By Pauline Melville
Pauline Melville is a British Guyanese writer who has worked in theatre, television, film and cabaret. Her novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Other literary awards include the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Guyana Prize for Literature and an accolade from the New York Public Library. Her new collection of short stories ‘The Master of Chaos’ was published earlier this year.
There’s a Joni Mitchell song which has the following words:
‘Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’
I was reminded of those words when I heard that the Jamaican poet, Jean Binta Breeze had died. Breeze and I became friends in the nineteen eighties. I worked alongside her in England. I saw her again at various times when I was in Jamaica. And thinking that we would all be around forever (big mistake, folks), I had not really bothered to keep in touch with her. I did not know that she was in Jamaica with collapsing lungs, hooked up to oxygen cylinders and in a wheelchair for those last months and weeks of her life. I remember her at a time when she was vibrant and radiant, performing her dub poetry all over the world. She had the delicacy, vulnerability and unpredictability of a butterfly, combined with a personality that was tough enough and laced with enough courage and humour, to overcome bouts of mental illness and to continue writing in Jamaican patois about her experiences as a Jamaican woman. And now she’s gone.
Jean Binta Breeze was part of a movement of dub poets who understood that poetry resides in everyday speech and elevated it to take its rightful place amongst the classics. It was only when I reached on my shelf for a book of her poems, ‘Riddym Ravings’ sitting in its place between the poetry of Johnny Agard and Martin Carter that I realised she was also a visionary and possibly something of a prophet.
The eighties was a decade when many of us flew backwards and forwards to the region from the UK or the USA or Canada. It was the best of times and the worst of time. There were shattering political convulsions – the violent deaths of Walter Rodney and Maurice Bishop but there was also an explosion of grassroots art, political activity, popular theatre and the emergence internationally of the dub poets. Rastafari had a major presence in the diaspora and Jean’s dub poetry sung its way across the Atlantic, resonating on both sides of the sea, carrying a message about ‘de simple tings of life’, embedded in the landscape of her own background. It was not poetry that belonged in an industrial landscape. It was poetry close to nature, oceans, blue mountains, picking and planting and stan’pipe life, Rastafari style.
It is in this closeness to nature that Breeze’s poetry seems to send us a message for today. Well, maybe a warning more than a message. At about the same time a few weeks ago that I was listening to her poetry via a video link, I picked up a newspaper and read an article in the Guardian with the heading: ‘Exxon’s Oil Drilling Gamble off Guyana’s Coast Poses Major Environmental Risk.’ Here are some excerpts from the Guardian piece:
‘…experts claim that Exxon in Guyana appears to be taking advantage of an unprepared government in one of the lowest-income nations in South America, allowing the company to skirt necessary oversight. Worse, they also believe the company’s safety plans are inadequate and dangerous.
‘A top engineer who studies oil industry disasters, as well as a former government regulator, have levelled criticisms at Exxon. They say workers’ lives, public health and Guyana’s oceans and fisheries – which locals rely on heavily– are all at stake.’
‘Moreover, Exxon flares, or burns its excess gas. In the first 15 months of production alone, that flaring contributed nearly 770,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions – the equivalent of driving 167,000 cars for one year.’
‘Environmental campaigners and activist shareholders suggest Exxon also cannot reconcile the project with its public commitments to address climate change and reduce carbon emissions.’
There is some irony in the fact that much of Guyana’s coastal plain, including Georgetown, is below sea level by as much as six feet. Climate change and carbon emissions will bring about a rise in sea levels throughout the world. Thinking long-term, Guyana might just have invited the means of its own destruction to take a seat some little way off its own shores. Oil companies from as far away as Nigeria and Alaska have a history of making false promises and then ruining the local environments that host their operations.
At around the same time that I was working with Jean Binta Breeze in London I was unlucky enough to suffer a life-threatening attack from a stranger who broke into my flat. My first overwhelming instinct was to return to Guyana. Much as it was helpful to see family and friends, in reality it was the landscape that I needed. I spent a long time journeying in canoes and small boats powered with Yamaha engines, along the silent black waters of various rivers as far apart as Supenaam creek and Kurukupari: creeks that were arched with overhanging green bush. I bathed in backwaters the colour of Pepsi-Cola, stained with vegetation from the great rivers. It is easy for those caught up with the struggles and preoccupations of daily life in Georgetown to forget the healing properties, the fecundity and beauty of our hinterland forest and savannahs.
