On February 23, 2010 the Republic of Guyana will celebrate 40 years since the nation became a republic. It is always a difficult thing to assess the impact of republicanism upon the arts, and which specific developments in that area were a result of the nation’s republican status.
Nevertheless, there are notable attempts to do this. Events are being staged by the University of Guyana through a Mashramani 40th Anniversary Programme and by the National Gallery at Castellani House through A Mashramani Exhibition II.
The University of Guyana is hosting two public events to commemorate the anniversary. There is a series of three symposia on Science and Technology, Culture and the Arts, and Republicanism which started on February 19. Those three areas were chosen as broad segments of social development which one can examine for any impact and influence on nationhood, or phenomena influenced by nationhood or any national agendas since 1970. In which directions has the country moved or what contributions has it made to developments in science and technology?
This was the idea for the discussions fixed for February 19. On that afternoon a panel discussion was scheduled to analyse Guyana and the Challenge of the Environment.
Environmental issues have grown rapidly in importance to the world in terms of the social environment, the ecosystem, climatic dynamism, and the Darwinian consequences of change, adaptation and survival. At the same time science and technology have made meteoric advances with a new technology that has revolutionised communication and the modus operandi of the globe.
Forty years on, science and technology have become crucial subjects for Guyana at this stage of its development, and there has been an urgent call for intensified training and the fostering of greater skills in these areas. The University of Guyana is sensitive to this more than most, since it has a responsibility for training and of trying to influence trends in higher education so that the nation’s capacity may be increased. Besides, the Guyana Government has embarked on a Low Carbon Development Strategy and the university has been crafting critical responses to this. It was expected that the LCDS would be a part of last Friday’s discussion. The panelists named were David Singh, John Caesar, Patrick Williams, Navin Chanderpal and Basil Butcher, with Suresh Narine as Moderator.
Another symposium has been planned to review developments of a more broad political nature, evaluating Republicanism: The Contribution of the Republic Ideal in Fostering the Concept of One Nation, One People, One Destiny. The date of this panel is to be announced.
Tomorrow, at the National Library in Georgetown, the focus will be on Culture and the Arts with discourse on the topic At the Service of Nationhood: Developments in Mashramani and Guyanese Culture. This is particularly important since the state of cultural development is always critical to the well-being of a nation. There have been significant issues in the arts relevant to political and social repercussions since 1970, sometimes arising directly out of the way the nation moved after changing its status in February 1970. These factors will be analysed by Elfrieda Bissember, artist, art critic, art historian and Curator of the National Gallery. She is joined on the panel by Paloma Mohamed, dramatist, singer/songwriter, poet, and Director of the Centre for Communication Studies, University of Guyana, who was Artistic Director of Carifesta X. Also on the panel are two very important but largely unknown gentlemen, Jimmy Hamilton, former President of the Jaycees of Greater Mackenzie and Walter Melville, a member of the executive committee of the Jaycees of Greater Mackenzie.
Hamilton and Melville are two of the innovators who gave the annual republic festival to the nation. They invented Mashramani. The UG symposium is analysing culture and the arts while celebrating the anniversary of that festival. It is therefore very relevant and extremely pertinent to hear from its founders, particularly since their fame has not been sung and “fabled” across the republic and they have not received the credit that they deserve. Over the years newspaper reports have hinted that Mashramani started in Linden; oral history and rumour have vaguely suggested that the origins of the festival had something to do with the Jaycees; and university students of Caribbean Studies and Tourism have been sent out from Turkeyen to write research papers on the annual event and how it developed. But it has largely remained shrouded by a veil of vague generalities that it was created to celebrate republicanism and that mashramani is an Amerindian word. Out of all of those, there has never been a clear statement or document made public about exactly how and by whom the festival was founded.
Neither has Hamilton, who was first the Public Relations man and then President of the group when the festival was created, ever asked, like Sampson, “Am I not sung and fabled across the [republic]?” (Milton, Sampson Agonistes) He and his colleagues seem to have simply retreated into private life after the festival was handed over to the government (not so private in recent years for Melville, though, as he became involved in some public litigation on other unrelated matters after 2006).
Jimmy Hamilton, Walter Melville, Claude Saul, Jim Blackman, Clavis Joseph, and Michael Brassington, were all leading members of the Jaycees of Greater Mackenzie (Mackenzie, Wismar and Christianburg) most of them middle managers of Demerara Bauxite. They were the ones who founded, designed, planned and administered the first Mashramani, performed in Linden on February 23, 1970. It was later moved to Georgetown in 1972 and was then taken over by the government in 1973. They started searching for a name for the festival in 1969, but only found one in early 1970 with the help of Alan Fiedtkou and Adrian Johnson, who discovered the Lokono tradition called mustameni out of which they fabricated the name mashramani. According to the Arawak authority, J P Bennett, the Lokono word is mashirimehi.
Where the arts are concerned, there are various areas of significant development that relate to social or historical factors of national progress or nationhood. The exhibition A Mashramani Exhibition II − Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Republic is currently open at the National Gallery of Art (Castellani House). It features works from the private collections of the artists and from the National Collection of Art at Castellani House. The pieces on show might well make statements about Guyanese art and its changing characteristics since 1970.
A very useful document on this subject is Elfrieda Bissember’s Introduction to the book Transition − Poems Old and New by Syble Douglas. An account is given there of developments in pre-Independence Guyanese art with useful indicators of the work that came post-1970. Other insights into the work with an even more direct reference to nationalism, are to be found in the document Guyana Dreaming by Anne Walmsley whose focus is the work of Aubrey Williams.
One can attribute important advancements in the arts to the general wave of nationalism building up in the early 1970s. These include the founding of the National School of Art by Denis Williams, where formal training in the arts began to take place locally in the school named in honour of E R Burrowes, who had many years before taken charge of such training in the informal Working People’s Art Class. This same wave also led to the founding of the National School of Dance which emerged from collaboration between the new nation Guyana and older republics like Haiti and Cuba. A National Dance Company was to follow in 1979.
From those developments came a situation 40 years after republicanism in which there is a proliferation of dance companies, several trained dancers and other private virtual dance schools. The eventual establishment of a National Gallery in 1993 reflects further gains made in the arts.
Yet other evidence of national advancements is now reflected in the government’s full support of a Caribbean press set up to publish local and regional works. The first texts to come out of this are the initial volumes in The Guyana Classics Series edited by David Dabydeen. Significantly, the inaugural text is Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of the Bewtyful Empyre of Guiana… the first work in the collection of a national literature from the historical beginnings of a nation.