“Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?” This sentence from The Magic Mountain—Thomas Mann’s unforgiving account of Europe’s spiritual malaise and self-destroying tendencies in the early years of the twentieth century—still resonates in the Caribbean, at many different levels. Political speeches from our recent past often look more ambitious and inspirational, the cultural references of previous generations sound more sophisticated and wide-ranging, even the spirit in which our cricket team played seems to belong to a vanished era of focused professionalism and high achievement.
The Guyana Independence issue of the New World Quarterly—a publication that grew out of a fortnightly magazine published in Georgetown—reads like a document from another culture, not merely because of its full-throated confidence in what the young nation might achieve, but because of the range and depth of its interests (sport, art, politics, literature, history), the distinction of its contributors, and the quality of its prose. In February 1966 the newly independent citizen of Guyana was able to buy a journal with poetry by Martin Carter, Nicholas Guillen and Aime Cesaire; cricket analysis by CLR James; political analysis by Cheddi Jagan, Eusi Kwayana (then writing as Sidney King), Walter Rodney and Lloyd Best; criticism from George Lamming, Kenneth Ramchand and Orlando Patterson; and extracts from the fiction of Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittelholzer and Jan Carew.
Nearly every page of the Independence issue contains material that has outlasted its occasion. CLR James’ tribute to Rohan Kanhai, (‘A Study in Confidence’) is a case in point. “A great West Indies cricketer in his play should embody some essence of that crowded vagueness which passes for the history of the West Indies,” writes James, before offering a characteristically brilliant analysis of Kanhai’s rebellious stroke-making. Brooding on one of Kanhai’s great innings, at Edgbaston in 1964, a moment at which “the West Indian could strike from his feet the dust of centuries,” CLR decides that the West Indies “embody more sharply than elsewhere Nietzsche’s conflict between the ebullience of Dionysus and the discipline of Apollo.” And yet, for all his occasional cutting loose, CLR concludes that that “distinction, gaiety and grace” (a phrase appropriated from Lytton Strachey’s opinion of French literature) were the hallmarks of the Kanhai style.
The Independence issue had lighter moments too. In a wonderful autobiographical sketch of ER Burrowes, Donald Locke recalls a humorous exchange between members of the Working People’s Art group. During a vaudeville show the students debate whether Burrowes or Basil Hinds is the greatest “draw man” in the country. Hinds, says one student, has painted a bone so realistically that a dog “come and eat the canvas before ’e realise was canvas and not real bone.” His friend counters with a story of how “Burrowes take a piece o’ cork, and paint it jus like a piece o’ marblestone, and when ’e throw it in the water … it sink.”
Where did this breadth of cultural knowledge and intelligence go? A possible explanation suggests itself in thoughtful preface by then prime minister Burnham. Acknowledging that decolonization must mean more than “the formal conceding of political and constitutional power,” he welcomes New World for its willingness to examine “centuries of colonial rule as a result of which our society has remained a complex of complexes, causing us to ignore and sometimes consciously condemn our own achievements and distinctive cultural patterns.” The urbane tone and self-conscious inclusivity of the preface (“the community of origins which we share with our brothers of the Caribbean, the Negroes of North America and the Nations of Africa and Asia”) may be the most remote aspect of the entire publication. For little of what followed, at least politically, lived up to Burnham’s hopes that Guyanese could set aside “electoral rivalries and ideological differences and … acknowledge the urgent and essential role of the intellectual worker in the process of transforming our society and nations.”
Art, culture and sport have proved surprisingly resilient in Guyana, far moreso than the critical commentary that used to accompany them. When the fiftieth anniversary of Independence arrives, a few years from now, no doubt there will be fresh promises about ideological unity and the importance of intellectual workers.
When these are made, we would all do well to remember how meaningless similar assertions have proved to be in the recent past. Ultimately a society gets the culture it deserves—or at least the culture its citizens are prepared to support. Without the political will, funding and civic participation necessary to reverse our current malaise, the pastness of our recent cultural past will likely remain as profound, and legendary, as it has been for some time.
