THE ENTIRE concept and practice of Guyanese literature today is rooted in examples of ancient writings and sayings’ brought to these shores in books, mostly religious, by all the diverse races and their cultures, as well as their oral tales and proverbs. The first local shift away from this inherited foreign subject matter came with the printing of local newspapers in the late 18th Century, and the publication of numerous historical and travel literature by Europeans both residing and visiting Guiana when it was the Dutch colonies of Essequibo, Berbice, and Demerara, and after it was surrendered and sold to the British Empire and became known as British Guiana.

However proud Guyanese may feel about some of these early adventure and historical writings, such as Raleigh’s ‘Discovery of the Large and Beautiful Empire of Guiana’ (which actually contains little or no experience in the mapped territory known today as Anglo Guyana), or the historical works by Henry Dalton, Harsinck, Nestcher, Pinchard, or Rodway, their contents are not of the best quality to influence Guyanese creative literature today because of the imaginative fantasies, historical biases towards race, especially against racial mixing, and, above all, their dogmatic judgment and opinion about others they hardly saw in a human way, and knew little about, beyond their appearance and customs.

Narrative voice
The best quality of these books remain their descriptions of the Guyanese landscape, fauna and flora, even though in the case of Raleigh, some of these descriptions are clearly the result of poetic fantasy masquerading as document, with an eye no doubt for arousing curiosity, excitement, and interest in his fellow Europeans.

On the other hand, it is books like Adrian Van Berkel’s travels in Berbice and Essequibo, Laurens Storm Van Gravesande’s journals, published as ‘The Rise of British Guiana’; Henry Bolingbroke’s ‘Voyage to Demerary’; Schomburgk’s ‘Travels in British Guiana’, Waterton’s ‘Travels in South America’, Evelyn Waugh’s ‘When The Going Was Good’, Vincent Roth’s ‘Pathfinding on the Mazaruni’, and Nicholas Guppy’s ‘Wai-Wai’ which, by their narrative voice, their observations and descriptions of Guyana and diverse Guyanese, which laid the first literary foundation for a distinct local creative literature, relying more on objective description and human sensitivity rather than dogmatic pronouncements, evaluations, and opinions.

This is a prime literary quality which is relevant to creative literature. It is a typical Guyanese irony that many of these books, especially by Van Berkel, Schomburgk, and Roth, among others, were once published by the Daily Chronicle Press since the early 20th Century.

Such books, along with local literary periodicals like ‘Kyk-over-all’ and ‘Timehri’, were an essential part of literate and modern Westernized local households in British Guiana, because they were advertised in newspapers and in the back pages of these intelligent periodicals.

As a young boy, I remember many such local books being on my father’s bookshelf, but I was more interested in the mildly pornographic magazines like ‘Playboy’ and ‘Cavalier’ he kept hidden in his trunk. It was not until as an adult in the 1980s, when it became essential to my writing that I should know the history of Guyanese literature, that I spent about five consecutive years reading every known and obscure book and journal on Guyana, and came across books by Schomburgk, van Berkel, and Roth printed on the finest glossy and semi-silk paper published by the British Guiana Daily Chronicle Press in the reserved stacks of the prestigious Robarts Library on the University Of Toronto Campus.

Social regression
Reading such literature on local reality, despite the fact that such a reality may be changed or dated but bearing in mind that what is important is the example of each writer’s focus on the Guyanese environment, is what helps to create a tradition for the local creative writer, and the general public who needs to see novel perspectives on their geographic and social environments.

It is a fact that Guyana, today, has progressed considerably both economically and structurally, despite the myopic views of those steeped in one-sided political and ethnic evaluations. Yet Guyana has regressed significantly in civilized human behaviour and intellectual interests, such as the consumption of creative literature, both local and foreign, also in regular public exposure and appreciation of top quality international films.

To think that such a public regression has no bad effect on the quality of everyday Guyanese life is to live in a false world. It is the intellectual and civilized vacuum left by the severe absence of numerous high-quality bookstores and public venues for the professional selection of films which has resulted in the devastating gap between the economic and material progress achieved over the past two decades, and the plummeting standards of individual and collective behaviour today.

This decline in the civilized quality of everyday life is further affected by the inability of most Guyanese of all ethnicities — especially young adults, who are left with little accessible local and foreign creative products which enable them to contemplate and criticise themselves — to look into themselves, to develop themselves mentally, and to enjoy themselves in intellectually exciting and productive ways.

First of all, how does creative literature, whether local or foreign, help to achieve such goals? By the ability of the creative writer to produce creative writing which is not concerned with mimicking historical or factual realities which have already occurred, but instead by giving creative life to what has not been visualized in writing before.

The perennial importance of a Guyanese creative writer like Edgar Mittelholzer is that he ventured into human areas that people tend to repress in their psyches, and therefore never really come to terms with in a mature civilized manner.

One such area is the imperial, abusive, and exploitive history of Guyana from its earliest colonial eras. Mittelholzer knew that such a history would produce psychological and chip-on-the-shoulder handicaps and obsessions, generating stagnant social viewpoints, like a dog spinning round and round trying to find ticks in its tail.

Mittelholzer’s amazing Kaywanna Trilogy of novels changed Guyana’s historical basis to an imaginative, critical, and idealistic one, where it is no longer so important how European and other races in local history actually lived.

His fictive trilogy, though based on historical dates and outlines, humanised our history for us; he invented an investigative fiction of idealistic honesty, discussion and logic, and on the whole, did one of the greatest civilised services for Guyanese in the medium of creative literature.

It is an example of where Guyanese literary creativity becomes the new in-depth inspiration for self enquiry, and the resolution of numerous racial, psychological, social, geographical, and national conflicts.