Guyana as Poetry and Guyanese as poets

Feb 18, 2018 Countryman, Features / Columnists

By Dennis Nichols

Many people do not ‘get’ poetry. And poetry doesn’t get many people, especially where it makes the rawest impact – in the gut. A poem can be anything, metaphorically speaking. Obviously, it doesn’t have to be just the written word. It doesn’t have to be ‘about’ something; it can be the thing itself, like an animal, a tree, a cloud, a mud-dam, or something abstract like the grace of a dancer, or the passion of a painter.
It can also be a country. Guyana is a poem, and Guyanese are crafters of verse, although most of us are not ‘real’ poets. When a pork-knocker says, “Boy, water high an’ we tekkin’ blows” or “Boat done gaan a falls; cyan tun back” he is linking thought to feeling and creating the imagery of poetry.
From the folksy ‘Itanamie’ via the mystical ‘Legend of Kaieteur’ to the pragmatic ‘University of Hunger, poetry pours from the lips and pens of ordinary, and extraordinary, Guyanese – but not enough for me.
American poet, Joyce Kilmer, wrote, “I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree”. Critics disparaged the simple sentimentality of the poem which ends with a profound self-deprecating twist, and deference to divinity. “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.” In this crazy, seemingly God-forsaken world, we need poems as much as we need trees, and both for the same reason – sustenance for the spirit.
The Jamaican-born poet, Claude McKay, while living in the United States wrote nostalgically about his island home.
‘… I shall return to laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes/At golden noon the forest fires burn/wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies.
I shall return to loiter by the streams/ That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses/And realize once more my thousand dreams/Of waters rushing down the mountain passes.
I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife/ Of village dances – dear delicious tunes/ That stir the hidden depths of native life/ Stray memories of dim remembered runes.
I shall return, I shall return again/To ease my mind of long, long years of pain’.
I said it before, and I’ll reiterate – our country is poetically blessed with some of the most awesome, primordial, and pristine landscapes on Earth in spite, or because, of the ruggedness and impenetrability of our forested and mountainous regions. And if Guyana is a poem, then I will be an eagle, a Harpy, soaring against cathedrals of green, tumbling cataracts, and mist-shrouded peaks. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s short elemental poem ‘The Eagle’ springs to mind.
‘He clasps the crag with crooked hands; close to the sun in lonely lands, ringed with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, and like a thunderbolt he falls.’
As a child, it was one of the few poems I truly felt, and one to which I was instantly drawn.
I have travelled to, and seen, only small portions of Guyana’s wilderness wonders, so I know that there are enough places left here for me to put on my ‘bucket list’, although I’d love to see America’s Grand Canyon, Africa’s Serengeti, and Peru’s Machu Picchu before I die. But my country beckons, and it’s almost unimaginable when I consider that I have never visited Kaieteur, glided over Roraima, or gazed at a Rupununi sunset.
Others have come here and done that, (some in their dreams) and have waxed poetic. It is said that Sir Walter Raleigh the explorer, W.H. Hudson, author of ‘Green Mansions’, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who penned ‘The Lost World’ and novelist Evelyn Waugh, (A Handful of Dust) were all inspired to write effusively, and with poetic license, about Guyanese locales. These include that area which embraces the hauntingly mystical region extending around Mount Roraima in the Amazonian rainforest border tripoint of Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil.
Geologists, researchers, anthropologists, ethnographers and a few doughty ‘sightseers’, many of whom are non-Guyanese, have braved sweltering heat, unaccustomed privation and the jungle’s pervasive dangers, walked in the tracks of jaguars, waded through swamps inhabited by caiman and camoudie, and fended off mosquito blitzes, just to glimpse some rare specimen of flora or fauna, or to coax some bit of information from the bush’s elusive human inhabitants. They go where some locals fear to tread, and are rewarded with poetry.
On the internet, photographs, video clips and documentaries tell our story in the language and idiom of the foreigner, and with the accents of alien tongues. They tell us, sometimes with more truth and eloquence than we do, who we are and what our treasures be. All good, but we need to write more of our own stories, craft our own verses, and sing our own anthems. Thank God for our folk songs.
To me, it is the visitors, who seem to find the greatest pleasure in Guyana’s heartland, even while mounting expansive expeditions, exploring our natural habitats, and monitoring our conservation programmes. The more adventurous ones have helped trace the sources of rivers, climbed table-top mountains, and abseiled down Kaieteur Falls. Many of them were no doubt inspired by the efforts of naturalists/journal-keepers like Gerald Durrell (of Three Singles to Adventure fame) and David Attenborough, both Englishmen, who came, saw, and documented.
I know that we have our own experts in the areas and disciplines mentioned above. Maybe we just need to hear more about the grand work they are doing, for example at Iwokrama. But for me, I want to see and hear, and feel the rhythms and the melodies of nature, even those fraught with peril, from the Mazaruni mining pits to the summit of Ayanganna. I want to see more pictures, and hear more stories birthed in the mud and sand and bush of our 83,000 square miles, and I want them expressed in our colourful vernacular as much as in our vaunted Standard English.
Where are the photographs of Robert Fernandes, the stories of Ivan Forrester and the songs of Hilton Hemmerding? Why aren’t the efforts of artisans like Dennis Williams, Aubrey Williams, Marjorie Brodhagen and George Simon given more prominence in the media? How many young Guyanese know about the specific contributions to Guyana’s nationhood of people like Jan Carew, Wordsworth MacAndrew, John Agard, Rajkumarie Singh, Laxhmie Kallicharran, Rooplall Monar, and Francis Farrier? And these are just a few.
I also speak to myself. When I first travelled to the North West hinterland, I was enchanted (maybe bewitched is a better word) by the hills and valleys, rivers and creeks, and the inscrutable and enigmatic place names – Hosororo, Hotoquai, Koriabo, Kamwatta, and Papaya. Also at first, I wasn’t quite prepared for the people – for their naturistic way of life, their instinctive forms of expression, and their tolerance, if not embrace, of my awkward coastlander etiquette. But we later bonded, like family.
So I have to take my own advice. I must write a poem – maybe a kind of eulogistic epic dedicated to the people and the places, particularly in the hinterland, that have helped shape my world view, with Guyana as my stage, and maybe Kaieteur Top as my vantage point.
My poem will also be a song, and since life hasn’t always been good to me (even in the bush) there may be some discordant notes. But these will be obscured by the overriding harmony of composition. And because there is no image in nature as iconic as Kaieteur’s ancient and perpetual cascade, it will form the perfect backdrop to my ode. But I need the company of other poets.
Come on, Guyana is worth it.