Interiors by Mark McWatt

INTRODUCTION
Mark Mc Watt was born in Guyana in 1947, and spent his child-hood in the Guyanese interior, where his father was a district officer. As a teenager, although he moved to Georgetown to attend school and college, he continued to arrange trips back into the interior, to which he had grown attached. He then left Guyana for Canada to study for a degree in English at the University of Toronto, and became a Canadian citizen. Mc Watt went on to complete a Ph.D at the University of Leeds in the UK, drawn by the innovations of academics there in the field of commonwealth literature. He eventually returned to the Caribbean permanently, but not to Guyana, taking up the position as Professor of West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, from which he has recently retired.Mc Watt has talked of the importance of his childhood and adolescent experiences of the Guyanese interior to his creative process and his sense of self, commenting in a 1990 interview that he ‘feel[s] the need to go back,’ despite the obstructions presented by the country’s political situation’, and mentioning in a 2007 interview that he still tries’ to get back to renew acquaintance.’ The influence of his various memories of Guyana’s forested hinterland is clearly apparent in his published work. In his two collections of poetry, Interiors (first published by Dangaroo Press in 1989) and The Language of Eldorado (Dangaroo Press, 1994), rivers in the northwest district of the interior feature in many of the poems, collected into sections entitled: ‘The Interior’ (in the first collection) and ‘Rivers of Dream’ (in the second collection). Of the eleven stories which make up his first work of fiction, Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement (Peepal Tree Press, 2005), four chart a journey upriver through the Guyanese interior. Finally, in his most recent poetry collection, The Journey to Le Repentir (Peepal Tree Press, 2009), a sequence of poems fictionalising an Elizabethan sea captain’ search for El Dorado is juxtaposed with a semi-autobiographical sequence depicting a personal childhood’ discovery’ of Guyana’s rivers.
If Mc Watt’s creative output demonstrates the centrality of the Guyanese interior as a place both experienced and imagined to his own sense of his identity as a writer, the prizes awarded to him suggest that Guyanese readers also view him as contributing to the development of the nation’s literary tradition. The Language of El Dorado won the Guyana Prize and Suspended Sentences won the Guyana Prize as well as the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for best first book. Indeed, reviewers and critics have considered the relationship of his work to that of an earlier generation of Guyanese writers, including Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittleholzer, A.J. Seymour and Martin Carter.
McWatt himself draws attention to his indebtedness to these writers through dedications and explicit allusions: the subtitle to the poem’ Orifice’ in Interiors is a quotation from Seymour, the final poem of The Language of Eldorado incorporates words from Carter’s poem ‘You Are Involved’, in his 1954 collection Poems of Resistance – ‘(despite the poet) all / are not consumed. Not yet’ – and Mc Watt’s poetry and fiction resound with multiple references to Harris’s work.

However, as his contestatory citation of Carter’s words indicates, Mc Watt’s inter-textual dialogue with these writers is characterised by tensions and differences as well as shared concerns. Speaking to Gemma Robinson, Carter explained his decision to remain in Guyana at a time when many others left the Caribbean region in order to pursue writing careers: I stayed in Guyana deliberately. I felt that to be a writer, especially a poet, I should.’ For Carter, then, the act of remaining in Guyana was a necessary part of his identity as a writer; according to Gordon Rohlehr, he saw the migration of other Guyanese people as’ a means of evasion, a being “elsewhere” when our historic moment calls for confrontation.’ In an essay on Carter, Wilson Harris challenges this idea, identifying with Carter across the discrepancy in their geographical locations. The’ division’ between them, