MV Mc Rae is an animated Romanian woman with a Guyanese husband, a profession as a doctor and a passion for poetry. That almost certainly makes her unique among Guyanese writers.
In another life she was Michaela Valentina Ciobanu……….until twenty five years ago when she came to Guyana with a husband, a former Guyanese University student in Romania whom she told me “was determined not to come back home empty handed;” Then she fixed him with a mischievous stare and declared that “he just picked up the first thing he could lay his hands on and brought it home.” Her creative wit that was to considerably enliven the rest of our conversation.
She had come to Guyana from a world of poetry, influenced by a talented mother – “a famous Romanian poet of national recognition who blessed me with the love for poetry and introduced me to its magic world.”
Words, she says, are “wonderful toys” with which to fashion that magic and despite her native tongue she concedes an embracing of English as by far her favourite vehicle for reading and writing poetry.
“English language has a certain affinity with me. We understand each other so well that I would probably say that I am more comfortable expressing myself poetically in English than I am in my own language.” She explains this by saying that English “satisfies my inner need for expression in a different way,”
Shades of Life is MV Mc Rae’s first book of poems and comprises poetry which she says was written “over the past twenty years or so.” It is, in a sense, a tribute to her acquired ‘Caribbeaness.’ The poems, the says, reflect “the impact of Guyana and the Caribbean on my way of thinking, my way of feeling and my way of understanding the world.”
Shades of Life, she says. has been influenced profoundly by two of the region’s poetic icons, Guyana’s poet laureate, Martin Carter and the St. Lucian Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. “People who read Shades of Life, she told me, “will probably recognize the influence of Carter and Walcott on my work.”
That is why, she says, meeting with Walcott during the recently concluded Carifesta X was so important to her. She had met Carter much earlier and, she says of their first meeting – “his spirit was standing in a companionable silence by my side while I learnt to grow comfortable with the way I saw the world.” She has written poems dedicated to both Carter and Walcott.
And yet, for all her consummate immersal into world of poetry, writing is not a full-time preoccupation. The other MV Mc Rae is a medical practitioner. “I love writing enough to find the time to do it despite the challenge of being a full-time medical practitioner,” she says.
To fulfill her passon for writing MV Mc Rae has learnt to cope with other challenges like “congenital handicaps that restrict her movement and causes her almost continuous pain and frequent attacks of vertigo.” Still, she says, “I cannot live without poetry.”
When I asked her about inspirational moments that spawn her poetry she paused reflectively then turned to Martin Carter. “Poems write themselves,” she retorted. She believes that it is audiences that celebrate writers. “I leave it to my audiences to determne whether or not I have a literary imagination.”
When I broached the subject of other Caribbean creative influences – apart from Carter and Walcott – on her own work MV Mc Rae turned instead to the problem of the availability of books in Guyana. “Try as you may you cannot get a Seymour, a D’Aguiar, a Mittelholzer, a Pauline Melville in Guyana. I remember being at a forum to celebrate the life of Martin Carter some time ago and they were announcing the availability of an anthology of his works. As it happened the collection was available in London and was not immediately accessible to any of us. We had a good laugh on account of that. Another frustrating thing is that even when the boks are available they are not properly displayed.”
Mc Rae says that writers write “because they believe that they have something to share with the rest of the world. It’s not for the money. It’s because it is so important that we be allowed to share our views with the rest of the world. We lose a lot by not being able to share our work with others.
And MV Mc Rae is passionate about her belief that the quality of a society as a whole is determined by the quality of people’s exposure. When you are exposed to creative things and to the various other facets of education it makes the difference. That exposure informs the path that you will take and in the end it impacts on the quality of the whole society.
Becoming a Guyanese poet “has been a process of self-discovery for MV Mc Rae. I am discovering more about myself and my work with each passing day.”
(Arnon Adams)
