“Oh beautiful Guyana, Oh my lovely, native land…”
These are truly patriotic words which force my doubting heart to feel love; love for a land where I must go hiking or look beneath layers of filth to see beauty. It is the land of the lost city.
Sweat trickles down my back as I stand under a tree on Brickdam. Perhaps the intense heat I’m feeling during these early days of September is a testament to the thinning ozone layer.
Contractors are working on the building in front of me. I hear the buzz and bang of their tools, the occasional ‘cat-call’ and honking of a horn but my mind is not on the living things present on this Georgetown Street. My mind is lost in a time long before my birth; lost in a story that is the memory of a friend who is quickly approaching her 70s.
In the 60s, the 70s, even the 80s, she tells me, this is when I should have lived my life as a Guyanese. Those were the days of gentlemen, clean gutters and mowed lawns; the days when our cultural diversity was in its purest state; a thing of beauty to be enjoyed.
Her days, she says, were those of the ferries and bicycles. Those were days when a group of Georgetown schoolgirls could cross the Demerara River with their bicycles and head to Canal Number One Polder. There they would have no fears; they’d be given fruits and coconut water and be treated like the next villager.
Even greater than all those things, she told me with an impressive show of pearly dentures, was the feeling that came with telling another Guyanese that you were a Georgetown guy or gal. Being from the city was a thing to be proud of back then.
Long walks from your Kitty house to one cinema or the other; or just a night time stroll along the avenue; these were things of her youth. A Georgetown where she could stand and take a deep breath and not be afraid of the sights she would see.
Never in her life would she have guessed her beloved city could become the shabby, drainage-challenged, extended mess that it has become. Even now she cannot believe that this Georgetown is the same place where she lived her life and created memories which now seem like events from another place.
“The lost city,” she muttered to me. This is how she thinks of the great place in her memories.
And as I stand on Brickdam, I try to see the things from her memories. I try to see the beautiful place of her youth.
Of course I will never be able to see it. She is right. Her city is lost. This city of my time can never be the one she remembers. Walk down the avenue at night? In Georgetown? Oh please, I will never be that drunk. I would probably get robbed of my plastic jewellery and contact lens.
Take a trip across the Demerara River with a bicycle in tow? On what? Those speedboats? At that nasty, rickety stelling that I hate? No thank you. I don’t need the sort of memories that have broken her heart.
My generation will never know the lost city she loves to tell me about. But even with all the garbage filled canals and shabby patches this new Georgetown is still apart of the land which is: “More dear to me than all the world…” (srh.midnight@gmail.com)
