The recent passing of two very different regional poets, offers an opportunity to consider the diminishing role of literary culture in the contemporary Caribbean. Aimé Cesaire was a Paris-educated Surrealist, bookish, rebellious, a pioneer of Negritude (a literary and political movement that saw black pride as an antidote to French colonial racism) and was politically active in his native Martinique from the early 1940s up to his retirement as mayor of Fort-de-France in 2001. Wordsworth McAndrew, by contrast, was entirely homegrown, a popular broadcaster and folklorist whose time was mostly spent probing the undertow of Dutch, Hindi, Portuguese and West African currents in local speech. Cesaire’s work delighted in its subversion of traditional literary forms, McAndrew’s was generally (and intentionally) un-literary and came to life in performance in ways that it never could on a page. One tilted at Europe’s bitter legacy to the Caribbean, the other quietly catalogued the ways European culture had taken its place among others in our oral traditions.
Yet, different as they were, both men shared a streak of national pride that we would all do well to remember. Cesaire’s rousing lines about the daunting prospects of postcolonial freedom used to be very famous: “my country and I, hair in the wind, my hand puny in its enormous fist and now the strength is not in us but above us, a voice that drills the night and the hearing like the penetrance of an apocalyptic wasp. And the voice complains that for centuries Europe has force-fed us with lies and bloated us with pestilence . . . They went straight to the point, politically, and swept the reader headlong in the complex drama of incipient nationalism. It was impossible to read Cesaire and not feel the thrilling sense of possibility in which he composed his great poem. Today, sadly, his work is hardly known within the Anglophone Caribbean.
McAndrew’s “Ol Higue” is better known — at least in Guyana — but beyond the thrill of performance, few of us are likely to grasp the original shock which dialect poetry, about a local folktale, was intended to create. In a 2004 tribute to McAndrew, Dr Vibert Cambridge observes that “In the early 1960s, many Guyanese felt ashamed of things that were clearly of African and East Indian origin. In some segments of the society, cook-up rice was considered ‘improper’ for polite circles.” Imagine then the impact of a line like “Leh de ol’ higue wuk begin”, shouting its impropriety from the rooftops, daring its audience to consider the idea that we might be able to tell our own stories in what another Wordsworth once referred to as the ‘language really used by men’. In that sense, at least, this ‘unliterary’ poem was not so unliterary after all.
Wilson Harris and Martin Carter, in their very different ways, also thought very profoundly about what sort of country we might become, how we might move beyond Europe’s force-feeding and express the meanings of our literal and figurative interiors. But how many of us, apart from students of literature, are prepared to wrestle with these authors for the weeks and months that their work deserves? Contemporary novelists and poets – even winners of the Guyana Prize – are barely known or read by most Guyanese, partly because of the expense and difficulty of obtaining their books, but also because, as a society, we have lost the habit of caring about writers and books.
Nearly twenty years ago in the film Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams played the role of John Keating, an English teacher who made Whitman and Shelley and Shakespeare relevant to the lives of his students, opening out for them a literary culture of which they knew nothing except what appeared in their text books. By the end of the film the dead poets of the title have changed the students’ lives forever but only because Mr. Keating, their living advocate, has been able to show the boys how to read. Until he does that, until the students learn how to use poetry to bring their lives into focus, all poets are dead poets.
That is our plight too. As we forget how to read, our writers continue to fade into oblivion even while they are still alive, their work silenced by our apathy. Occasionally events like Carifesta or the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica reveal just how much we are missing. Far more common, however, is the quiet disappearance of literary figures, major and minor, whose work has never had the audience it deserved.
