John Gimlette’s book on Guyana is indeed contentious

Sep 06, 2012 Letters

Dear Editor,
Without wishing to take up any cudgels on behalf of Major General (ret’d) Joe Singh, there may well be ‘observers’ who will support the view that the ‘Wild Coast’ by John Gimlette is indeed contentious.
The word ‘observer’ is deliberately used, as the author splashes ink over five centuries on a canvas that pretends to portray Guiana and Guyana simultaneously, in a manner that results more as an abstract painting than the reproduction of recognisable features of the scenario of 2008 when he set out from London (pg 10 of Wild Coast).
There is no question that Gimlette concocted this vista of the ‘colony’ for consumption elsewhere but 21st century Guyana.
His persistent efforts to make the country and its parts exotic to foreign strangers merely teem with an instinctive arrogance.
Amongst the 20 or more photographs in the ‘Guiana’ portion of the book, there is not a single sight of any edifice in 2008 Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana – no Pegasus Hotel, no Bank of Guyana, no Cathedral, no public buildings, not even the Victoria Law Courts which he eloquently describes as follows:
“Soon after my arrival in the city I read about one of these trials and went along to watch. It was held in the Victoria Law Courts, a lingering fantasy of tropical Gothic. On the outside it looked like a vast tin palace, with corrugated gables and pillars made of iron. Inside, it seemed bigger still, and was richly inhabited by long-dead solicitors now whiter than ever in marble.”
Then the author supplements the contempt with the following imagery of the day’s court proceedings:
“In every other sense, however, the trial was like a snapshot of modern life in Guyana. The side walls of the court were open, and so the parrots sat in the palms outside, chattering through the evidence. Then the rains came early, and sounded like horses on the tin. Defence counsel, meanwhile, was – like almost half the population – Indian, and wore a black silk suit and robes. Whenever he could, he’d pound around the court, thundering away in a rich Creole, well larded with Dickens and Donne.
The other races too played their part that day. The judge and all the constables were — like a third of all Guyanese — ‘African’, while the jurymen made up the rest: ‘the mixed races’. There, in their twelve furrowed faces was the story of Guyana, a hotchpotch of displaced souls: slaves, Amerindians, Dutch conquerors, ‘Chineymen’, Irish adventurers, Scottish cattlemen, pirates, pioneers and Pathans. Together, this volatile mix made up a population barely big enough to fill a little phone book. All that were missing were the whites, whose share of the whole was now a slice of 1 per cent.”
There are many more embellishments. But to end this first installment, readers are invited to savour this perception of Georgetown in 2008:
“Of course, almost all the civic buildings were notionally British – although they didn’t always look it. Often even the queen’s most loyal architects had let heat and fantasy go to their heads. Father Scholes’ City Hall looked like a runaway doll’s house, and Blomfield’s cathedral had used up so many trees that, even now, it was at risk of vanishing into the mud. It was only in the details that Georgetown’s streets were still lingeringly British; the Hackney carriages, the EIIR letter boxes, the statue of a great sewage engineer and a pair of Sebastopol cannons. Once, however, I did see a large building site called Buckingham Palace, although – sadly, perhaps – before any resemblance had taken shape, the financing had failed.”
There are lots more flavourful ‘insights’ about religion, food, etc, but to follow-up on these subjects will require the editor’s permission to report on a whole series of insults.
E. B. John

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John Gimlette’s book on Guyana is indeed contentious

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