***Don’t forget to use the Visuals
MOST OF THE creative literature that emerged from New World nations with a colonial history — the Caribbean, Latin America, as well as North America — will always be indebted to European and Mediterranean literature, both in terms of conception of form and colloquial speech.

This is not in any way an error, short-coming, or flaw in Guyanese or any other post-colonial American literature, because almost 75% of European classical and modern creative literature is based on the individual conscience and self-analysis, not an inherited cultural ethos; the freedom, perception and innovation of individual writers, and not officially instructed or constructed viewpoints, such as would represent their nations’ imperial and colonial policies.

Many post-colonial nations assist their own various problems by easily blaming convenient concepts like ‘Western regimes’, or ‘developed countries’ for such problems, rather than seeking out and studying numerous individual and independent critical perceptions and innovations alive in the same ‘Western’ or ‘developed countries’.

But colonial regimes, through their conservative educational policies, ignored such creative literature, or chose mostly conventional European prose and poetry to become the educational standards, which passed down into numerous post-colonial societies of today.

It was not the audacious, outspoken, experimentally avant-garde, critical and even sensual non-Anglo creative literary styles of Horace, Petronius, Petrarch, Ariosto, Helidorus, Rousseau, Stendhal, Maupassant, Nerval , Gautier, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Huymans, Proust, St John Perse, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, or the philosophical discourse of the Abbe Condillac, Jacques Derrida, or Jean-Luc Nancy, or broad-minded American 19th Century writers like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, or Herman Melville, that influenced most creatively inclined Guyanese students.

Our one-sided Anglo-literary post-colonial creativity remained mostly mediocre, predictable, and provincially dilettante, but of course politically conscious and politically rebellious, while sometimes promoting a mere doctrinarian attitude via the nationalisation of education.

This is one major reason why, despite the gaining of Independence and self-governance, a chronic malaise of motivational stagnation still affects the intellectual input and growth of the society on the whole, which is further handicapped by having no constant creative literary outlet and innovative central Publishing House to foster the circulation of exploratory and self-reflective creative literature for an intellectually-curious population, which, instead, is left to keep marking time.

However, neither during the colonial nor early post-colonial era of Guyana, up to the late 1970s, did the established and conservative educational curriculums in creative literature affect vast importations of most of the above-listed literature by book departments like Bookers, Fogarty’s, SPCK, Michael Forde, Argosy, Graphic, and Central bookshops. An enormous amount of the world’s best classic and modern creative literature and critical thought unavailable in Guyanese libraries and schools, were cheaply available in paperback form in these Georgetown bookstores.

It was here, especially at the Bookers Universal Store bookshop cum snack-bar, and the Fogarty’s Book Department that Guyana’s serious senior and young professionals could be found any day of the week, but especially on Saturday mornings, socialising, perusing and buying titles.

***It was here that the Who’s Who of Guyanese creative professionals and intelligentsia of every race found the inspiration to pursue their careers. Such a vital social milieu should never be confined to a University campus. It might be useful to mention the names of such people, as substantiated by my being a part of that crowd. Apart from already established local creative writers like Martin Carter, A J Seymour, and Ian Macdonald, there were upcoming local writers like Rachid Osman, Sheik Sadeek, ND Williams, Marc Mathews, Michael Gilkes, Mark McWatt, Wordworth McAndrew, John Agard, Brian Chan, MR Monar, Jan Shinebourne, Cyril Kanhai, Sharon Maas, Charles Barrow, Jean Field-Ridley, and Rosemary Kempadoo; intellectual officials and teachers like Milton Drepaul, SS Ramphal, Bill and Frank Pilgrim, Clairmont Taitt, Helen Taitt, Joan Dummet, Ron Robinson, Beryl Pereira, John Rickford, Terence Bobb-Semple, and some of the most physically gorgeous sports and fashion-conscious Guyanese beauties and models the likes of Shakira Baksh, Alexis Harris, Pamela Lord, Faye Yansen, Zena Lashley, Diana Tikaran, Freda Ali, Claire Bowen, Peggy Glasgow, Paulette Boyer, Tessa Bishop, Jewel Adamson, Ray Marks, Sonia Sucre, Bernice Roberts, Petal Roberts, Jennifer Rodrigues, Jacqueline Correia, Jacqueline Gouvia, Gail Shannon, and Alexis Stuart, who were also intellectually inclined librarians, teachers, bank clerks, receptionists, showcase designers, and sales girls.

