Countryman – Stories about life, in and out of Guyana, from a Guyanese perspective

Mar 23, 2014 News

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Guyana is home, but cutting cane is hell!

By Dennis A. Nichols
The Bahamas is beautiful, but it’s not home! America is the home of the brave, (and the land of the free) but, going colloquial, it ain’t home for me! Industrialized Germany with its tough nationalism, and enigmatic England, our increasingly cosmopolitan motherland, are models of European stability. I’ve been there and seen that, but home for me is, and will always be, where the

heart is.
It’s where heart beats to rhythm of land and water, where memories of the past and hopes for the future collide with everyday survival, where my channa, puri, metemgee, cook-up rice and mauby; even the glass of lemonade ‘swank’ I bought at Bourda market on Wednesday, taste like nothing else on this earth. So I’m home, and I eat and drink to the health and heartiness of my homeland.
Yes, I’m back home, after a prolonged stretch of teaching in The Bahamas. And just as happened 22 years ago when I returned from the U.S after living there for two years, friends and relatives want to know if I’d lost, or am losing, some of my most basic mental faculties. I was accused of being an unrealistic dreamer, seeing my Eldorado through rose-tinted specs, and worse, being a damn fool. Truth is, I may be guilty to some extent of all of the above, but I am also a realist; it’s just that my reality may be a bit different to the reality of others, especially when it comes to Guyana.
My Eldorado is far from what I would have liked it to be. Compared to The Bahamas, the United States, Germany or England, and several other ‘nice’ places, it may be seen as an impoverished third-worlder, a labyrinth of crime and corruption or a failed state. That’s eminently arguable, but I’m not a politician or an economist.
Yet I consider myself sensible enough to know that in many ways, Guyana and Guyanese are not that different from some other countries and their citizens; for example there are some people, among them scientists and philosophers, who think that mighty America is fast approaching a doomsday of sorts, who also imply that it is becoming a failed federation. Maybe. Maybe not. Like I said, I’m neither a politician nor an economist, but I am a Guyanese.
That means that I can quite consciously, focus on, and write about stuff other than troubling issues, at least temporarily, or do so only when they are incidental to what I am saying.
My story, my life experiences have been vast and varied, and some, immeasurably memorable. Many of them could only have happened here in Guyana, and one such experience lasted a lifetime of six hours, on a sugar estate of all places – Diamond sugar estate to be exact, out of which was born the short-lived legend of Balgobin, and if you think I lie after hearing this story, ask my nephew, Rasta Gary. But let me begin with a little biographical background.
I was born in Mahaicony, the sixth of seven children, and only son of my parents, a headmaster and a housewife. My early childhood was spent at Highdam (or Stanleyville) a village some eight miles west of my birthplace. It was the rustic, windswept atmosphere of that rural village which helped shape my appreciation of country life and things indigenous to Guyana. Later, my family’s move to the capital helped nurture an innate curiosity about things experienced differently from earlier ones, particularly from a cultural point of view.
Later still, it was an eight-year stint, teaching in The Northwest region of Guyana that strengthened my love of such experiences. Finally, my travels to several countries, including an unforgettable week in Cape Town, South Africa, cemented and helped satisfy my instinctive inquisitiveness. But back to my story set in Diamond sometime in 1980. (or was it 1981?)

I had quit teaching the year before, and my interest about that most Guyanese of all jobs, cane-cutting, was inexplicably aroused when I learnt of a strike at Diamond Sugar Estate on the East Bank of Demerara, and the urgent need for scabs to supplement the non-striking workers. Why not, I mused. I’d already worked as a rice stacker at the Guyana Rice Board, a road gang labourer at GS&WC (Waterworks) and a teacher at St. Dominic’s School on the Aruka River, a few hundred kilometers from GT. No roads, no electricity, no telephone, no potable water!
Those were tough jobs. Why should cane-cutting be any tougher? My cerebral cortex dismissed the very thought of it; never mind that my cutlass-wielding experience had been limited to yard-weeding in late afternoons, and chopping grass in my school compound on the Aruka. Wasn’t cane a kind of grass?
And so it was on an explosively bright Monday morning (I think) that I left my sister’s home in Plaisance and caught the sugar workers’ truck headed for Diamond Sugar Estate.
I duly presented myself to the relevant authority there who, after peering at me intently, wrote my name down in a book, gave me a brand new machete (not the kind of long, narrow cutlass I expected, but a shorter, thicker, heavier version, which I found out hours later I was supposed to sharpen first … how would I know that?) and sent me out, not with the scabs, but with a group of seasoned veterans. I wanted the experience, didn’t I; in fact I had asked to be sent with the regular workers!
Some of what I endured over the next six hours has been clouded over by time, but this much I remember. There was I, a skinny Red man with an unsharpened machete staring at a field of blackened sugar cane, with the sun already beginning to scorch my hide, sheepish and self-conscious, amidst a gang of tough-looking, weather-hardened, sinewy East Indian men.
A couple of troubling questions were starting to alarm that part of my brain to which I have already alluded. But I could not turn back; my pride wouldn’t allow me; in any case it dazedly came to me that I had a wife and three children to provide for, and I was a man. End of the matter.
I was given a partner to work with, one of the aforementioned weather-bronzed stalwarts, who proceeded to give me a short but intensive lesson in commonsense and cutting cane. He had little time to waste. He showed me how and where to cut each stalk, gather them together in a bundle, place it on my head, and walk the hundred yards or so to the punt he and I were supposed to fill.
But he was guilty of the sin of omission. He didn’t tell me where/how to sharpen my tool, or that I should have something on my head (I think he later called it by a Hindi name) to cushion the weight on the canes on my bare head. Neither did he tell me that the sun that shone down on canecutters had a special kind of enervating heat straight from hell, that the ground was uneven, that my head, stomach, back and knees would betray my manliness, that skin colour can change from red to black in a matter of hours under the hell-sun, or that I needed to have on my person a little something named WATER. Until it was too late!
(To be continued)
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(Dennis Nichols is a teacher, journalist, creative writer, and winner of the 2000 International Short Story Competition, run by the U.K – based Commonwealth Broadcasting Association.)

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