In “Dear Coast Landerz ah Guyana,”creole poet Gabrielle Mohamed confronts the attitudes of coastland residents to their indigenous counterparts by way of a letter of complaint.
“It addresses the divide we have perpetuated even now after independence between us coast landers and our indigenous population. Although we are of the same land, the entitled attitudes and behaviours of us coast landers are encroaching on the land and previously protected areas. My viewpoint is that this is unacceptable, my poem is meant to address this,” Mohamed explains.
And although she has roots in both Bartica and Berbice, she acknowledges her own culpability as a coastland resident.
Mohamed says the poem was written for a pre-synodal assembly meeting of Catholic churches on the Amazon, which also required her to write the “standard English” translation for non-creolese speakers.
She has previously said that she has been using creolese in her writing in an attempt to “capture the continual influence of colonial and post-colonial attitudes and behaviours” within her countrymen’s lives.
Giving insight into her creative process, Mohamed notes that her poetry can often demand different ways of coming to the surface. “Most of the times, though, my poetry takes me to the “drawing board” or a blank (unlined) sheet of paper, preferably in an art book, where I engage in free-thought exercises to create links between concepts I wish to introduce in the poem, and its grander relation to the story theme I wish to develop. If this doesn’t work, I draw the thing that comes closest to what I wish to express and work from there,” she says.
“Frankly speaking, I don’t know when the poem is finished but I write until the blood has drained from my body into a chalice my readers can drink from. For me, it’s all about getting the emotions out. From there, it’s up to how the reader interacts with it,” she adds.
Asked for recommendations for readers, she points to the works of Mahadai Das, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, and Martin Carter.
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