There were other High School students and working girls who were featured in the Chronicle’s ‘Teenager Of The Week’ column, some of whom classified themselves as ‘Intellectual Beatniks’, pleasantly influenced by the then popular beatnik-styled films like ‘The Beat Generation’, ‘The Subterraneans’, ‘Play It Cool’, ‘Expresso Bongo’, ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, etc, which kept Georgetown cinemas filled with a new generation of the ambitious and intellectually curious.

For those who may not be aware of this, both the easy availability of high-quality international creative literature, and the daily public screening of similar Hollywood and European films like ‘The Sun Also Rises’, ‘Breakfast of Tiffany’s’, ‘The L-Shaped Room’, ‘Room At The Top’, ‘A Man And A Woman’, ‘Live For Life’, ‘Bocassio 70’, ‘Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow’, ‘Contempt’, ‘Day For Night’, ‘La Notte’, and ‘Blow-up’ in local cinemas led to the local development of excellent professional skills in the generation of Guyanese listed here.

Most of these people began to leave Guyana between the late 60s and 70s due to petty political and ethnic rivalry contesting the rein of self-governance, and the rise of totalitarian decrees, which also affected the once easy availability of such literature and films, was gradually replaced by the quantity of ‘junk’ literature, ‘junk’ movies, and ‘junk’ music which eventually came to dominate local standards and minds.

No one, therefore, should be surprised that many young generation members from the 80s onward who left Guyana for Canada, the USA, and England were quickly seduced into various forms of crime and became deportees.

Such foreign rejection almost never resulted from an earlier generation of Guyanese immigrants nurtured by their local exposure and interest in the examples of top-quality creative literature and films I have mentioned here.

However, apart from the early vitally fresh and audacious Guyanese novels and poetry by Mittelholzer, Harris, Carew, Carter, Seymour, ER Braithwaithe and Peter Kempadoo, most younger writers abroad, except for recent fiction by McWatt and Cyril Dabydeen, and recent innovative novels like ‘The Intended’ by David Dabydeen, and ‘The Ventriloquist’s Tale’ by Pauline Melville, or a poetry collection like Michael Gilkes’ ‘Joanstown’, have not shown the influence of innovative creative literature once readily available locally, and which they probably read.

Why not? Probably because when they came to write, their conventional and conservative colonial and post-colonial schooling in literature asserted itself, helped by the stylistic preferences, specific expectations and guidance of foreign literary agents, publishing house editors, and even critics of similar formation.

After all, just to achieve publication that is not self-created suggests status, and in many cases, writers adjust to various ‘audience’ and ‘market’ expectations. But achieving a vital, fresh, audacious form and content in one’s creative writing is altogether another matter.

Yet, the international success achieved by Latin American novelists and poets like Borges, Cortazar, Carpentier, Fuentes, Marquez, Puig, Amado, Paz and Neruda occurred after their works were first accepted and published by South American publishing houses. These writers could, therefore, be their exploratory, innovative, and audacious selves, judged by resident editors who shared the same familiar quest, and who were not removed from the freshness of their immediate local geographical and social environment. So, once again, we return to the specific benefits of classic and avant-garde European-Mediterranean creative literature.

What does it have to offer Guyanese writers? First and foremost, a tendency to focus as objectively as possible on one’s environment, and the state of mind of a narrator within it. In ‘Jealousy’, for example, the amazing and hilarious novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet, set on a European-owned plantation in the Caribbean and once sold at Fogarty’s in its precisely translated Calder & Boyars edition, the descriptive focus and hidden viewpoint of its style is instructive.

Here is the beginning of the second paragraph of the first page: “Now A…has come into the bedroom by the inside door opening unto the central hallway. She does not look at the wide open window through which — from the door — she would see this corner of the terrace.”

The narrator immediately shows us he is there, but in a strangely surprising way. Yet, as the novel progresses, he never appears as a visible character, only a jealous one of biased vision.

Similarly, in ‘The Unnamable’ by Samuel Beckett, undisputedly regarded as one of the greatest creative writers to ever come along, whose volume of three novels also once sold at Fogarty’s, we find all our fears, uncertainties, pains of living, explored through language: “…All words, there’s nothing else, you must go on, that’s all I know…. I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

The entire novel is about aging, and the ultimate experience of simply living day by day. To read it is to be shocked by the refreshing, liberating power of true creative writing.