By Al Creighton
When the Macmillan Caribbean Writers Series published Going Home and Other Tales from Guyana (Macmillan Caribbean, 2002), it was a significant milepost artistic achievement for its author Deryck Bernard. It was an advancement of a particular kind in his career, however, since it has been a career of different directions and many achievements.
There were other milestones and other publications. Bernard was an academic whose main field was Geography (especially Human/Economic Geography and Planning) and who built his career at the University of Guyana where he was at different times Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Head of Department. He also did stints at other universities including a year at Oxford Polytechnic in England, and accumulated a reputation in his field for research, consultancies on various projects and several academic publications. Going Home was not even his first Macmillan publication, since they published his Geography of Guyana, a much sought after work that he did following the previous text by one of his mentors, Professor Leslie Cummings. Even that was part of larger projects of his which included large inputs of mapwork by Claudette Foo.
Other projects of some magnitude take us to another segment of his varied career. Bernard was something of a reluctant politician since it seems he resisted calls to become involved and accept political posts for a while before finally giving in, out of a sense of duty? Or the desire to give national service? Or an ambition he was disinclined to acknowledge? Nevertheless, he served as Permanent Secretary, Minister of Education and Member of Parliament. In the last capacity he once made a stirring, memorable speech in defence of the university when a controversial matter concerning the University of Guyana was debated in Parliament.
Deryck Bernard’s career had its probably discordant cross-overs, making it difficult to say which he regarded as the zenith, or even if they were at all discordant. There is always too much politics in academia, and artists are always taking the vanguard in political causes; many of them have been politicians; a playwright became President, a poet became Minister of Government, and it goes on. In any case, it was often clear where Bernard placed priorities. When the establishment of a new University of Guyana Berbice Campus was first publicly announced many members of the UG Academic Board objected strongly to the manner in which it was done and approached. Yet, the board was able to set that aside and Bernard was foremost among those getting to work to assist in the design of academic programmes for the new campus.
So the integrity of the academic interest was a priority for him. And even while he was pursuing his most recent career interest, preparing to be an attorney-at-law, he never once set aside his artistic focus. This, too, was varied, since he was a trained musician, a guitarist, keyboardist and tenor, composer, songwriter, arranger, theatre director and writer of fiction.
Therefore, when Macmillan published Deryck Bernard’s first collection of short stories, it was another signal achievement, but only another of many turns in the road. Trinidadian theatre critic Judy Stone edits the Macmillan Caribbean Writers Series which has so far published two novellas, four sets of plays and two short story collections. Here, Bernard is in distinguished company; the other volume is by Jan Carew.
Going Home and Other Tales from Guyana was shortlisted in the Best First Book category of the 2002 Guyana Prize for Literature when it first came out, having impressed the jury as worthy first fiction of an international standard. It had already impressed a reputable publishing house. He was beaten to the prize by Ruel Johnson’s Ariadne and Other Stories.
Going Home has characteristics which are no different from those of the standard first fiction: autobiographical or semi-autobiographical, a reflection of the author’s memory of place, growing up, and early impressions of society and native land. It is a mixture of vignettes from Bernard’s upbringing in a kind of semi-urban Kitty in what grew into Greater Georgetown, imaginative tales, and other experiences inspired by different aspects of Guyana. It is what Judy Stone describes as tales recalling “boyhood days in colonial British Guiana, the amorous exploits of young men, adventures digging for gold in the bush, cricket at Bourda and a host of eccentric characters . . . exploring the hardships, challenges and achievements of growing up in a small community.”
The tales shift shape from the humorous to the deeply moving, sometimes combining both in laughter and pathos. The title story, Going Home, is perhaps the most emotionally stirring in the book, with profundity in its simple-sounding narrative of the life, dreams, illusions, tragedies, disappointments and triumphs of a pork-knocker. The narrator gives in to the lure of expansive wealth to be gained by going into the bush to dig for gold and the extravagant exhibitionisms of Jan Carew’s famous Ocean Shark. He relates his story of the hardships, conflicts and the sadness of colleagues lost in the hunt, always accompanied by the consistent undercurrents of disappointing signs seen and denied and by the ever sustaining vision of returning home to familiar people and surroundings rich and triumphant. It is also one of the two with the most satisfactory endings, since many of Bernard’s tales need stronger endings.
The other is Big Joe which, like Going Home, is among the most complete of the tales. It is a very balanced mixture of humour and serious statement, and is as moving as Going Home, concisely written in the honed linguistic economy of well-crafted prose. It is a complete artistic document of colonialism and change, charged with laughter, comment and irony.
The narrator remembers the way his boyhood hero, Big Joe the village crier, rescues him from a wayward life of failure. As a bright boy sent to study he had lost interest in books and disappointed Granny and the family who had placed great hopes in him. He was “to my granny’s disgust now a drinker of beer and a smoker.” One of the high-points is the depth and subtlety in the narrative when they “had an argument about my downward path and I stormed out of the house in anger and to avoid seeing Granny cry.”
The other is in the ending. The narrator gets into a fight over a girl with one of the “village roughs,” which Big Joe saw as the nadir of his downward fall. It was Joe’s stern lecture and rebuke that changed the course of his life and led him to outstanding success. He ends the narrative, “I have never been able to admit to my grandparents and aunts that that Big Joe was the real reason I took to my books. They would be hurt and dismayed, for they believe the story I usually tell on public occasions held in my honour, that I owe it all to them.”
This is reminiscent of a story told by Bernard about his student days in England when many musicians went busking in the train stations, in pubs and other public places. It was a good way of earning extra money and he strung up his guitar and did it, with people passing and dropping money. It so happened that a man from his home village who had migrated to Britain saw him and was shocked and shamed. He spread the story back home about how Deryck, who was sent to study, had shamed his family; how he had dropped out of university and was playing music and begging on the streets in England.
Music, though, was most likely his first love (I’m sure Myrna is not reading this). He was the finest tenor in the Woodside Choir for which he was also assistant Conductor to the great Bill Pilgrim. Out of this he founded the folk group Korokwa, named from an Amerindian word which refers to remembering and preserving. Its aim was to keep alive and popularize Guyanese and Caribbean folk music through interpretation and performance, and for which he researched and arranged the music. His love for the theatre also drove him to plot out concerts for the choir which were actually full theatrical performances based on artistic themes.
He was also one of the stalwart members of university theatre at the University of Guyana at those different times when that flourished for a while. He was one of the directors, musical director, instrumentalist and singer in such productions as Legends, The Journey Upriver, The Encounter, The Trials of Brother Jero and concerts featuring the music of Bob Marley. He was as equally skilled in reggae as he was in popular music and the classical canon.
