Compiled by Al Creighton, Vanda Radzik, Marina Taitt and Jocelyn Dow
Michael Gilkes (1933 – 2020) was a prominent Caribbean academic, literary critic, playwright, director, poet and filmmaker. He was among the first order of Guyanese dramatists, a prize-winning poet, who made significant contributions to Guyanese literature, to the arts in the Caribbean, and earned a notable place in university circles in the West Indies, Guyana and the UK.
Michael Arthur Gilkes was born on November 5th, 1933 in Georgetown in then British Guiana. He attended secondary school at the Queen’s College but he did not think much of his academic achievements there, saying that English and Gardening were his two favourite subjects. He remembered his childhood as one of constant moving about in the city – moving a dozen times over 15 years of his boyhood life. He said that his “placelessness” was mainly a genetic trait: “I have inherited an Amerindian-based, Caribbean restlessness from my father and grandfather, both of whom were explorers in their own way, always seeking new territory”. The most constant place and his cultural cradle was the Taitt’s residence – Woodbine House on Murray Street – (now Cara Lodge). He was a nephew of Dorothy Taitt, cousin of Clairmonte Taitt and part of the illustrious Taitt family of Guyana. The first record of his work in Theatre, which spanned more than 50 years, was in a school production when he was 12 years old. He returned to the stage as a young man when he trod the boards in the role of Hamlet at the Theatre Guild Playhouse.
He left home in 1961 for studies in the UK, gaining his BA (Hons.) from University of London in 1967 and his PhD in English from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1973. He has also been the recipient of the Commonwealth Scholarship, 1970 -73, Fulbright Fellowship 1980-81 and was a Leverhulme Fellow 1986-87.
As a scholar, he made his mark as a literary critic with a keen interest in Sir Wilson Harris, on whom he published two books – Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (Longman Caribbean, 1975), and a collection which he edited, The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris (Macmillan Caribbean, 1989). Gilkes presented the fifth Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lecture in Georgetown in 1975: Racial Identity and Individual Consciousness in the Caribbean Novel. He was also a brilliant lecturer and promoter of Caribbean Literature at Cave Hill, UWI.
As an artist, Gilkes excelled in a number of related disciplines. His poetry appeared in several journals and publications, and his first published collection, Joanstown and Other Poems (Peepal Tree), was a prize-winning volume, being awarded the Guyana Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in 2002. His latest collection was Heart/Land: Poems on Love and Landscape (2015) In drama he is best known for three prominent plays – Couvade, A Dream Play of Guyana (1972), A Pleasant Career (1992) which was based on the life and art of Edgar Mittelholzer and The Last of the Redmen (2006). These last two had the distinction of winning the Guyana Prize for Drama in 1992 and 2006 respectively. As a theatre practitioner, Gilkes was a talented actor, playwright, and stage director. Derek Walcott’s play Franklin, which Gilkes directed, had its world premiere in Guyana at Theatre Guild in 1968. His other theatre successes as a director included Sweet Talk by Michael Abbensetts, (Theatre Guild 1968); Shakespeare’s The Tempest Green Room Theatre, B’dos 1974); Walcott’s Ti-Jean and His Brothers (Stage One B’dos 1974); EK Brathwaite’s Mother Poem (Stage One, B’dos and its Gala Entry for Carifesta ‘79); Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Errol John (Stage One, B’dos 1983); Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Stage One & Green Room Players, B’dos 1985); Walcott’s Remembrance (Bermuda, St Lucia & TT 1999); and The Last of the Redmen (Guyana 2006). Redmen also won Trinidad & Tobago’s Cacique Award for best drama production in 2006. He received the Earl Warner Trust Lifetime Achievement Award in Barbados in 2003.
Gilkes grew up in colonial Georgetown, a city with character and dignity, and the qualities that remained indelibly deep in the writer’s memory. It was the same environment etched in literature by Mittelholzer’s Sylvia in which the tragic marriage between the privileged coloured classes of Kingston, Georgetown and the depressed districts of Tiger Bay and Stabroek Market was dramatised. For Gilkes, the memory was particularly profound because it was the home of Joan McDavid, the Muse that inspired his collected poems in Joanstown. For him the city was indivisible from his beloved Joan –- who became his first wife and lifelong partner. The poems have a painterly quality, telling of his deep love of this girl entwined with the love and admiration of the Old Georgetown, which is immortalised in the poetry.
The collection also recalls the scandal for which the country is infamously remembered, the indoctrination and murder of nearly 900 cult followers at Jonestown. Gilkes plays/puns on the two names in order to preserve the memory of one and erase the infamy of the other with pictures of beauty of woman; and also not only the town, but the villages, sights and landscape of Guyana. In verse which is often reminiscent of Walcott, it also underscores biography as Gilkes’ hometown, his growing up and his romance. Even his last volume of poems, Heartland: Poems of Love and Landscape, returns to a source of love, awe and wonder of Guyana – attributes also reflected in the works of Mark McWatt and Wilson Harris.
Michael’s marriage to Joan produced three children, Mark, Cathy and Kai, and the family lived some twenty years in Barbados, where he was a lecturer in the UWI at Cave Hill. He rose to be Reader in English and served as Head of Department. He returned to Guyana in 1992 as Professor in the Department of English, where he advanced the new Master’s Degree in Literature. He also spent some time as Visiting Fellow with his family in the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, where his critical studies of Harris progressed, resulting in the editing of The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris. His scholarship, research and writing benefitted from close interactions in the UK with former Director of the Centre, David Dabydeen, and with Harris himself.
Gilkes also worked in St Lucia at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, followed by other posts such as the Quillian Visiting Professor at the Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, USA and was appointed to conduct workshops at the Berkley Institute in Bermuda, where he lived with his second wife – Angela Barry nee Richards, a writer and lecturer at the Bermuda College in Hamilton.
It is in the field of drama that Gilkes’ presence made its greatest impact in the Caribbean. As an actor and director, part of his early career was spent in Guyana at a very significant period when he practised at The Theatre Guild in the late 1960s to early 1970s, a period in the Guild’s “Golden Age”, when it flourished as an institution for both performance and training. At the same time when plays written by local playwrights were emerging at the Playhouse, it was an informal training ground in theatre. It grew to be an exporter of talent as a number of practitioners left there to become prominent and to push theatre in other places across the Caribbean, including Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, The Cayman Islands and Barbados.
In Barbados, he became one of the strongest pillars of the cultural establishment and had his most fertile period as a director and playwright. He worked primarily with Stage One, the leading company in that country and produced a string of the most outstanding plays over the eighties and nineties. First among those was his production of Franklin, the full-length edition which Walcott reworked from his early one-act play originally titled The Wine of the Country. Gilkes worked mainly as a realist with a passion for elucidating meaning out of Walcott’s text. As he told critic John Theime, he saw this as one of Walcott’s most dramatic plays, with each character precisely drawn.
Another outstanding production worth noting was his direction in Barbados of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by foremost American playwright August Wilson. This is a major American drama focusing the journey to self-realisation and liberation as a people by black Americans, descendants of the former enslaved who migrated from the South to the industrial North in the very early part of the twentieth century. This further demonstrated Gilkes’ universal interest in drama and his success at theatre at the highest level in the West Indies. This he also achieved in an entirely different dramatic form when he directed his own play, Couvade in Guyana while he was at UG in 1993. Couvade, which was first done for the inaugural Carifesta in 1972, was appropriately staged for Guyana’s Independence celebrations, and is another of Gilkes’ major contributions to Guyanese and Caribbean theatre. One of the nation’s most acclaimed plays, it is based on Amerindian mythology, and lends itself to a more modernist experimental design as Gilkes explores shamanism in a quest for healing and wholeness in cross-cultural society of multiple races.
He was among the very first flight of playwrights, whose other two plays are of contrasting styles and preoccupations. A Pleasant Career, with its dramatisation of the rise and aspirations of Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer, is a biographical work, following the complex social and racial matrix of 1930s New Amsterdam and his subject’s determination to get published and be a writer in London.
The play’s interest in race, class and colonialism might have taken second place to its interest in art and the artist, but in the situation of the colonised it links to his later masterpiece, The Last of the Redmen. This is an epic one-man play, which openly acknowledges the inspiration it took from Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and plays with a single actor. It simulates an interview with an aged medical doctor, but takes its audience through a labyrinth of existentialism, biography, autobiography, race, class, art and mores in old colonial pre-independence Guyana. Its title is a pun, since the hero, whose name is Redman, is a representative of a faded/(extinct ?) coloured (“red”) middle class in Guyana. Gilkes also says that it echoes the term “red” used to describe the native peoples of the Americas by the imperialist colonisers. The play was written for his cousin Clairmonte Taitt, a legendary Guyanese actor, who, according to Gilkes, declined the weighty challenge of playing the role, which was therefore performed by Gilkes himself. Concomitant with its major significance, the play is really about Clairmonte’s father, and the Taitt family, famous in Guyana as patrons and practitioners of the arts. The play, produced by Gem Madhoo-Nascimento, was actually performed at the former Woodbine House, the Taitts’ home and theatre where they hosted several performances. It is now the Cara Lodge hotel, and the “ballet room” where Helen Taitt taught dance, was transformed into an exquisite small theatre for the performances of Last of the Redmen.
Gilkes once explained that his interest in film grew and actually became a practice when he contemplated the way a stage performance vanishes into thin air after the curtain closes, as against a film that actually preserves the work for future viewing and posterity. He has contributed a number of short pieces to the growing collection of the Caribbean film. His version of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea faced certain limitations because he could not acquire the screen rights for the novel. That was sold to the big company Lime Tree Cinema who produced it for the big screen – the commercial cinema. Gilkes was thus forced to do a shorter version on a low budget, but had the accomplishment of a finished product in circulation. The film was also supported by CXC, which had selected Wide Sargasso Sea as one of its set texts, and the film was widely shown to CXC students throughout the Caribbean at the time of the release. It was filmed on location in Dominica – the birth place of Jean Rhys and the setting for most of the novel. Ken Corsbie was instrumental in the filming. Outstanding Guyanese actress, the late Rosamund Addo, was cast in the major role of Christophine, with Vincentian Nan Peacocke as Antoinette and Barbadian Patrick Foster as Rochester. A number of Guyanese, cast by Vanda Radzik, played characters – young Antoinette was played by sisters Caroline and Melanie Wilkins, Luke Fraser as young Sandi, veteran actor Neil Isaacs as Mr Mason, Charlene Benjamin as Amelie and Radzik herself as Sr Marie Louise.
A charming film project was Concert in the Rainforest, which featured Ray Luck, internationally acclaimed Guyanese pianist, and filmed in Wai-Wai territory in Deep South Rupununi with the Wai-Wai children and people as the stars. A grand piano had been donated to the Wai Wai community for its village church – this strange fact caught the attention of Michael, himself a music lover, especially since no one in the village could play it. Ray Luck and Michael Gilkes ventured forth with a genius piano tuner and welcomed by the curious and friendly and cultured Wai Wai children, leaders and people created the Concert in the Rainforest. This undertaking was assisted by Maj-Gen Joe Singh (ret’d), Carolyn Rodrigues then Minister of Amerindian Affairs and Sydney Allicock, North Rupununi Makushi leader and friend of the Wai Wai.
His most ambitious film project, and most time-consuming (2016 – 2019), was Maira and the Jaguar People, which took him to the Amerindian village of Surama in the North Rupununi in the Guyanese interior – in close proximity to the Iwokrama Rain Forest- which he scripted and directed. Omar Estrada, Cuban visual artist and director of photography and close friend, flew into Surama with crew to capture the film on location. Omar also volunteered a studio in Cuba for the post production editing of the film. The trailers for Maira were launched and shown in Guyana on a number of occasions – but the final production will now be shown posthumously. Madhoo-Nascimento’s Gems Theatre Productions was the film’s dedicated producer and prior to her was Barbadian film producer Penelope Hynam. The film never raised the requisite sums of money needed for its completion. The Makushi people of Surama were the mainstay of the film – and this was a great source of gratitude and pride for Gilkes.
There was a close relationship between Gilkes’ art and his interests as a critic. He immersed himself in the rainforest with which he had an understanding not unlike that of Harris. He famously elucidated Harris’ narrative, which he describes as “maverick”, by explaining how Harris “spent seventeen years in the rainforests talking to himself”. It was with the same profound consciousness and deep concentration that Gilkes himself approached his art, so that despite a lifetime spent mostly out of Guyana, he called himself a “mudhead”. It is to his native “mudland” that he constantly returned for inspiration, for subject, for theme and for setting of his poetry, films and his drama. In his own words:
Life was a continuous discovery. It still is, and I have become even more restless, more Caribbean, with age. I consider my address, my location, to be the Caribbean from Guyana north-northwest along the island chain, slung like a hammock between three Americas, and northeastwards across the Sargasso Sea to the final Bermudas. I return every year, like a Leatherback, to renew contact with the original soil of Guyana where I was born, and will always remain, a Mudhead.
Michael Gilkes died of the coronavirus in a hospital in London on the night of April 12, 2020. And, as his daughter Cathy says, his spirt is now forever at rest – in his spiritual homeland – the mountains and forest of Surama in Guyana.
