Covering the Hundred Years’ Period, 1831-1931
Introduction by Gemma Robinson, University of Stirling

Origins of the anthology
Anthologies rarely perform just the task that their titles assert. For N.E. Cameron – working his way through the poetry in the Reading Rooms of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society in Georgetown – the production of the first anthology of Guyanese literature was the answer to a request: “to give some account of the literature of this country” (“Introductory Essay”). But this was not a straightforward concern.

It raised questions about the nature, status, even the possibility of a literary tradition, in what was then British Guiana. Cameron admits:
“As my attention was never drawn to such matters at school, I revealed the state of my ignorance when I replied, not without much embarrassment, that I did not think the people were much addicted to literature.”
(“Introductory Essay”).

This response, given to friends at Cambridge while Cameron was in the UK as a student, provided the impetus for a pioneering collection of work that took seriously Guyana’s literary legacy from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The results are an anthology that charts not only the rise of poetry in colonial Guyana, but also one that surveys an emerging national poetics, the poetics of Empire and slavery, experiments in literary form, and one that provides a key chapter in the country’s history of the book.
The ninety-three poems collected here voice the shifting emphases of several generations of poets, variously identifying their population as “Demerara’s Sons” (Egbert Martin (‘Leo’)), “sons of Africa” (T.R.F. Elliot) and “Guiana’s sons” (Walter MacA. Lawrence). These differing labels mark the changing times and possible future identities of people in the South American territory. In Cameron’s generation the futures of the Caribbean colonies were debated in terms both political and cultural, and the date of the anthology’s publication is significant. He explains in a later work:
“1931 was a year of great inspiration to Guianese. It was the Centenary of the Union of the three counties of Berbice, Essequibo and Demerara into the Colony British Guiana. An outburst of literary activity greeted the event – Webber’s Centenary History, Cameron’s Guianese Poetry, Magazines by Eric Stoby and Marion Rockcliffe, Hildred Britton’s Stages of Development of British Guiana’s Womanhood, 1831-1931, while Balthasar, a drama by the author, gave the impetus to dramatic writings and productions by Esme Cendrecourt.
The Centenary was duly observed by several events, an outstanding one being a Centenary Exhibition and Fair held on the grounds of the G.C.C. and G.F.C. with a section devoted to Education. The Centenary was commemorated by the institution of a Centenary Scholarship the number of which was subsequently increased. The Governor entered into the spirt of the occasion when he suggested that Guianese painters might paint on the panels of the tank in the yard of the new Broad Street Government School, scenes depicting various episodes in the country’s history.“
If these works and events show a growing interest in charting specifically Guyanese achievement, it is also worth pausing to note that Cameron does not query the British imperial context for these activities (indeed he dedicated his anthology to the Govenor, Sir Edward Denham). For some his comments might reveal a tension between and assertion of cultural self-determination and a colonial politics that did not countenance the break-up of the British Empire. For others Cameron’s remarks might place him in a transitional period between the colonial and anti-colonial, when Caribbean activists and intellectuals began to map out different ways of understanding their pasts and present. Certainly, Cameron’s editorial endeavours in Guyana were not isolated. 1925 saw the publication of Louis Morpeau’s Anthologie d’un siècle de poesie haitienne, 1817-1925, setting a precedent for collecting nineteenth and twentieth-century poets together. In 1929 J.E. Clare McFarlane’s Voices from Summerland: An Anthology of Jamaican Poetry was published in London. Eight years later Albert Gomes would edit From Trinidad: A Selection from the Fiction and Verse of the Island of Trinidad, British West Indies, building on the work if Beacon, the literary and cultural journal whose first issue came out in 1931. By the time Guianese Poetry was published in 1931, the challenge of popularizing the work of contemporary poets and their predecessors, and the challenges of forging and describing cultural independence in the Caribbean, were being discusses across the region.

