Seymour Birth Centenary Activities (Part 5)
On Monday January 13, 2014, the National Library staged the unveiling of a plaque on the former residence of Arthur James Seymour (AJS) at lot 23 North Road, Bourda. The event was witnessed by family members – Seymour’s second daughter, Joan Seymour; Seymour’s niece, Dr Jacqueline de Weever; close friends including Dr Ian McDonald, the present owner of the property, media houses and staff members of the National Library. (The unveiling followed the ‘See More Poetry’ performance on Sunday January 12, 2014, marking Seymour’s birth centenary.)
It was an overcast morning with intermittent drizzle being shooed away by ‘the cool Trade Winds’. The clouds over Guyana were like ‘little curled feathers on the back of the sky [T]hen frisky lambs that gambol and bowl along [s]hephered by the brave Trade Wind’. Many of the persons witnessing the unveiling knew the house and its surroundings intimately as captured in the following poems/odes by AJS – ‘The House’ and ‘To the Family House Awaiting Repair’:

The House
I have a room
Where several sages
Sleep in their serried shelves
And await my conversation
Here
I-fashion images
Carving and fitting words
Polishing syllables
Shaping new rhythms
To grace new meanings
Distilling experience
Hammering metal
In my spirit’s workshop

To the Family House Awaiting Repair
Oh, the long narrow home heavy with living
An age of memories people the walls
Around your naked frame.

Warm shell of love and crowding children
Where young girls in uniform
Hats worn like horse guards
Speech full of the school diction
And the cool Trade Winds carry echoes…
The scent of roses in the slim garden
Growing in the four-hour overhead sun
Smell of bread from the oven
Everything mingling in the wind

Image of the dedicated student..
Impatient for games and parties but slow for school

So many came here – tea visiting professors
Exam students, poets, novelists, sculptors,
A Chief Justice – a future Prime Minister…
And little children to the Kindergarten
Wrestling their way into the hall of learning
Chattering, tormenting the wild cherry-tree
That always yields its fruit.

O, crowd your long years of memories
Into a prayer for their future
For all who lived and loved and studied here

To fill out those poems, to add life and colour to those words, to find out more about the rich and rewarding lives of ‘all who lived and loved and studied’ at that house and to know more about the life and work of Seymour it would be useful to read the following four of five of his autobiographies:
‘Growing up in Guyana’
‘Pilgrim Memories’
‘Family Impromptu’
‘Thirty Years a Civil Servant’
The plaque was another way of preserving our literary heritage and I suspect the National Library will again in the near future continue and extend similar gestures to other literary shrines across the country.

Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com

What’s happening:
• ‘An Introduction to Guyanese Literature’ is now available from the author at the above contacts, Austin’s Book Service (telephone # 226-7350) and at the National Library (telephone #226-2690).

Written By Petamber Persaud