Remembering ‘AJ’  

(Extract of an interview with Dr. Ian McDonald in January 2011, Georgetown, Guyana.
McDonald is a prizewinning poet, novelist, playwright, columnist and editor; he also has to his credit six collections of poems. He has won the Guyana Prize for Literature on two occasions, and the Royal Society of Literature Prize for best regional novel with his first and only novel, The Humming-Bird Tree. His most recent book, Selected Poems, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.)

PP: A. J. Seymour was a poet, anthologist, editor, publisher, broadcaster, cultural historian and literary enabler. He was born in 1914, and when he died in 1989, he had done a great service to the literature of the Caribbean and Guyana. In fact, he had a hand in the shaping of Guyanese Literature. Your thoughts on the man.
IM: I am delighted to talk about AJ. He was a great, great Guyanese. He was very dear friend of mine. I knew him for many, many years, since I first arrived in Guyana in 1955 to the time when he died in 1989.
Right away, I would like to read something I wrote in the introduction of this book, ‘A. J. Seymour, Collected Poems, 1937-1989’ that sorts of sum up, well, nothing can sum up Arthur Seymour because, as you rightly said in the beginning, he had so many attributes.
“His overall contribution to the cultural tradition of Guyana and the Caribbean is truly astonishing. I do not think the younger writers and academics grasp it fully. The AJS bibliography compiled by the National Library in 1974 was already 100 pages long and since then must have doubled in length. This amazing man’s work contains poems, historical publications, reviews, broadcasts, essays, addresses, entries in anthologies, forewords, lectures, talks, pamphlets, memories, sermons, eulogies, magazine work and books in such profusion that one would be excused for thinking this was the record of a school, not one man alone.”
A truly amazing man, and as you rightly said, a truly amazing man who shaped the literature of Guyana, and the shaping of Guyanese culture, and the shaping of the minds of Guyanese for independence.
He founded the journal, Kyk-over-Al in 1945. And remember, the first set of ‘Kyk’, in its initial contribution, lasted from 1945 to 1961. All those issues were very important in the shaping of Guyanese literature and culture, and therefore the emerging nation. A very important figure… ‘AJ’.
PP: Talking about culture… he was involved in History and Culture Week, which, I understand, helped to evince a sense of pride of nationhood in Guyanese. We have already said a lot about the man and his accomplishments. What about his formative years, those years that nurtured the man for greatness? 
IM: I did not know him then, but I’ve talked a lot with him about his formative years, and there is no doubt that he was brought up from an early age to love reading, to love writing, and to love literature. Oh, he loved to read! He started reading poetry from very young, and started writing poetry from very young. One thing I want to emphasise is that running through all this is that Arthur Seymour was a very good poet. And he wrote an enormous amount of poems, much of it very good.
I remember after he died, I went through his papers and found no less than 550 poems. In his ‘Collected Poems’, which I helped edit, there are just over 220 or 228 poems. So he wrote many more than are captured in this book. He was always writing poetry, whatever else he was doing. He wrote a great deal of religious poetry, and he is perhaps Guyana’s and the Caribbean’s foremost religious poet.  We must not lose sight of the fact that among all his other attributes as editor, publisher and enabler, he was a poet.
PP: An amazing output! The first poem in that collection, ‘turn these pages’, he said, ‘turn these pages, gently/for in them you see the wilful marriage/of heart’s best blood to brain’s keen accuracy/…turn these pages gently, for in them lie precious things.’
Of note, Seymour was always writing… A poem for every event, passage of time; every occasion, every visit, every visitor to Guyana; every important person… A poem for everything and every event…
IM: One of the things I will never forget; one that moved me tremendously when you talked about a poem for every event. One of the vivid memories I have was on his last birthday… his 75th birthday on the 12th of January, 1989. You know he died later in the year…
PP: Christmas Day, 1989…
IM: Yes. But I will never forget… He had written a small poem on the morning of his birthday, and he read it to a small group of us. And I remember that voice… Oh! He so loved poetry! And he read it. He was on the veranda on North Road, Bourda, and the wind was blowing so gently… It was a lovely day… a lovely Guyanese day. He sat there and said:

Bless Father God, I pray,
The gift of my birthday,
This milestone – I alive
At age seventy-five.

Bless, Holy Spirit, bless
With Thine own holiness

All that I do and say
As from Thy will today

And Jesus Christ Thy son
May all His Grace be done

That brought out the religiousness of his poetry, and you are right: He was always writing poetry, only that morning…
PP: Marking that milestone…
IM: But that was not all! His delivery was touching…! You know… he said it in that beautiful voice of his.
PP: Quoting from the introduction of that very collection, what you said about his work, you said that ‘He began in an era when everything was still to be done…’ He was a pioneer.
IM: I think that is a very good phrase, if I might say so. Yes, he was a pioneer.
PP: Continuing… ‘The work that is done at the beginning of anything…is least seen but it is the most important part.’
IM: He was that… he was the foundation; he built the foundation of so many things that we are enjoying now.
PP: Added to that and very instructive were his five volumes of autobiographies by which he hoped to inspire others… some academics at the university… to carry on his work.
IM: Well, I don’t think there is anyone who has taken on his role, multi-varied, but many people have followed on from him. And, of course, we must remember Arthur used to say he was nurturing writers far greater than himself.
If I must say, Petamber, he would have been proud of you. Your contribution to Guyanese literature over the past few years is quite remarkable — two television programmes on literature; two columns in the local press; editing The Guyana Annual; coordinating literary events and a host of other things… You are to be thanked and congratulated. And I say again, Arthur would have been proud of you.

WHAT’S HAPPENING:
·    A UNESCO-sponsored one-week creative writing workshop is set for August 2011; limited places available on a ‘first-come-first-serve’ basis. Facilitators will include local and international teachers/writers. Please contact me for more information.
·    Look out for a new addition to the Guyanese bookshelf: ‘Copying, Copyright and the Internet: The issue of internet Regulation with regard to Copying and Copyright’ by Abiola Inniss.
·    And you are invited to a book exhibition and a lecture on copyright to mark World Book and Copyright Day at the National Library, Church and Main Streets, on Wednesday, April 27, 2011, at 1700 hours (5pm)

(To respond to this author, either call him on (592) 226-0065 or send him an email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com)