There exists a slim, neat volume of some fifty pages, unobtrusive and unheralded, whose worth is several times more than its unassuming appearance and deserving of much more attention than it has ever been given. My Life, My Country by Helen Taitt, (2nd edition), published in 2008 by the New Guyana Company is a very valuable document for at least two reasons that are most concisely stated in its title. It is the autobiography of Helen Taitt and therefore quite obviously records “her life,” and it is a priceless record of “her country,” pre-independence Guyana in particular, but also of the country as a young nation with much about its arts, cultural and social life.
The book is the finished, collected version of Helen Taitt’s serialised autobiography written by her and submitted for publication in the Sunday Mirror. The series appeared weekly in the Mirror between January 10 and May 16, 1993, under her own chosen title ‘My Life, My Country.’ Former President Janet Jagan, then editor of the Mirror, describes her in the book’s introduction as “one of the brightest stars in our cultural past” who “did not receive the rewards she deserved. She was way ahead of her time, especially in her efforts at dance and choreography in the USA and Europe, which at that period, when she was at the height of her profession” was denied by the race prejudice she encountered. Today, she would probably have been a prominent dancer in one of the world’s leading dance companies.”
Chapter 5 is prefaced by another description whose source is not stated, but which contains some bio data. It says “born in Guyana, South America, the dancer Helen Taitt came to Europe as a guest of the German government. She is a graduate of the School of American Ballet in New York (Balanchine) and has studied with Anthony Tudor, Rosella Hightower, Tatjana Gsovsky, Gustav Blank and others. She studied modern dance with Merce Cunningham and Janet Collins.
“Helen Taitt has appeared with the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg and the Württembergische Staatstheater in Stuttgart; on Broadway and at the Theatre de Champs Elysees in Paris. She has toured with, among other companies, the Hungarian Operetta Theatre, the Scapino Ballet, the Caribbean Art Circle (Barbados), the Dominica National School of Dance and the Berlin Art Circle, as well as the Stadttheatre Lüneburg, where she was assistant ballet mistress. She returned to Guyana in October, 1992.”
This is meant to be a mere brief notice, hopefully to introduce the document to some wider attention with the intention of giving it more detailed critical attention later. The purpose here is also to highlight two of the poems that appear in the book and their significance to the dancer’s autobiography. The first is untitled.
I am dead child on a bicycle bar
and all before me is the red dirt road
and all beneath me under the wheels I am
dead
in the before-sun and before-love.
I am the young man with the child
Carrying my failing for a death certificate
And I am the doctor’s child
I see it all and weep.
And my tears take the red dirt
To the trench.
Little white coffin, I will paint you a sail
A red-rose sail to float you down the trench.
To save you from the red-hot dirt road
Hard and dry in the dusty midday sun.
Trench water carry my
tears
And the little white cof
fin
Under the bridge in the
shade.
The poet was obviously moved by the experiences of British Guiana sugar estate life that she observed as a child in Skeldon where her father was Government District Medical Officer. The East Indian estate labourer’s existence was hard and the child mortality rate high. Taitt writes “almost every day there would be another stillborn baby brought to Daddy’s surgery for a death certificate… I was always very sad to see the young father riding into our yard with the little cloth-covered coffin on the hand bar of his cycle.” She relates, however, that “there was a happy ending to that situation. The sugar estate had by law to supply a hospital for its workers.” They supplied an empty building, but after subtle agitation by Dr Taitt, they were “forced to supply the necessary equipment. When we left the area, the infant death rate was normal.”
The other poem came after she had completed school at Bishops’ High “when the USA Elmhurst Contracting Company arrived to build their airbase at Hyde Park (renamed Atkinson Field and now the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, Timehri). Taitt went to work there. “I was in charge of one of the long green buildings. I filled requisitions and helped with simple first-aid. I had time for my poetry and wrote the following while on the job.
Hyde Park
These are all mine
The trees, slender and
breeze-brushed
Sighing to a well contented
Heaven
Blue, white and unafraid
These vines treading the
ground, playing in
shadow
Breathing with the life of a
Million running creatures.
My land
This white sand piled in ups
And downs
Footprints there ever changing like a world
of men
Tramping out their father’s memories
Now a peace so profound – the air bursts
with it
Long buildings
Wooden and green – like silver-backed
caterpillars
In the sun.
Barracks
The men with guns
Come to draw the red war line
Round our hearts
To blast our peace to pieces
Or keep it
Time will tell.
Yet all mine. Even they
For they have taken mine …
The book goes on to give an account of the life of Guyana’s best- known dancer, choreographer and dance teacher, certainly the country’s most accomplished in classical dance. For a great part of her career she lived in Germany. Helen Taitt was also a poet and three of her pieces are printed in the book, the two reproduced here and another titled ‘Spirit’ which she wrote and published in memory of Cheddi Jagan in 1997. The poems capture in more condensed verse form some of the experiences and impressions of a very sensitive observer with considerable artistic talent.
This author of one of Guyana’s classic theatrical works, the famous Stabroek Fantasy, recounts these impressions in a little known but priceless historical record which she titled My Life, My Country.