Norman Cameron
For Cameron, the anthology was one of many publishing projects to which he devoted his time. Born Norman Eustace Cameron in 1903, his academic abilities were quickly identified and he won the Guyana Scholarship to study in the UK. Returning to Guyana in 1926 after studying Mathematics at Cambridge, he taught in Georgetown, at the private Guianese Academy, and later at the prestigious Queens College. He combined this career with research that encompassed both local and global interests, publishing his two volumes of The Evolution of the Negro in 1929 and 1934. It is this text, perhaps more than any of his more Guyanese-focused research that is remembered today. An early work in the field of black consciousness, it was prompted by Cameron’s concern to understand and value African and African diasporic civilisation – an impulse felt across the black populations of European empires and the Americas, including the Negritude movement of Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor. Cameron’s other interests led him to assess education, politics, church history and librarianship, as well as to write a number of plays that dealt with African and biblical history, such as Balthazar (1931), Adoniya (1943) and Sabaco (1947).
All these activities placed Cameron at the heart of a cultural life in Guyana that prioritised education, historical awareness and literary accomplishment. Like many writers and researchers in Guyana before the 1960s, Cameron often produced these works as pamphlets in Georgetown, self-publishing them with the printing services of the local newspapers, and selling them to like-minded Guyanese (largely Georgetown) residents. He writes in his “Introductory Essay” that “I consider it a service to the community to present this publication”. This work would become even more precious in 1945, when the rare copies of Guyanese literature housed in the library of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society were destroyed in the fire that consumed much of Georgetown.

Guyanese literary culture, 1831-1931
In his study of education in British Guiana, Cameron summarizes his view of the nineteenth-century cultural milieu in the colony:
“To an educator in this country at the beginning of the nineteenth century the position would have been that of a mass of uneducated enslaved people with here and there one who could read or write, a Mohammedan from Gambia maybe, or a few trained by some benevolent persons, and on the other hand a small section of comparatively highly educated but often immoral white colonists – planters, merchants, Government officials who supplied the administration of the country – together with some free persons of African descent (pure or mixed), taking their lead from the whites.”
This social context has consequences for the literature published in the colony, and for Cameron’s anthology of insistently textual, rather than oral, culture. According to the 1827 and 1829 censuses, the total population of what would become British Guiana was just over 100,000, of which approximately 90% was enslaved. To be a published poet in Guyana in the first part of the nineteenth century, we might assume, was to be a member of a small white colonial elite. The first editor that Cameron records fits this description. Known only as ‘Colonist’, this poet published Midnight Musings: Being a Collection of Poems on Various Subjects in 1832, with (as Cameron records in his “Introductory Essay”) a damning proviso: the Colony, though fertile in everything else, is barren in incidents for poetical display”. Here we find a first model of literary composition in Guyana: that of the displaced colonist, uninterested or unable to respond to a Guyanese cultural landscape, and writing instead of a reconstructed England.
But the nineteenth century also saw the rise of multiple institutions that would explicitly locate cultural production in Guyana. In 1810, rooms in the Union Coffee House were converted to become the first Theatre Royal. During the 1800s Georgetown added to this the Athenaeum, the Assembly Rooms and the Philharmonic Hall. In 1844 the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society was founded to provide (in the words of A.J. Seymour) “an apparatus for literary and other discussions for the ruling British group in Georgetown”. Its journal, Timehri, was first published in 1882. The British Guiana Museum opened with its first exhibition in 1868. The Young Men’s Guild (established 1896) provided a forum for intellectual debate. While these institutions were narrow in their membership and scope, they marked a collective wish to explore the specific locality of British Guiana, and its history. And increasingly, poets – from differing sections of Guyanese society – would be drawn to local subjects and the possibilities of a local poetry.
Guyanese publications and newspapers offered writers new opportunities to see their creative work in print, and well into the twentieth century this would be a crucial way for writers to publish across the Caribbean region. Walter Rodney reminds us that by the end of the nineteenth century Guyana’s press was wide-ranging:
Only the Argosy was an unwavering voice of the planter class. The Chronicle and the Royal Gazette were capable of being liberal, and most other publications were to the ‘left.’ The Creole and the Working Man assumed the mantle of spokesman of the middle and lower classes during the 1870s, and the same role was later played in the 1880s by the Villager, the Echo, and the Reflector – with the Liberal joining the ranks in the 1890s.
Voices from abroad remained of high prestige, at least in some quarters of the press. The Australian-born, eighteen-year old Vincent Roth, who had recently arrived from the UK in 1907, was immediately offered a post at the Argosy as Assistant Sub-Editor “with and extra $3 per column for literary contributions”. Nevertheless, in the same period the local writer, Harold W.B. Moore, best known as a weekly newspaper columnist, was also publishing poetry in the Argosy, and in Cameron’s generation the B.G. Literary Society focused activities for Georgetown writers. With this anthology Cameron begins the job of reading and collecting the ephemeral poetry of Guyana, from both the past and his present. He is by no means comprehensive (his acknowledgements thank only the Daily Argosy and the Chronicle Christmas Annual), but he begins an important task, and one that is unfinished today.

The Poems
The hundred years’ period that Cameron researched for his anthology covered slavery, emancipation, indentureship, the age of British imperialism and intimations of its decline. What is striking about the anthology for us today is how the poetry of that century registers its present, and the formal choices the poets made when composing their work. Part of the pleasure of reading an anthology such as this is trying to trace the relationships of influence and lines of experimentation that might lead to a particular poem. Equally, we might turn to this anthology to gauge poetic responses to key moments that have shaped the Caribbean’s past.
For Cameron, the discovery of early poetic voices from the black populations of Guyana was particularly significant, and he singles them out in his introduction. Simon Christopher Oliver’s occasional poem written in the year of emancipation (1838) is a particular bibliographical triumph, as are the poems included from Thomas Don’s Pious Effusions (printed in new Amsterdam in 1873), and the commemorative songs from the Emancipation Jubilee of 1888, organized by T.R.F. Elliott. Oliver ( a free Grenadian-born schoolmaster in Buxton), is preceded chronologically only by ‘Colonist’ in the anthology, but Oliver’s work makes clear the narrowness of his predecessor’s complaint about the ‘barrenness’ of incidents in the colony. Colonial experience drives the poem: “On this glad day the galling chains of Slavery were broke / From off the necks of Afric’s sons, who bled beneath its yoke”. Oliver’s iambic rhyming couplets shift between celebration of the social liberation that comes with emancipation and moral guidance on who “ye first of August freed men” might “salute” for this liberty. Progressing through its twelve lines, this poem of thanks is full of celebratory commands and statements of obligation with which the newly freed population must comply. It is “Queen Victoria”, “God”, “your masters” and “Great Britain” who are the active agents of liberation here and Oliver instructs: “Then you should sing, God Save the Queen, oh, may she live forever”.
Fifty years later the poets of the Emancipation Jubilee would retain only God as their object of gratitude, and by 1930 Cameron’s own “A Brave Boy” venerates “Christophe’s breed”, invoking the Haitian Revolution to link a hero black past to a Caribbean present. In his pursuit of an African-Caribbean poetic, Cameron also acknowledges his editorial practices of censorship: he deletes ‘nigger’, replacing it with ‘skipper’ in henry G. Dalton’s “The Essequibo and its Tributaries” and cuts a stanza from Martin’s “the Negro Yard”. What emerges from the anthology is the possibility of a Creole literary tradition whose heritage is dually African-Caribbean and European. For example, Cameron’s “On Favouritism: A Sonnet and a Tale” rewrites Guianese folk traditions into Standard English and canonical poetic forms. This idea of a dual heritage might also account for the balancing of proto-nationalist work – such as Walter MacA. Lawrence’s “Forward Guiana’s Sons” and Vere T. Daly’s “The Song of Young Guiana” – with the unacknowledged prevalence of pro-Empire verse. Egbert Martin’s “Additional verses Written for the National Anthem” is perhaps the famous example, but consider also Mrs. Z. G. R’s 1855 poem, “Great Britain”, notable one of the only two female writers included.
If Cameron’s version of Creole poetic heritage is forged through largely male writers, even more apparent is the silence of Amerindians and Indian-Guyanese voices. Dalton’s “The Carib’s Complaint” (1853) and Martin’s “The Hammock Maker (An Indian Eclogue)” 91883) voice an Amerindian experience of cultural and personal loss. Using the seven-syllable trochaic line so common in English poetry (from ballads to Shakespeare to Wordsworth), Martin identifies a symbolic ‘sage’ who silently marks the passing of an age:
Bowed with age and feebleness,
Crowned with locks all silvery white,
Eyes so dim and lusterless,
Slowly sinking in life’s night.
Dalton on the other hand, is willing to imagine an Amerindian consciousness, but in his pursuit of the poetic form of the complaint, he fails to see the living presence of Amerindian communities in Guiana: “I go like a Carib – the last of my race / And leave not behind one memento or trace”. Certainly, the multiple ethnicities of the Guyanese population leave an uneven trace in Cameron’s anthology. Just as striking as the poetic decision about representing Amerindians is Cameron’s editorial decision to omit Indian-Guyanese writers. He notes in the “Introductory Essay” that Joseph Ruhoman and C. E. J. Rancharitar-Lalla are “adding their contribution to our stock or religious poetry”, but he makes no comment on their absence from the anthology. In 1934, in response to Cameron’s Guianese Poetry, Ramcharitar-Lalla presented a parallel tradition, editing The Anthology of Local Indian Verse (including the work of J. W. Chinapen, W. W. Persaud, Ramcharitar-Lalla, Joseph and Peter Ruhoman).
If Guianese Poetry fails to fully register song and folk traditions within its pages, and offers a limited picture of writing, ethnicity, gender and class, there is still much to discover about poetic sensibility. The four main sections – Narrative Poems, Nature Poems, Tropical and Miscellaneous Poems, Moral and Religious Poems – identify modes of Caribbean writing that persist into the twenty-first century. Topography and climate provide many comparative examples of Caribbean writers’ wish to describe a local landscape. At times this is taxonomic, as in Walter MacA. Lawrence’s “Sylvan Guiana”:
Each towering Greenheart are ingot,
Each Mora, a nugget of gold;
Each Purpleheart an expression
Of something more brilliant than wood.
With each name comes an articulation of Caribbean particularity, and this is repeated throughout the anthology: in the detailed focus of Martin’s praise song for “the love-star” of “The Sorrel-Tree”, Harold W.B Moore’s for the ‘sea-scent’ of “The North Wind” or W.A. Buttery’s “Mighty Mazaruni”. It is important to remember the longevity of this impulse, from near contemporaries, such as A.J Seymour, and most famously in the Adamic poetry of Derek Walcott.

