Dear Editor,
Briefly. Two men have recently passed on who earned my respect.
The first was Isahak Basir whom I knew from my two years of living on the Essequibo Coast as a teenager.
Always friendly, I met Mr Basir though my visits to the Michael Forde bookshop which was just opposite the Anna Regina Secondary School, and contained a wide range of communist pamphlets and Marxist books (chosen works of V I Lenin in three volumes etc.) As a young man I was there every day and came to know the regulars.
So I came to know Mr. Basir who as a leading PPP activist was also frequently at the book store. I have to say that I agree without reservation to all the descriptions of his qualities and good manners that have been written here by family and friends. I read a note from Mohamed Khan some time ago saying that he had been deprived of his pension. I thought of revolting against a practice that has had other victims, disliked by one leader or another, in a civilization where the fidelity to leaders has more value than the fidelity to principle and values.
The second demise I noted was that of the artist and media personality Ron Savory.
I took over the classic music radio programme and the Development and You public education programme (I think it was called) on GBS when I moved there in the early seventies from Radio Demerara. Ron Savory was leaving. In talking to him I understood that he was bored. Savory was an intelligent artist and we had good relations for all the years that I was in contact with him. He was, to my mind, typical of a certain coloured middle class that was present in Guyana in the new post- independence period. We later caught up in St Lucia where he had chosen to live as a painter at the end of the seventies. It was always a pleasure speaking with him. He brought to a complex and strange (for me as a Guyanese) experience like St. Lucia, a level of comprehension and compassion that was revealing of a character trait that others also remarked. I still recall our conversation on Naipaul when I, a critic, said that Vidya and Shiva, were doing a bad job and that they should be rejected. Ron replied that they were necessary and brought insights into ourselves that had to be remarked.
I was unprepared for the type of impressionism that dominated his painting style. And he is one of the best that the Caribbean and indeed the third world has produced. I found it incomprehensible at first and saw the work he was doing in St Lucia and came to a great appreciation of his art. My time in France has made me familiar with the style and its varieties I appreciate painters like Savory and Stanley Greaves (cubist) for the originality of their expression in our artistic work.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr