[Gabrielle Mohamed, Is You Madness, Nah Me Own: A Short Collection of Creole Poetry, Georgetown: Gabrielle Mohamed, 2019. 30pp]
[Gabrielle Mohamed, Blackout Daze: A Collection of Creole Plays, Georgetown: Gabrielle Mohamed, 2019. 50pp.]
Breathe in the tombs
Of our stillness, and perhaps,
You will be free.
– Gabrielle Mohamed
What does the landscape look like where contemporary work by new writers at home in Guyana is concerned? With Guyanese literature dominated by major artists residing and publishing overseas, the public is not very aware of what is being done by those at home.
The major novelists and poets still resident in Guyana whose work has been published alongside established mainstream literature, include Ryhaan Shah, Ian McDonald and Paloma Mohamed (who is primarily a dramatist). Prize-winners Imam Baksh and Subraj Singh (also a dramatist), as well as Scott Ting-A-Kee have stood out as the most outstanding talent among new young writers, but not much is known about their peers.
Among playwrights Mosa Telford has been prominent for some time. The new, emerging talents, among whom Sonia Yarde, Nicholas Singh, Clinton Duncan and Sheron Cadogan Taylor may be counted, have attracted just a little bit more publicity because of the National Drama Festival and the National Drama Company. A broad sweep across their work reveals a general landscape of social realism with violence, abuse and the darker tragedies of contemporary society, mixed with a few representatives of post-modernist and post-colonial work.
Very few of them have been published. The most remarkable among new published fiction is Kamarang, (2017) the spellbinding first novel of journalist Michael Jordan. From the new poets Daryll Goodchild and Gabrielle Elizabeth Mohamed stand out with published books. Goodchild produced Crassin De Rivah: The Caribbean Flavour (2019), his first collection of poetry and short stories. Mohamed released two volumes – Blackout Daze: A Collection of Creole Plays (2019) and Is You Madness, Nah Me Own: A Short Collection of Creole Poetry (2019).
Mohamed is a recent graduate of the University of Guyana where she read English – a degree in Linguistics. She started writing while a student there, and was one of the winners of the Walter Rodney Literary Prize. She was invited to read her work on several occasions on campus, and was also a member of that group of local poets who could be heard at various events nationally. Among her most treasured achievements might be being selected to represent Guyana as a young writer at Carifesta XIII in Barbados 2017 and again at Carifesta XIV in Trinidad and Tobago in 2019.
Both of her books were launched in Trinidad and exhibited during Carifesta. Before the publications, she was gaining attention as a performer of Creole poetry. She writes in Guyanese Creolese as an ideological choice to emphasise her preoccupation with post-colonialism. She has had much to say about writing in Creole, an interest she developed at UG, inspired by her Linguistics degree. Her bio sketch in one of the books asserts that her language “employs her country’s Creole English, coupled with the active engagement of the Guyanese space that is essential in facilitating a breakdown and breakthrough process that will allow all un-homed individuals the ability to find their true selves, devoid of any colonial touch.”
This language in both works is consistent with the anti-imperialist stance of her characters and personae in several poems. She fights against colonialism and neo-colonialism through the employment of the vernacular as well as imagery, metaphor and recurring symbols of death, violence and earth. Earth appears as a sustaining presence, a reclaiming spirit, a sense of belonging and of home – there is a motif of “De Red Muddah” that appears sometimes as native earth but at other times as an avenging spirit.
On the other hand, while there is that richness in what she achieves from artistic use of language, Mohamed’s Creolese is not always easy to read. Basically, creole is a non-standard language, especially when it comes to the spelling of words, which is best done in an orthography guided by the sound of the words. Mohamed has not managed this consistently or in a manner that makes her narratives or dialogue easy to read. That is so more in Blackout Daze than in the collection of poems. It interferes with the flow, the rhythm but not with the characterisation or the effective, sensual imagery.
Blackout Daze is a short collection of creole plays; there are three of them – “Graveyaard Talez”, “Anemone” and “MonKey Pun Eye-Yan”, but they tend to read as one continuing work because of the unity of style, themes and references. They are at best poetic drama, but in all cases they are far more poetry than theatre. Mohamed is better able to communicate effectively through poetic dialogue, poetic monologues and dramatic narratives rather than through use of the stage. In a way they bring to mind Wilson Harris’ Eternity to Season (1954), not as if it is a copy of Harris in any way, because it is not; but in the way it reads, the type of work that it is, and its verse quality. Mohamed’s creole plays are verse drama that do not employ many techniques of the theatre.
Is You Madness Nah Me Own is a short collection of creole poetry. The poems are: “Welcome to the Graveyard A Imperialism”, “Elisabeth, De Un-Indian Coolie Gurl”, “Ah Tell Yah, Is You Madness Nah Me Own”, “Great Gammuda Lakshmi” and “A Blaze A Dem Shadow”. Here again, they all appear as parts of one long poem with a continuing unity of theme, voice, Hindu consciousness, anti-imperialism and post-colonialism. They are dominated by a plot in which an Indian girl is forced by circumstances at home where she is rejected, to join the indentureship boat to British Guiana.
The various poems dramatise the horrendous passage across the kala pani with all the horrors at sea as well as those on land on the plantation. Prominent in the ongoing sequential plot are the gender-related oppressions and atrocities, as well as those that were cultural and religious. Poems deal with the acts of stripping the Indian woman of her identity, forcing her to jettison her religion, her cultural traditions and adopt those of English, including her name. She is re-named Elisabeth. Significantly, the poet uses a version of her own middle name in the poem as if to make a statement that she, herself suffered similar erasure of culture or self in her present life in a neo-colonial society.
Just as in the plays, the poems suffer because of the orthography which causes a struggle to read some lines of creole verse. But there are several links and resonances in both books. There is a voice and there are threads of history. While the poems mainly focus Indian indentureship and its modern day aftermath, the plays cover a wider range of history. There is a strong presence of the Dutch and a deliberate mixture or confusion of the Dutch master with the English. The wife of the Dutch planter, “Miss-is. Ana –Eye-Yah Charles” is the same as the wife of the English planter “Massa Charles”, and she is also transformed into the violent “Wata Mama” in the river in Bartica.
The same Massa Charles and wife are the antagonists against the Indian woman in the poems. As it happens, Massa Charles is derived from Dennis Scott’s play An Echo in the Bone (1974) in which Mr Charles appears as the white owner of an estate and plays the role of the archetypal planter under slavery, paying for the sins of his ancestors and representing a neo-colonial presence in the play. He is borrowed by Mohamed as an archetype in both her poetry and her plays.
Her plays will hardly work as stage drama, and depend very much on the power of the dialogue and the setting. A director will have to draw on what the scripts suggest but mostly on his or her own imagination and stage artistry to perform them. But they link with the poetry to make some important statements.
A few interesting points are Mohamed’s use of Sorrow Hill in Bartica, of the fair maid – the wata mama, and the river. She has a very effective dramatisation of the dysfunction of the police in times of need when a poor family suffers violence, death and tragedy. The con-tinuing suffering of the people and the modern results and continuities of a history of slavery, indentureship and colonialism are recurring preoccupations in Mohamed’s two published works. They help to give an idea of what the landscape looks like in the newer contemporary Guyanese literature.