Guianese Poetry Today
Were we to judge Cameron’s anthology by the endurance of these nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, we might have to conclude that it failed to create and sustain a reading public for Guyana’s early writers. His anthology only ran to one edition in Guyana. By the time A.J Seymour came to edit A Treasury of Guyanese Poetry in 1980 the goal of extended historical representation remained important, but Seymour notes that it is the period from 1940-1980 “which marks the emergence of the modern Guyana and which has produced the greater part of the poems collected here”. Writing about twentieth-century West Indian poetry, Edward Baugh claims “the poets of the post-1940 mainstream do not consider themselves to be descendants of (their) forerunners, who produced a strictly colonial poetry”. Reading Seymour’s anthology alongside Camron’s collection only Cameron, “Colonists”, Thomas Don, Walter MacA. Lawrence, Egbert Martin (‘Leo’) and A. R. F. Webber find a home in Seymour’s later selection.
But we should not be quick to limit Cameron’s editorial endeavours to that of historical curiosity. While it might be difficult to find the family resemblances between the literary concerns of later Guyanese writing and these early literary experimentations, it is worth reflecting on the familiar and unfamiliar features of this combined body of work. We might, for example, conclude that the narrative and religious poetry collected by Cameron would seem out of place in contemporary Caribbean poetics, but here then is the task for us readers. A full reckoning of Caribbean poetry has to make sense of discordant, dated and forgotten voices, as well as those voices that seem to cohere with and encourage later poetic forms. Cameron’s anthology – with its editorial idiosyncrasies and bibliographical drive – challenges use to see, where no-one had before, a textual community of Guyanese poets.

(By Norman Eustace Cameron)