“Dickety!! Dickety!!!
(The sweet melody of a trumpet calling horses to the starting gate plays)
“Elaine cussing she husband Tim
With de money he wasting
In English racing
Buying books from quite in London
Checking de horse information
“He know
Who is colt and who is filly
Who win de Oaks and win de Derby
This English racing have him like a fool
Throwing all he bread in de pool
“But Monday morning is horse
In de evening he loss
Evening races, is horse
Double losses, is horse
Man ah want a divorce
Better ah did married to a horse
Yes ah want a divorce
Monday to Sunday you playing horse
“Dickety!! Dickety!!
“As he reach home in de evening
He up with de newspaper researching
De man aint had no time for me
He talking about [Steve] Cauthen and [Pat] Eddery – [jockeys]
He know who is de horse mother and father
Who is de owner and de trainer
Dis stupid man he aint hav no shame
He aint know he grandmother name.”
Calypso connoisseurs will instantly recognise the above as the lyrics of “Is Horse”, from the 1986 album ‘Rebound’ by top notch composer and calypsonian Winston Henry, performing under the aptly adopted sobriquet Explainer, who also rendered other classics such as “Lorraine”, “Park It” and “Ras Mas”.
Like Tim, we, as a society, are fast being side tracked with pinning our hopes (and future) on a single-minded obsession and becoming oblivious to all other matters of importance in our daily existence. Not a day goes by, perhaps not even an hour passes, without our conversations shifting to the inevitable subject of oil. Oil. Oil. The topic appears to dominate every daily newspaper front page and headline every television and radio newscast. Our vocabulary is now littered with words and phrases that were hardly ever heard in our everyday banter seven short years ago.
Now we are all fast becoming experts on the subject. Oil blocks, oil revenues, royalties, tax concessions, tax holidays, refineries, natural gas, sweet crude, discoveries, more discoveries, billions (definitely a favourite) – of drums, of dollars, US dollars, Kazakhstan Model, climate change, Petroleum Agreement, fossil fuels, public accountability, renegotiation, spills. Names of multinational corporations and acronyms are tossed around like a beach ball; Exxon, Hess, CNOOC, Haliburton, SWF, EEZ, EPA, to mention a few.
Meanwhile, as we channel our focus on oil, important matters are cast aside, and start drifting slowly into the world of irrelevance. One such significant concern is the subject of the Guyana Prize for Literature, which was last awarded in 2015. The deadline for submission for entries for the 2017 competition was 31st March, 2017, and since then the topic has acquired the status of the elephant in the room.
In June 2018, then minister of social cohesion Dr George Norton of the APNU+AFC Coalition, proffered the feeble excuse of the cost of hosting the competition. “We would not go spending that kind of money if we are not certain that it is achieving what it set out to achieve in the first place and if it’s worth the amount of money—because it runs into millions of dollars that we can ill-afford at this time,” he had stated.
Later that year, a forum facilitated by Dr Paloma Mohamed and the University of Guyana Department of Philanthropy, Alumni and Civic Engagement was held to “reimagine” the Prize,
from which a report was produced. The last thing heard of it was that it was “at the level of Cabinet,” according to the minister. That was in February, 2019.
The intrinsic value of the Guyana Prize cannot be readily quantified in monetary or cultural terms. It is (or should that be was) a one-of-a-kind accolade that evolved with time, growing initially from a single award – for which entrants in both poetry and fiction competed – to separate rewards for fiction, poetry and drama, the latter being entirely unique to the Guyana Prize. In addition to being the pride, and possibly the envy of the Caribbean, the Guyana Prize was the only other literature competition apart from the Commonwealth Prize to offer training for writers.
It is ironic that the burial rites for the Guyana Prize were read during the APNU+AFC’s time in office, since it had been implemented in 1987 during the presidency of Desmond Hoyte, whose party, the PNC, formed the largest part of the coalition. The current government has shown no interest in reviving the Guyana Prize, so we are left to conclude that the fire for its cremation will be lit at any moment. Why have successive governments shown total reluctance towards developing this tradition? Why hide our literature, the mirror of our society? As one searches for a plausible answer, the only recurring one is fear. Fear of what? Fear that our tradition of producing great writers like Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris and Jan Carew might one day spawn another great scribe capable of producing a body of work that makes them uncomfortable. No excuse for shelving this competition will ever be deemed acceptable.
Writing in his weekly Arts Column in this newspaper on 1st December, 2019, long-time Secretary of the Prize Management Committee Al Creighton observed, “As it stands today, the Guyana Prize has been discontinued… Lauded internationally and acknowledged among the world’s literary prizes, its value has not been equally appreciated in Guyana.” He concluded his extensive article with the lamentation, “It is inconceivable that this priceless institution should be shut down.”
In Trinidad and Tobago, as calypsonians of the calibre of Explainer, Shadow, and Lord Kitchener depart, and their protégés gravitate towards the more lucrative genre of soca, which focuses on musical beat rather than lyrical content, the true value of the calypsonian and his chronicling the good and bad of society wanes. The cultural loss is one of an evolutionary nature. Here, the tragedy is that the people elected to lead our country do not appreciate or understand the value of the institution of the Guyana Prize and appear to have deliberately chosen to sever it from us.