So It Go

God knows if I’ll ever finish it, but after several proddings from various quarters I have begun writing a book.

We have rock stars in the Caribbean; we don’t call them that, but, in the North American meaning of the term, that’s what they are.

The folks in tourism have it right when they talk about the Guyanese treasures we have, particularly in the interior, for visitors.

When I was a youngster growing up in West Demerara and going to Saints, we usually headed for the Pomeroon in the August school break.

In my early life, that stretch when Tradewinds began, a young man from Linden, living in Toronto, got very annoyed with me over a song.

The cliché about a picture being the descriptive equivalent of a thousand words remains relevant because like every cliché it conveys some essential truth.

Bert Carter is a national treasure; let’s start from there. If you needed any persuading of that, you should have been at Moray House on a recent Monday when he spoke to a very attentive crowd on the drainage infrastructure of Georgetown.

On a recent trip to Orlando I saw a comment by Sam Roberts, son of former Guyana Police Chief “Skip” Roberts, on the widespread Caribbean practice of pinning nicknames on people, especially males, and he noted the almost amiable nature of the practice in that, most of the time, nobody takes offence to the monikers even when they could be seen as disparaging.

About to conclude a column for So it go I am aborting it to write, instead, on a sudden impulse, about Helen Bartlett, a mother in Point Fortin,Trinidad, who is big in the news this week over a video of her beating her 12-year-old wayward daughter.

A letter in Kaieteur News this week, by Mr M Maxwell, made the trenchant point that our forefathers came to Guyana already imbued with the racial prejudices of their ancestral homelands; that those ethnic divides, while recognized and exploited by the British for their own advantage, were a pre-existing condition; it was certainly used but just as certainly not created by the colonialists.

For each of us there is the memory of a particular performance of a song at a particular time that stirred us deeply in some way, creating such an impact, for different reasons, that the memory stays and stays.

My very first visit to Trinidad in 1967, to try and launch Tradewinds in the Caribbean, was a whirlwind affair – a lot of hustle and hurry.

As Guyana continues the current tourism expansion push, persons in the industry must be encouraged by the number of interesting travel outreaches that have come to Guyana in recent times – cruise ship in Georgetown last year; birding groups in the Rupununi; visiting ocean-going yachts;  a National Geographic cruise ship in the Essequibo, etc. 

Memory is often not the best storehouse for trivial information – it’s an arbitrary process which often excludes something that turns out to be important – so I have developed this habit of jotting down, on a notebook or my computer, transient thoughts or reactions on a range of subjects.

For all of us, at whatever strata we live, episodes come along on our journey that transform us significantly purely from the realization or understanding those encounters generate.

Almost every time you get on an aeroplane to go somewhere, several learning experiences come your way. 

This is not my story; I’m only the conduit.  It’s a story of individual fortitude, and of people rising to a challenge. 

I am tired of hearing it.  I heard it again this week. 

Some things remain the same: political turmoil, taxation, potholed roads, and bad food in restaurants being four examples. 

Among the number of significant social forces in the apparatus of daily life one encounters in the more developed world (US, Canada, Europe, etc) is the array of institutions functioning in those societies that serve, ultimately, to convey the opinions or positions of the average citizen to the persons and political parties in positions of rule.