CROSSING the English Channel on a crisp and clear mid-December night in 1996 was surprisingly less choppy than anticipated. I was on my way to London for an interview with Fred D’Aguiar, whose ‘The Longest Memory’ was one of the books I had been able to snatch from the editor’s book shelves as compensation for an unpaid internship at a small Edinburgh-based publishing firm the previous summer. This novel and his earlier books of poems turned out to be so captivating and full of exuberance, drive, and passion that I had to meet this poet in person. In preparation for the interview, I had caught myself frequently turning to D’Aguiar’s first, slim book of poetry, Mama Dot, which was described by reviewers as “Stunning” (O’Donoghue 107), “remarkably free from self-doubt” (gross 67), “the most exciting first book of poems to appear in recent years” and nothing short of “a landmark in modern poetry” (Charles 36). Mama Dot revolves around a character based on the poet’s grandmother in Guyana, the challenges of the Guyanese diaspora in the UK, and the Guyanese landscape as sensual stimulus for artistic growth and expression. The image of Mama Dot is one of vitality and strength, she is “somebody out here you can touch and verify with the senses…who you can see, fear, smell and remember,” as D’Aguiar explains in an interview. (Leusmann 18). He gives this grandmother figure mythic and primordial qualities. Through her, links to the African diaspora in the Caribbean and Europe are forged. She becomes a goddess-like centre of creation story and a representative of the African diaspora in the Americas who undertakes an Adamic task of creating and naming a new society away from, but fused with the memory of, Africa. She enables him “to write about my memories and imagine those experiences again,” but the further he delves into this experience, the more that person Mama Dot vanishes: “…after a while I am not simply dealing with her biography, but extending her into a symbol and metaphor”(Leusmann 18).
In the person of Mama Dot, many experiences are synthesizes, and D’Aguiar employs her image to move from past to present to future, a future that in many cases means migration away from Guyana as a necessity for a family to survive. The diasporic condition is viewed by Mama Dot in a pragmatic and affirmative view when she addresses the narrator: “You know England, born there, you live / To die there, roots put down once / And for all” (D’Aguiar, Mama Dot 21). It has the effect that the narrator recognizes his position as insider and outsider in the diaspora all at once, being able to observe the centre not just from the fringes but from its very midst in London.
What the narrator carries with him to the centre is his language. D’Aguiar reveals the far-reaching influence of the Caribbean nation language as a choice of diasporic artists. At play are not only a mastery of the English language, but also a skilful and artistic subversion of it to reflect realistically and convincingly on diasporic experiences of other Caribbean immigrants in Britain, as in “Dreadtalk.” This poem records the rough situation of young West Indians confined to psychiatric wards in London, an environment D’Aguiar has insight of and experience in as he trained as a psychiatric nurse after leaving secondary school. Locked up in facilities like these further contributes to a deterioration of their mental condition as they are already alienated by growing up in the diaspora. The narrative voice of the poem is made up of many voices D’Aguiar had known among those institutionalized youths. In “Dreadtalk”, one cannot help but feel a linguistic inventiveness, the forming of the language to suit the narrator’s palate and the poem’s originality as well as unaltered transfer from the speaker in the room to the listener/reader. It is almost a recording of voices that incorporates oral elements of the diaspora experience and gives the poems an immediacy and “a hard edge” (Birbalsingh 140) without nostalgia and sentimentality. They also reveal a hybrid character, as they are the result out of the merging of the Caribbean language and the dialect and slang of the English language spoken in London.
D’Aguiar moves into a significant role as translator for the black British young people who lack knowledge of the Caribbean. Having grown up in Great Britain, they know what it is like living in that country, but have no first-hand experience of the place their parents and thus part of their cultural inheritance came from. These young and often aimless adolescents are frequently without orientation in the British society that more or less rejects them. D’Aguiar attempts to give advice on how to manage and negotiate life in the diaspora.
Mama Dot is characterized by a kind of self-awareness in evocative poems like “Mama Dot Warns Against an Easter Rising” and “Guyanese Days.” Especially “Guyanese Days” reveals that D’Aguair is looking up to another Guyanese writer, Wilson Harris, for a link between life in the diaspora and Guyana and its interior. For D’Aguiar, Harris’s writing “helped in the formation of my otherwise romantic sensibility, a mindset affirmed by reading English Romantic poetry and reaffirmed by a landscape which promised a viable alternative to the querulous city and postmodern materialist consumption” (D’Aguiar, “Country” 44). D’Aguiar’s self-reflection emphasizes that life in the diaspora means negotiating two stands of identity – one Guyanese, the other British – and not falling into the trap of essentialist notions of neglecting one part of his identity.
