the latter, as they obtain greater control over their affairs, will still value the British connection.”

Caribbean Voices, broadcast from London, could be interpreted as promoting this “British connection” but, as Swanzy’s articles and the transcripts of the programme show, the British connection was valued only in so far as it would enable the emergence of a distinct West Indian literature and culture.

His recognition of a Guyanese literary doctrine can then be understood as a keenness to find a body of writing that fits his hope for West Indian literature to have both an independent tradition and a vision of good for society.

Harris’s mythological poetry – prefiguring “the emergence of the black world, the organic topics” – can take on the status of a doctrine because it has these good intentions.

Although he may not have been a British Council worker, at times Swanzy’s language adopts the tone of the colonial administrator.

In “Prolegomena to a West Indian Culture” he writes: “It is not inconceivable that of all the English-speaking world, the West Indies may be revealed as the place most suited for maintenance of a literary tradition.

For real maintenance relies upon real development and to that almost every important factor in the Caribbean cultural situation conspires”.

Maintenance of tradition and real development – these phrases and the goals they describe are reminiscent of the recommendations of the Royal West India Commission in 1945, the commission that sought to propose a framework for a politically and economically unified Caribbean.

The Commission stated that “a lead should be given by His Majesty’s Government in favour of the aim of federation and that British policy should aim at the fostering of a sense of West Indian unity.”

Swanzy as pseudo-colonial administrator is plausible – he, his British reviewers and Caribbean broadcasters are aiming at West Indian unity, and are committed to cataloguing and shaping the federal status of the Caribbean’s literary future.

Lamming’s image of Caribbean writers gathering together to listen to Caribbean Voices to keep in touch with “the latest work of writers in another island” and then stepping out into the literary world (or “rambling down to Down Town Port of Spain”) offers one way of thinking about literary federation in action.

As writers argue about the relative merits of Caribbean writers and literary critics, the all-important aim of fostering “West Indian unity” is reinforced through informal processes of resistance, accommodation and consent.

Every week Caribbean Voices demonstrated that the Caribbean and its people should be seen as an organic unit, perhaps in contrast with its Froudian image as an artificial construction of imperial powers or, as J. Michael Dash writes, in contrast to “a fantasy theater for the imaginations of travellers, adventurers, and missionaries.”

Swanzy had played with the idea of the “organic tropics” before, but had previously seen it as a challenge for

Caribbean writers to overcome:
What seems to me the very great problem in a potential Caribbean literature, under capitalism, socialism, communism, nationalism, or any other ism, is in fact that tropical dolce far niente, the easy drift, the acceptance of the facile and immediately brilliant, the lovely flower that so quickly becomes over-blown.

Without claiming omniscience, I have seen this tendency elsewhere, of easy synthesis, the parallel of the proliferation of organic molecules in the sun.

This was written in 1949 in his “Prolegomena”; by 1960 when he describes Harris’s “black world” he no longer worries about “the easy drift” of tropical idleness and its effect on literary standards, but rather celebrates the tropical synthesis attempted in Guyanese writing.

The black world of the Caribbean prefigured in Harris’s work could be read as a forerunner of Paul Gilroy’s “black Atlantic”, but one that is not limited to an African diasporic Atlantic culture – a meeting place of cultures, but a place whose resultant cultural modes add up to more than the sum of their American, African, Asian and European parts.

The tropics, like the Atlantic, offer a conceptual and geographic space through which to explore what is understood by identity and nationality in places where cultures and traditions cannot be viewed as fixed.

Swanzy’s move from moralizing about Caribbean dolce far niente to hinting at the emergence of an organic tropical black world marks the distance between literary criticism as colonial administration and a criticism which responds to the new world of the Caribbean as an independent place of cultural expression.

But this vision of “tropicality” would never be the “expression of the perspectives, the hopes, and the will of the revolutionary Caribbean left”, to use Rene Menil’s summary of the Martiniquan journal, Tropiques.

Instead the emergence of an organic tropical black world and its culture was presented apolitically in Caribbean Voices as the surfacing of literary originality.

The definition of originality demanded in Caribbean Voices draws on two senses of the word original.
The first part of that definition calls for Caribbean literature to disclose its local source.

In “Prolegomena” Swanzy writes, “I think that all the better writers show signs of their origin, even when they are not specifically describing the West Indian scene, either natural or human”.

While this tip to “write what you know” might have been necessary to some writers, it is obvious from the archives of Caribbean Voices that there was a real urgency felt by writers to create works of fiction that re-imagined what it meant it be from the Caribbean.

EDITOR’S NOTE:
We have only managed to bring you a part of this very instructive essay. The discussion on Guyanese and Caribbean identity as played out in our literary and visual arts is complicated by several factors, not least of which is the fact that the discourse of the region has been, and perhaps continues to be shaped by voices outside of the region, which Swanzy himself describes as “an absentee critical culture”, a trend that made him uneasy.

We invite responses to the issues raised in this, and previous columns on such themes as: what constitutes Guyanese art and literature; is there such a thing as a Caribbean identity; what is art and what is it good for?

For the full length of today’s article, see THE ARTS JOURNAL Volume 2 Number 2 (March 2006), available from all leading bookstores in Georgetown or from the editor.

To contact the editor: Telephone: 592-227-6825. E-mail: ameenagf@guyana.net.gy

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