“If there are ten doors you could go through and only one you must go through, a kind God closes the other nine.” Such were the words that returned to me as I read the acceptance speech of Bernadette Indira Persaud delivered on the occasion of being conferred with an Honorary Doctorate for Excellence in Arts from the University of Guyana on November 11, 2023. Born in Bush Lot, Berbice and coming of age at Mackenzie High School and later St Joseph High School in Georgetown, the path Persaud has journeyed could not have been anticipated. As a consequence, the door through which she did her life’s travel could not have been predicted.
After years teaching English Language, Literature, and Art at the secondary level, Persaud found the door she had stepped through closing in on her. “The year,” she writes “was 1980.” After teaching first at Charlestown Secondary School from 1967 to 1977 and then at St Rose’s High School from 1977, Persaud was dismissed from her post. She writes, “paraphrasing the words of the distinguished Guyanese poet Martin Carter: