As I get older, I have come to realize, time and again, that we are often oblivious to things of great value in the culture we inhabit, and I have to admit that I didn’t come to this position on my own. I have been led there by comments along those lines by several persons in my immediate circle, principal among them being my friend Ian McDonald, who has often reminded me, as I gripe about one thing or another, that we (a) we have to keep trying and (b) that we should not forget the many blessings we have before us in the Guyana landscape despite all the detritus. In the group admonishing me is my wife, Annette, with her dedicated commitment to Guyana’s environment, so much so that visiting Grand Cayman for the first time, she immediately launched into how much she missed this wonderful Guyana forest landscape that was so important to her life.
I did have a bit of a jump start on all this in my youth, when I worked for B. G. Airways as a Flight Clerk, operating out of Atkinson Field (now Timehri) and seeing a range of our interior for the first time via the DC-3 aircraft serving the interior. Apart from the obvious Kaieteur and Orinduik vistas I was introduced to, I remember being particularly struck by the astonishing sprawl of our Rupununi Savannah – I would stare through the airplane window at it on the South Savannah trips in awe at what we had there compared to the coastland. Looking back on it afterwards, living in Toronto, it occurred to me that in all those years with the airline, I did not recall anyone speaking about a similar fascination with the area; it could have been there, but it was not a conversation topic I remember. In a way, that same absence is there in the conversations I meet up with today, and Ian’s comment, as I reflect on it, suggests that the awareness I’m referring to is still missing in some way in me; so that, along with almost everyone else, I, too, need reminding.
Indeed, these days, with all the readily available technology to both photograph and distribute, the reminders come to us, almost daily, reminding us indeed about the value of what we have. Sometimes it is the range of astonishing images of Kaieteur Falls or a close up of the rapids at Orinduik, the obvious “oh my God” shots, but that is only a fraction of the reminders. Some of them come from unexpected sources such as, just this week, two photographs from Ian Brierly, an English photographer who has spent some time in Guyana. One of his photos, posted on Facebook this week, is a view of western Georgetown, taken from a drone, in which Ian showed the spread of the city but also skilfully captured the section of the Demerara River just beyond; in that one image, the power of that landscape with the urban presence almost cradled by the river and with the West Bank land ghostly in the distance. Mr. Brierly, who clearly has as eye for contrasts, also posted a picture, from atop the Pegasus Hotel, looking west, showing us the Umana Yana structure below, sitting like a sentinel over the city. While that may not have been his intention – the observation is mine – the effect is there, and I mention here as an example of the condition of these vistas being part of our lives that we don’t seem to recognize and/or value. In other words, Ian McDonald’s point; and once you’ve been alerted to the matter you suddenly notice other examples of it.
Similarly, another individual with a keen eye, local photographer Leon Moore, has been recently showing us online pictures of Guyana birds in the wild (among other things, Leon does nature tours) which I can only describe as riveting. I’m not particularly a bird-watcher, but some of the close-up photographs taken by this gentleman left me transfixed. I didn’t know such creatures existed here. They were so beautiful it left me incredulous that folks would actually imprison such birds permanently in 2-foot-square cages, or even smuggle them out of the country, for sale, squeezed into hair-curling plastic cylinders. Leon’s photos left me suddenly more appreciative of the small brown bird that often appears in the window, 20 feet away from where I type this, chirping away in a frenzy clearly showing a joy for living. And (back to my original point) there are scores of such birds in our environment – I haven’t been noticing.
The examples abound. Annette’s son, Alex, now making a name for himself with videos of natural Guyana, is also showing us so much environmental wonder – such as a slow troll of Mount Roraima that makes the area almost mystic. Similarly, photographer Michael Lam, working often in black-and-white, has put before us that other Guyana – the one that we pass every day without noticing and appreciating, like an image of the seawall, he has, taken at low tide that brings home that the wall, created to control flooding, is now almost a kind of comfort for people living on the coast, even though we may not frontally recognize that.
There are scores of other examples: our network of creeks, rivers, canals and trenches; the incredible sunsets we see posted virtually daily on social media; the array of fresh produce on display every day of the week in our markets and roadside vendors; the East Coast breeze; the road from Linden that takes us to Savannah country (ideally not in the rainy season when it can be a quagmire) on a twisting trail cut through dense forest so that all one sees, literally, for miles, is this natural jungle on either side and the sky above and then, the impact of the forest trail ending suddenly, almost like a door opening, so that in the space of a few hundred yards we go from dense jungle to this thrilling spectacle, and I mean “thrilling”, of the bowl of the Savannah filling up the horizon for as far as one can see. It is like a thunderbolt, and every time I take that road route and come out into that view of another world I am taken aback; it makes you catch your breath. Although I have seen it before, the effect is always like the first time; look at what we have here, what a gift from the Creator.
There are so many examples of it. I leave you with one more: I was born and grew up mostly in West Dem and had some youthful appreciation of its open spaces and for the Boeraserie Conservancy behind it, teeming with fish as well as being a magnet for weekend travelers, but it was only recently that I had an experience which showed me more than that. It came during my Artist in Residence stint with the University of Guyana when I was doing a performance at Anna Regina in the UG arts-outreach programme and travelling with the three musicians who perform with me in Guyana (Oliver Basdeo, James Jacobs and Colin Perreira). We left from Ogle in an Air Services aircraft, and flew for the next hour or so and, in that spell, at about 10,000 feet up, I was seeing that landscape, dominated by the enormous Essequibo River, the land above it, and the land below, including my West Dem home territory, stretching all the way to beyond Parika. And in all that journey, all of that under us was Guyana. It literally gave me the chills. My experience is not unique. Anyone who lives here and has been fortunate to move around the country would have felt it. That is the resource that Ian and others are talking about; the awareness that amid the angst there is beauty and splendor about, one just has to take time to notice.
