I favour the reintroduction of public transportation. A system of maxi-buses on the roads, well-managed and subsidized with some of the VAT bonanza, would be a great boon for hard-working Guyanese hustled and harried in getting around. Let us hope it is not just another plan but that it gets done quickly.
I ask one small favour. When the big buses begin to roll could the powers that be please arrange that they post up poetry in all the vehicles for travellers to read. Transport systems around the world follow this practice and Guyana, where the literary tradition is rich, should do the same. I have recently seen at first hand how prominently the subway system in Toronto sponsors a programme of placing poems in their carriages to catch the eye of commuters. I also recall vividly the poems appearing in the extensive London Underground system and in the Paris Metro carriages. Apparently these programmes are popular and travellers in the trains write thousands of letters to the authorities about the poems they like and don’t like and suggest poems they would like to see featured.
In my own case, I remember long ago seeing on a London Underground train a poem by the Russian Osip Mandelstam which sent me searching for as much of his work as I could find.
You took away all the
oceans and all the room,
you gave me my shoe-
size in earth with bars
around it.
Where did it get you?
Nowher
You left me my lips,
and they shape words,
even in silence.
And finding Mandelstam led me to Anna Akhmatova and to Joseph Brodsky and all their riches. It made me think how many people, young people especially, might have had their lives enriched by getting a glimpse of poetry on some dirty subway train or inner city battered bus somewhere.
Can we not introduce poems into our new buses – and the mini-buses may also be interested, who knows, especially now that music has been banned. Amid the hustle and the din might a poem not catch the eye and surprise with a new wonder some young potential Martin Carter or Mahadai Das and inspire him or her to seek out a richness in their lives which they had not so far chanced to glimpse? So do revelations fall upon the young in strange circumstances. So do dreams awake.
Naturally each transport system favours its own. And we would certainly first of all choose Guyanese poets for our buses, any number of Martin Carter’s infinitely expressive poems leading the way. Classic AJ Seymour songs and poems would be there to remind us of the beauty he so often wrought. Examples of the work of Mahadai Das, Marc Matthews, Rooplall Monar, David Dabydeen, Stanley Greaves, Mark McWatt, Fred D’Aguiar, Ruel Johnson, John Agard and Grace Nichols, to name a few, would feature prominently. The continuing strength of our poetic tradition would become very clear.
Those closest to us, poets from the West Indies, should also be represented. Derek Walcott will surely be there. I nominate to take up the whole interior of a bus The Spoiler’s Return, Walcott’s barbed account of what happened when the legendary old calypsonian came back to life in modern Port-of-Spain. I would also want to see inscribed Walcott’s great lyric poem The Season of Phantasmal Peace. The Light of the World, his poem about a beautiful girl he saw one day on a St Lucia bus, would be a favourite I know in our own buses.
There should be a number of Lorna Goodison’s wonderful poems if we could organize it. She is Jamaican, the best of a new generation of West Indian poets. Everyone who rides in a bus, and anyone else for that matter should read For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength) and her plain and beautiful poem My Will in which she describes what inheritance she would leave her son to make a good life.
And if there were to be one bit of poetry which should be in every bus, not to mention in every issue of all the newspapers, it would be a few lines from the American physician/poet, William Carlos Williams:
It is difficult
To get news from poems
Yet more men die miserably
every day for lack of what is found
there.
It isn’t just the schools – we should get poetry into the buses. Poetry is blessedly quiet. I wonder if the Commissioner’s traffic cops could hand out poems for posting up in the buses? And the magistrates could assist: instead of fining first offenders they could impose a poem or two for the next ride.
