The Colony's best poet is a Marxist leader of the P.P.P., Martin Carter. His ideology has given his work a passion and intensity. I will quote the whole of one of his best and most typical poems, called 'New Day': Not hands like mine these Carib altars knew: nameless and quite forgotten are the gods; and mute, mute and alone, their silent people spend a ring of vacant days, not like more human years, as aged and brown their rivers flow away. yes, pressing on my land, there is an ocean's flood; it is a muttering sea, there, right at my feet my strangled city lies, my father's city and my mother's heart: hoarse groaning tongues, children without love mothers without blood, as cold as dust nights dim, there is no rest. ah! mine was a pattern woven by a slave now still are the fields covered by the floods, over altars gone; rouse, turning to the sun. and more fierce rain will come again tonight, new day must clean, have floods not drowned the fields killing my rice and stirring up my wrath. In his poem 'For My Son' Mr. Carter reiterates this theme of awakening which runs through most of his poetry: Light will awaken All the young flowers Sleeping and growing Hour and hour. Dew is awake Morning is soon Flowers will bloom. Mr. A. J. Seymour's poetry has none of this political allegiance. He is at his best when he is celebrating the physical beauty of his country, retelling the ancient myths of the Amerindians or commenting on the history of the Colony. His poem 'There Runs a Dream' is typical of his work: There runs a dream of perished Dutch plantations Black waters rustling through vegetation That towers and tangles banks, run silently These rivers know that strong and quiet men Wilson Harris belongs to the same school as Mr. Seymour, but his poetry is rather more contemplative and philosophical. He is strongly influenced by the later poems of T. S. Eliotparticularly in his series called 'The Spirit of Place'. I will quote the last passage from 'The Spirit of the Fall': So Man in his unreconciled drama stands where the future can never be ground however sensible the spray that broods like Spirit over the Fall. Once the essence is broken the inter-connection remains unplanted. At the end of the trail the first deception happens, the hero comes to the precipice, goes over and goes down. The huge mist that rises and offers a sea solid and compacted is only a captivating mirage. Over and down, the ineffectual shriek, the slippery caves and bubbles, the startling and startled ground. very fine and ground to streamers of cloud and deposit of mists: to consolidate every little ground. Margins are always ebbing and flowing, the stage to return or go forward construction of time to where the solid lands come up and climb. * * * How, I wonder, did the folk arts of the Slave Coast manage so entirely to be lost during the horrors of the passage to the New World? Why did the slaves, who came from a people accustomed to the creation of artifacts and works of art, sometimes of a remarkable order, not recreate even the simplest of their visual arts in the Caribbean islands? Their dances have survived in the mambo, the conga, and their rhythms in the calypsos of Trinidad and the meringues of Santo Domingo: do yet as far as I know it is only in Haiti that the African plastic arts have survived, and this by means of a conscious revivification of a a peoples dead tradition: for the rest not one decorative motif Culture make them baskets or to work in precious metals has survived. In all the Ria is left, no inclination to make pottery and adorn it, to weave me coastland of British Guiana I could find nothing whatever, either among Indians or Africans, which even pretended to be a folk art; in Georgetown alone there are Indian gold and silversmiths producing commercial filigree work. During the last decade or so Guianese interest in the practice of painting, rather than in its appreciation, has greatly increased. This is largely due to miss of Mr. E. R. Burrowes at the Working People's Art Society, Winlite the excellent and inspiring work u which he founded-work for which he has been honoured with 9 129 s mem-0110 chem usually what The Re wantto Joelings Most of the painters appeared to be of African origin, and although their immediate inspiration was European, the uninhibited statements of the paintings, often frankly sensual in an entirely non-obscene way, seemed to have their origin in the atavisms of race. Guianese painting has not yet reached a stage of sophistication comparable to Guianese poetry, and it shows a tendency to lose the imagery and naturalness of primitive art. That is an inevitable stage in the formation of a cultural activity of any value. Quality and sophistication could come with time, as young and promising painters emerge. But here there is a similar danger as in literature. A good Guianese painter will have to come to Europe to study, since there is no really adequate training to be had in the West Indies, and in proportion to the extent of his talent he is likely to identify himself with European painting, looking on British Guiana and its culture as something he has escaped from. It is the traditional dilemma of the expatriate artist and can only be solved in the mind of the artist himself. It makes the 'creation of quality' in the West Indies doubly difficult to achieve. There is an interesting example in Denis Williams, a brilliant Guianese painter, and illustrator of this book, who has more or less settled in Europe, where he is experimenting with the various languages of the modern movement. He knows that his future as an artist lies in Europe, and it is difficult to blame him for not wishing to identify himself with British Guiana. However, one day he may find the images and the light of his native country returning to him as a source for his work. In Georgetown I saw some of the work of his early Guianese period; it is startling, frightening, violent in mood; drawn, it seems, out of the darkness of Africa. The small, integrated intelligentsia of Georgetown is not at the moment a very potent force in the Guianese community, but it recognizes its own value and its responsibilities in bringing the Colony towards maturity. It knows that it is the intelligentsia more than any other section of the community which must carry out the task of completing the pyramid, and the intellectual leaders of the Colony take seriously their aim of the 'creation of quality' in British Guiana. It is sad that intellectuals and artists are, as a class, less able to dominate the minds of the people than are politicians. 8. THE PEOPLE'S PROGRESSIVE N. PARTY O colonial political party has captured the interest of the world more completely than did the People's Progressive Party at the time of the suspension of the Constitution in October, 1953. Anti-imperialists sprang to its support, seeing the suspension as proof of Britain's insincerity in her policy of giving her colonies self-determination; liberal-minded people with genuine goodwill towards the colonies were dismayed, questioning the U.K. Government's action as possibly unjust and precipitate. The suspension became a far larger question than the ending of the P.P.P.'s ministerial power in British Guiana; it became a symbol of the dangers attached to the handing over of power in all the colonies, and there is no doubt that what happened in British Guiana has made Britain more cautious in the formation of constitutions for her other colonies. I met both leaders of the P.P.P., shortly after my arrival in of the Constitution being restored and free elections allowed. teldumi The Robertson Report had called for a responsible moderate ८ The split was therefore so it was said-being manufactured Deep to give the appearance that the Communist Jaganites had been clim expelled, whereas in fact the Party would unite again once the P.P.P. this was not a far-fetched view. ing the the Congress Birt's colon be comm Chay |