The Joni Mitchell song warns about the destruction of that environment:
‘They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
They took all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum,
And they charged the people a dollar an’ a half just to see ‘em’.
Of course, oil wealth is enticing. Of course it would be good if Guyana were to be lifted from being one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. But somehow that wealth always seems to stay with a few people at the top and never trickles down to the poorest. Although we live in a democracy, to quote the American activist, Lucy Parsons: ‘We should never deceive ourselves that the rich will allow us to vote away their wealth.’ And I remain sceptical about the illusory promises of those oil companies. Exxon reminds me more of the snake who entered the Garden of Eden.
I have two snake stories. The first is a Wapichan story from the savannahs. Now I see the man in the story as Guyana, the wife as the Guyanese environment and Exxon as the proverbial snake.
“Well one day this man had a quarrel with his wife. I can’t remember what it was about. He went off to hunt armadillo in order to cool down. On the way he saw a hole in the ground. Inside the hole he saw rainbow colours – you know those colours you see on the female land camoodie, the small anacondas. The male camoodies often lie in blackened coils parched by the sun but the female can be multi-coloured. Anyway as soon as he saw the camoodie he began to feel that there was a woman near him, walking close, who wanted to seduce him. It was the spirit of the rainbow camoodie. When he came home he wouldn’t have anything to do with his wife. In the next room she could hear him laughing and giggling like he was in love. He can see a beautiful girl with him. There is no-one there. Only he can see this girl. No-one else sees her. He refuses to make love to his wife. Nothing. He won’t have anything to do with his wife and she hear him laughing as if he is with somebody else. She told her mother who realised that it is the spirit of the rainbow camoodie seducing him away from natural life. Some people stop eating altogether when this happens. Her mother knew that snakes don’t like hot pepper. She took bricks out of the wall near the farine pan where they parch the farine. She made him wriggle through the wall, bricking it up behind him. Then she burns peppers in the farine pan so that the snake spirit cannot follow. After that he became his old self again. But it too late and his wife has gone off somewhere else. She live outside the village now. Her mother say that she turn killer. A tiger. She a turn-tiger somewhere in the bush.”
And it does seem that nature is taking vengeance against us for its maltreatment – forest fires all over the world and floods, earthquakes and droughts.
The second snake story is in the form of a song by the poet and songwriter Oscar Brown Junior:
On her way to work one morning
Down the path ‘longside the lake
A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake.
His pretty coloured skin had been all frosted with the dew
‘Oh well, she cried, I’ll take you in and I’ll take care of you.’
Chorus:
Take me in, tender woman
Take me in, for heaven’s sake
Take me in, tender woman, sighed the snake.
She wrapped him up all cosy, in a comforter of silk
And laid him by the fireside with some honey and some milk,
She hurried home from work that night and soon as she arrived
She found that pretty snake she’d taken in had been revived.
Chorus: Take me in, tender woman, etc.
She clutched him to her bosom, ‘You’re so beautiful,’ she cried
‘But if I hadn’t brought you in by now you might have died.’
She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed and held him tight,
Instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite.
Chorus: Take me in, tender woman, etc.
‘I saved you,’ cried the woman,
‘And you’ve bitten me, but why?
And you know your bite is poisonous and now I’m gonna die.’
Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin,
‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’
Chorus: Take me in, tender woman, etc.
*
Returning once more to the loss of Jean Binta Breeze. Some forty years ago, before the current anxieties about climate change had spread throughout the world, she wrote a poem called ‘Warner’. It is indeed a prophetic warning about the destruction of the environment. Here are the last few lines:
‘an de baby madda
kean talk
fah if de river mumma die
if de river mumma die
who shall cure de pain.’
Sometimes it makes more sense for us to listen to the poets rather than those politicians who might, when it comes down to it, turn out to be snake-oil salesmen.
