NUANCED FRAGMENTS FROM THE GLOBAL GUYANA VILLAGE: A BRIEF PERSONAL MEDITATION ON BEING A ‘FOREIGN GUYANESE’

Sep 19, 2010 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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BY CARL E. HAZLEWOOD

CARL HAZLEWOOD is a distinguished Guyanese artist, writer and curator, living in Brookiyn, New York. He is co-founder and Curator of ALJIRA, A Centre for Contemporary Art, in New Jersey. He has taught at New Jersey City University and is currently Associate editor for NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art.  His scholarly writings can be found in such periodicals as FLASH INTERNATIONAL, ART PAPERS MAGAZINE, NEW YORK ARTS MAGAZINE and in the forthcoming issue of THE ARTS JOURNAL. He is the recipient of the Guyana Folk Festival 2010 Special Award.

We feature below a transcript of Hazlewood’s presentation, “NUANCED FRAGMENTS FROM THE GLOBAL VILLAGE”, to the NINTH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM OF THE GUYANA CULTURAL ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK on 4th September.  The theme this year was ‘Diversity in our Villages; Harmony in our Culture”.

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I’m remembering a day in La Penitence, light rain drizzling down steadily, even though the sunlight is bright as ever. As a child, whenever this happened, kids would say, ‘the devil and his wife are fighting.’

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There have been several occasions in recent years where I’ve been accused of being a ‘foreign Guyanese’, that term being used deliberately to suggest, I felt, that I had no right to be involved with things I’d assumed was within my cultural sphere of interest as a ‘born’ Guyanese. As one might imagine, such encounters induced moments of extreme psychic dissonance for me. What was I? Who am I? Why do I feel such a responsibility to folks who seem so disinterested in whatever I had to offer… and what is the responsibility of that place and those people to me.
Certainly there had to be something there between us… some common ground.
I was still contemplating what I should talk about here today, when I attended the Guyana Cultural Association Awards Ceremony two days ago at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. At that event they began by singing both the US and Guyana National Anthems. Of course, I knew the American anthem as little or as much as any citizen does. But I was at a loss after the opening lines of the Guyana national song: Dear land of Guyana … da da da … da dum….
That song was so familiar… yet felt so foreign in my mouth.
Then the artist Ivor Thom gave a fine performance of his poem spoken in Guyanese Creole. The audience laughed at the correct moments, but I felt vaguely embarrassed that I was obviously missing something essential here and there… the accent was just too strong. So, am I even Guyanese anymore?
I was taken to the United States at around the age of thirteen or so. I was there to have a congenital heart defect repaired by the renowned heart surgeon, Dr Michael E. De Bakey of Houston, Texas. And except for a period of about two or three years when I was a teen, I’ve since lived in America. Thus I’ve spent only a fraction of my life actually located in Guyana. But what does that mean about the quality of my experience as someone of that place and of that soil? When my little family left Guyana in the 1960s the country was in the grip of a vital and increasingly violent political and social struggle. Even as a child I could feel that tension present everywhere, for it affected us all. Martin Carter wrote in his Poems of Resistance:

This I have learnt:
today a speck
tomorrow a hero
hero or monster
you are consumed!
Like a jig
shakes the loom.
Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!

I’ve written elsewhere that the land was an impoverished beauty and, like the rest of the Caribbean, it remains an ambivalent site of both desire and desperation.
Frantz Fanon, in “By Way of Conclusion,’ writes: “I want the world to recognize with me, the open door of every consciousness.”
So what do I remember for sure?

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I’m in my yard, a child again… maybe eleven years of age. I’ve been growing weaker and weaker. My friend has given up trying to wrestle with me. I haven’t the strength for that. So we lie quietly in the soft grass on the side of my home attempting to stare into the sun. My nostrils are invaded by the persistent scent of crushed green things and roses. Hibiscus blossoms hang just above my head. They are such a shocking red it causes me to blink.

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I was away from Guyana before I was old enough or healthy enough to have the common experiences I hear about every time there is a gathering of Guyanese: parties, dancing, drinking. I’ve never climbed a coconut tree or picked a mango off a branch, or gone swimming in a ‘punt trench.’ My childhood experiences were circumscribed and mainly focused on intellectual and artistic pursuits; books, whatever presentations the BBC broadcast, like Lorna Doone or Shakespeare plays; all the international news of far away countries fighting for independence… tales of Nationalism, bloody wars, and survival. And I knew it was happening around me too. I knew that death was never far off.

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Outside my house was the narrow, dusty road called Savage Street, and just beyond that, running parallel to it, was a canal or ‘punt trench’ with calm waters the colour of black coffee; At night, when it rained, I’d sit by my window watching many pairs of tiny phosphorescent lights float along the canal like emeralds glowing in the darkness. Those were the eyes of sharp-nosed alligators, out to enjoy the storm.
And across the canal was a wooded, relatively wild-looking area which we called the ‘back-dam’ that ran for several miles. I always dreamed of exploring that back-dam where thieves and murderers sometimes hid, but I never actually set foot there.

