As the Republic of Guyana celebrates 53 years as an independent nation, the anniversary is marked primarily by a variety of popular entertainment dominated by the Carnival. As this newly adopted festival with its 10 nights of revelry continues its course through a succession of ‘J’ouverts’, including the usual fetes and soca mega concerts, there are official ceremonies and national events along the way, and one of these events employed entertainment to make a national statement and craft a contribution to the intellectual content of the anniversary celebrations.
This was the annual production, “An Evening of National Songs, Poetry and Stories” produced and directed by Dr Barbara Reynolds, who is a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana. The programme is supported by the Ministry of the Presidency, Department of Social Cohesion, Culture, Youth and Sport.
The production, introduced and chaired by Keon Haywood, was theatrical, demonstrating the general strength and effectiveness of theatre to include entertainment and revelry in a conscious statement to make an intellectual input into the independence anniversary commemorations. The association with the university is not coincidental in this context. Dr Reynolds was assisted in the production by Ezzie Crandon, Hubert Meusa, Mervin Kissoon and Carol Valz.
The programme’s main thrust was the theme of patriotism with its usual strong undercurrent of national pride riding upon a collective praise song for the Republic. This was underscored by the closing hymn of the production as the entire congregation sang the famous Guyana anthem “Not A Blade of Grass”, which author Dave Martins describes as “a love of country song”.
That was the intention as the programme’s selections sought to give “a birthday present” to the nation in “songs, poetry and stories”. Dance was included in this as there were performances of “Shadows and Radiance” by Cristel Mangra with images, symbols and national colours, and “Guyana” by Mikel Andrews (member of the National Drama Company) with native Amerindian costume and motifs. The variety of songs all reflected a national heritage, the beauty of the country, its natural resources, spectacular and amazing landscape, folk culture and traditions, and were mostly selected from the collection known as ‘national songs’.
Although overwhelmingly patriotic in nature and purpose, the programme had variety and depth even in some of the national songs, folk songs, poetry and stories performed. This is where the theatre – the selections performed, whether in music, dance or speech acts – told and dramatised a portrait and held up a visage of Guyana for its audience; one that they could identify and relate to because identity was another strong factor in the character and effect of the evening.
There were poems of significance such as by Martin Carter, known as the “national poet”, whose work is undoubtably identified the poetry of the nation, but also poetry with profundity. One of the oft selected from Poems of Resistance was “Looking At Your Hands”, read by Heywood. The work of another foremost poet, David Dabydeen, was also presented. “Coolie Mother”, another often quoted work from Coolie Odyssey, in which Dabydeen dramatises the history and aftermath of Indian indentureship in Guyana was read by Nirmala Narine. Both Narine and Heywood, who also performed his own patriotic “Song for My Homeland” are members of the National Drama Company. Carlene Gill Kerr performed her “My Heart’s Cry for Guyana” in the same patriotic praise category, representing a new wave of nationalistic verse in spoken word poetry.
But another very important element of Guyanese poetry was represented in the same theme of national praise singing. The programme took its audience into the significant area of nationalism in Guyanese literature and music. From the 1940s right up until independence, a significant brand of nationalism developed in Guyanese poetry, which was also accompanied by realism in the fiction.
Following a trend in which a common preoccupation was with landscape poetry imitating the Romantics and Victorians, British Guiana began to be aware of national ethnic identities among East Indians and Africans. But rising out of this was the transition from imitative landscape to local landscape, including praise of it, and use of it to identify with the country and express a growing sense of nation (even though still a colony) and a more positive development of the poetry.
Most of the national songs first saw life as poems by leading poets of the 1940s such as Walter McA Lawrence, primarily. Going into the 1950s, 1960s and even the seventies, this included A J Seymour, J W Chinapen, Cleveland Hamilton and Vere T Daly, whose work (except for Seymour) was featured in the independence production. These were poems of nationalism typical of the period that were later set to music by renowned musicians. This was the process that resulted in the national songs of Guyana coming to prominence in the 1960s.
The programme included “My Guyana El Dorado”, “Arise Guyana”, “Song of the Republic”, “Salute to Guyana”, “Oh Beautiful Guyana”, and others. These were performed by the choir SASCA Heralders of Linden, as well as the Faith 4 group, the National Steel Orchestra, Omari Austin and Cherlyn Chichester.
Musicians got into the act. The rise of nationalistic verse was later joined by music of the same persuasion. Leading musicians produced a corpus of Guyanese independence and nationalistic music, much of it drawing on the poems for which they composed music. Chief among them is the outstanding artist Valerie Rodway who accounted for most of it. Others included W A R “Bill” Pilgrim, R C G Potter, and F P Loncke. This collection of music, which was responsible for the national songs, contributed significantly to Guyanese music as a whole, giving a sense of pre-independence and post-independence compositions worthy of study.
That illustrates the importance of this independence concert which highlighted notable areas of Guyanese creative expressions and the overall sense of identity that the production wanted to foreground. Included here would be songs composed in the form of folk music such as Hilton Hemmerding’s “Beautiful Guyana” performed by the Messengers.
Another important corpus of work to which the production brought focus was Guyanese oral literature. The nation’s folk songs are popular and somewhat taken for granted, but they belong to the oral literature reflecting the lifestyles, the environment, the beliefs, the culture, the folklore of the people who created them. Many of them on this programme joined the expressions of pride in the country and its natural, social and human characteristics.
The Moore Brothers, the Messengers and Dynamic Force performed medleys of those that recall the interior’s mighty rivers and the life and trade of porkknockers, village life and games that people play. These are important segments of the oral literature that were made alive in the concert.
Other forms of oral literature were the folk tales – stories and narratives which also reflect the folk and their cosmos. Lecturer in the University of Guyana’s Division of Creative Arts Michael Khan, in his stage persona as the legendary Ole Man Pappie, performed an Anansi story. It was one from Khan’s performance repertoire that comfortably fit the programme because of its type; it is a form of literature that is among the endangered species of Guyanese culture.
The other folk tale on the programme may be seen as a surviving gem from a mine of national culture that is already extinct. The National School of Theatre Arts and Drama (NSTAD), led by Al Creighton, performed “Skilpaata”, a folk tale from the lost tradition of Guyanese Dutch Creole (Skepi Dutch/Berbice Dutch/Essequibo Dutch). The tale was originally told in the Dutch Creole language and was collected in the field by Ian Robertson in the 1970s. It is a myth of origin and a priceless and very Guyanese folktale. It is in the tradition of trickster tales known in the African as well as Amerindian story-telling traditions.
The tale told by Khan also belongs to these types. The story explained how God came to live in heaven, and its hero is the trickster Anansi. It was Anansi who used his spider web to help God escape the wrath of an antagonist who was chasing him down to kill him. God and his wife climbed up to heaven where he has lived ever since and has never come back down.
The Creole Dutch myth of origin explained how the turtle’s back came to be the way it is – marked and cracked. It was as a result of the turtle’s greed. He played a trick on his friends the birds who, in anger, left him stranded up in the sky, causing him to skate down a mountainside on his back. Interestingly, the Creole Dutch was spoken by people of a hybrid ethnic background – Boviander, Amerindian, European, African, thus the mixture of the folktale traditions.
“Skilpaata” (Dutch Creole for “turtle”) was performed by NSTAD students Randy Fredericks, Nathaniel Powers, Alanna Gittens, Sheneria Isaacs, Janella Adolphus and Maurica Yarris.
Thus, a concert that set out to glorify Guyana on its birthday exposed an audience to a priceless demonstration of theatre which instructs about the nation’s cultural heritage, in a way not commonly acknowledged.
