Dear Editor,
Several days have passed since a letter from Professor Samuel Braithwaite appeared in your columns (SN 21 Oct) but instead of reading and passing on to the next day’s news, my mind keeps going back to that letter.
Braithwaite bemoans the neglect in remembering and honouring pioneer Guyanese writers and rightly so.
If the street on which Mittelholzer grew up is now named LFS Burnham Street, if no plaque is hung on the house where Edgar and family lived, and true, Martin Carter’s house on Lamaha Street needs a fresh coat of paint, all is not lost.
What is perhaps more important than naming streets is that Memorial Lectures in their honour should be sustained with vigour and imagination. And, perhaps even more important, the nation’s children should be schooled on the nation’s heroes and founders.
Mittelholzer books should be on the school curriculum of both secondary and tertiary institutions. One short story or a poem on the CXC reading list is just not enough. And this would be relevant for all the other Guyanese writers who allow us to see ourselves and our society through their works and thus make us understand who we are and our place in society: AJ Seymour, Martin Carter, Sheik Sadeek, Wilson Harris, Johnny Agard, and many more.
I’m not sure if this is already done at UG but I think every final year student of literature should produce a research paper on various aspects of the writings of these authors, a research paper that is publishable. Apart from their books being reissued by various presses, there should be conferences and readings throughout the year to keep these authors alive before us.
All schools should have fully functioning libraries where students can readily access these texts as well as critical material. A Director of Art and Culture with the dynamism and technical knowledge of Denis Williams is sorely needed to put some life in the literary and visual arts in this country as well as in the discipline of music.
Funding should be available to encourage budding scholars to research and produce publishable works on the pioneers. If we linger more we would be lost and forgotten. Currently, if you ask the average citizen who any of these writers are, he or she may look blankly at you.
Another way of honouring writers, poets and artists is to place their images on our postage stamps. O’Keefe is on a postage stamp, so why not Philip Moore? Marjorie Broodhagen? Leila Locke? Martin Carter?
Yours faithfully,
Ameena Gafoor