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Now I struggle to recall the difference between Jamoon and Psydium (sp.?). I think they are both purple and round and sweet. But I remember Cockabelly, tiny fish flashing silver in the ditch or gutter that ran outside our fence… I remember Hindi popular music by Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi on Radio Demerara’s Indian Music Program. I remember the songs my mother and sister practiced endlessly for the National Music Festivals. I remember looking out the window to see people leaning on our fence and sitting in the yard… listening when my mother, my sister and my visiting dad with his Mario Lanza tenor, sang show tunes and arias from operettas.
It’s odd, how much one can still care about the old homeland no matter how many years fly by. Like the vague image of a long ago lover, the personal Guyana I struggle to hang onto falls apart in the glare of reality, a consequence of passing time, frustrated desire, and failing memory.
In Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables there’s a passage where Hugo speaks of the ways in which physical places from our pasts become holders and place cards for psychological memories and experiences: ‘But when we are distant from them,’ he writes, ‘we find that those things have become dear to us, a street, trees and roofs, blank walls, doors and windows; we have entered those houses without knowing it, we have left something of our heart in the very stonework. Those places we no longer see, perhaps will never see again but still remember, have acquired an aching charm; they return to us with the melancholy of ghosts…’
I suppose it’s all about the continuing need to affirm roots, our stubborn wish to be planted in ground, which we imagine has always been ours —— by nurture and by blood. This lingering emotional dependency, the immigrant yearning to retain something that’s truly our own is perhaps understandable. When we left the land of origin we looked forward to having a secure future in that other place where we hoped to establish a new life for our families and ourselves; it would be a place where we could be safe, somewhere we might thrive emotionally and economically.
But no matter how we adapt and speak the language and intone words with the perfected accent of the native-born, there remains a nagging sense, at least for first generation immigrants that we are abiding among strangers. The habits and tastes of the homeland, masked though they may be, remain.
So, after a lifetime of desire and distance, home becomes an abstract zone of yearning; a need for tropical heat, an irrational wish to suck on a mango, obtained not from the corner supermarket, but plucked from the backyard tree of our hot myth of childhood, which is perhaps a memory, but probably only another artifact of desire. Despite our established presence here in the ‘other place,’ we know what we are, and hope that we understand WHO we are. But does our old country care? What are we to IT?
A friend of mine, Dr Olu Oguibe, the African scholar, artist, and poet, has written: “our bond with the site of our nativity is a largely one-way affair. It is an ambivalent bond borne out of a one-sided loyalty and a proclivity to possess, a desperate striving to belong, to lay claim to something that lays no claim in return. Severed from the womb and the body that bore us and hauled into the void of life and existence, we crave to attach ourselves to something, a moment, a location, an event; we crave an anchor which we readily find in the contours of the house of our upbringing, in the streets of our childhood, in the city of our birth. But the city has a different desire and a different response, for we need the city more than the city needs us.”
In an essay from his book, IMAGINARY HOMELANDS, Salman Rushdie quotes L. P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”
Oguibe, in fact, paraphrases Hartley and suggests: “the past, including the city of our birth, the geographies that define our beginnings, and for which, ever so often, we are called upon to die, is, in a significant sense, a foreign country where we never belonged. It is a place to which we are tied not by a mutual care or love but by trepidation, by a profound fear on our part of the loss of the familiar. The idea of our city’s special love is a fiction of our own making, a necessary justification for our possessive fixation on it. The conviction that we own the city, that in losing our place to others or to distance, we lose that which belongs to us, that to which we have an exclusive right, derives in no small measure from the wish not to compete for the attention of something whose love we crave, but fear, even know, that it does not love us back. It is as much a craving to own as it is an appeal to be owned.”
I exist now in that extended “global Guyana village” along with lots of inhabitants: intellectuals, artists, novelists, poets; people like Stanley Greaves, Wilson Harris, Donald Locke, Frank Bowling, Fred D’Aguiar, and a host of ordinary others. Despite my often-unrequited love, desperation, and disappointment, I find myself still actively engaged in constructing that hybrid culture that may ensure the survival of what is most vital and important about my distant homeland.

NOTES: All Oguibe quotes are taken from: “Interzonality and The Uncertainty of Geographies”, originally commissioned for and published in the catalog of the exhibit, INTERZONES,at the Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, 1996.

The editor of THE ARTS FORUM Column, Ameena Gafoor, can be reached by E-mail: [email protected] or by telephone: 592-227-6825

The Art editor of THE ARTS FORUM Column, Bernadette Persaud can be reached by E-mail: [email protected] or by telephone: 592-220-3337.

Volume 6 of THE ARTS JOURNAL is in press.

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