A poem like “Guyanese Days” is necessary in order to “rescue a place which I had in my head and heart, but which didn’t exist anymore” (Birbalsingh, 138), D’Aguiar explains. This place is the village of Airy Hall, “(f)ifty miles or so outside the capital, Georgetown… (and taking) up no more than a stretch of road. If you drive too fast you will not realize you have passed through it; if you sprint you can cover it from one end to the next in no time” (D’Aguiar, “Airy Hall” 5).He spent ten years as a child in Airy Hall, which the writer took in his heart and mind from Guyana to the diaspora in Great Britain. He vividly reminisces about this village and some of its inhabitants in that narrative, from which one can get the impression that his poems of Mama Dot “arrived singly, in odd lines that resonated for me because tied to a childhood memory, lines with built-in images which burnt with a beacon’s clarity in my mind’s eye,” as D’Aguiar clarifies (D’Aguiar, “Zigzag” 314). Here he hints at the creative process of the diasporic writer. The poem came into existence through a dreamlike remembrance. D’Aguiar’s desire to conjure memories of his former identity as a child growing up in Guyana was filtered through the lens of a diaspora experience. These places may not exist anymore the way they did when the writer was a child, but ultimately they form part of his diaspora consciousness. They have emotional weight for him as he played in those sands, trees and fields out of which he is “creating an emotional map” (Birbalsingh, 138) imagined from memories and superimposed on a geography that has probably changed a lot since his departure from Guyana at age 12.
“Guyanese Days” is a long evocation of the writer’s childhood in Guyana, trying to make “sense of the world and interacting with the world and being shaped by it” (Leusmann, 18). Especially from his diasporic perspective, those days and years spent in the Guyanese countryside defined who he was about to become. Absorbing the sensual qualities of the countryside with its colours, noises and smells left marks on D’Aguiar’s mind which he is able to translate into words once he started to learn writing in school. The poem is characterized by a freshness and openness that culminate in a lack of any restrictions. As a child, D’Aguiar could roam the countryside, working “this land half-naked / Growing into patched, taken-in clothes” (D’Aguiar, Mama Dot 43), and enjoy an independence that would have been hardly possible in an urban environment. The poet living in a diaspora revels in the thoughts of growing up in a carefree place where he “used to sit and count the coconut crash / Down: one this minute, two the next; / They skidded off branches, bounced trunks / To bang neat grooves in the mud, splash / Ponds or rolling, they’d come higgledy / Piggledy to nestle at my shaded spot” (D’Aguiar, Mama Dot 43). D’Aguiar remembers these incidents as only an adult can who enjoyed that time of his life which was also interspersed with the first positive school experiences.
He functions as a guide, recording instances and occurrences that many of the generation of Caribbean immigrant children growing up in Great Britain in the mid-1980s when Mama Dot was published were not able to experience. What they are able to experience here in Mama Dot though are vivid images of reading and writing that D’Aguiar mixes with the sensuality of the Guyanese landscape. D’Aguiar recounts the hours spent in chalk dust-filled classrooms where school was “a nursery rhyme / Sung till learned by heart, even table / so recall is an easy melody found whole” (D’Aguiar, Mama Dot 43) and the early beginnings of writing full of difficulties because the pen was not as easy to handle as the “fishing-rod made from a branch / Broken and shaped with a nail” and because “ he and page were like hoe and stony ground” (D’Aguiar, Mama Dot 44), difficult to manage and learn, but getting easier when “the rhythm of dive after dive and the pen’s zig zag receded” (D’Aguiar, Mama Dot 45) to become legible writing. There might be some romanticism in the recollection of the narrator’s Guyanese childhood, but the intention of these remembered episodes was to give the readers, and especially any young persons in the Guyanese diaspora in Britain, who had not been able to experience the countryside of the parents’ land, a window into a different life away from the stark and challenging realities of growing up in urban Britain. The narrator intended to show points of reference and guidance to a younger audience in their search for an identity that is difficult to come by in the diaspora and has rendered them void of a sense of belonging.
In Guyana, afternoons and evenings were spent indulging in the carefree enjoyment of child’s plays, companionship, and the greatness and openness of the sky where “[t]he full moon rose and million stars…/ All gathered to watch how its lustre creams the sky / And is sometimes lost to clouds” (D’Aguiar, Mama Dot 48). Intermingled with the images of natural beauty are the recurrent tools of a future writer. For D’Aguiar, the artistic expression to transport the natural beauty as well as the emotionality of Guyana began with his ability to put words to paper in an act similar to that of a painter who transports his feelings via brush to canvas. In Guyana, D’Aguiar experienced that “[t]hat country under the moon’s phosphorescence / Was vacant papyrus, my defining sight, its calligraphy” (D’Aguiar, mam Dot 48). Guyana comes to the canvas for the artists to be filled with words. Pen and paper are defining tools to make visible the feelings, impressions and memories of D’Aguiar’s childhood in Guyana to the diasporic writer he has become in Britain.
D’Aguiar has at his disposal a sort of selective memory that is unique to diasporic people, as they are not living in the place they are reminiscing about. What D’Aguiar records is a diasporic imaginary, very selective, subjective and contradictory. It is a dreamlike landscape reflecting his desires and not based on common experiences he may share with other members of the Guyanese diaspora in Great Britain in the 1980s. The ability to write and communicate the singularity of his experiences in Guyana is a defining moment in D’Aguiar’s quest for an identity. He can write a Guyana he experienced years ago into existence. Guyana is the imaginary homeland that does not exist anymore in that shape or form when D’Aguiar had left it, but he is able to conjure it up through the images that he was able to capture as a child when he had been physically in Guyana. The physical sensation of actually being there is not possible in a diasporic condition, so the mind has to function like a repository of memory and imagine a Guyana specifically in D’Aguiar’s terms.
Introduction by Harold Leusemann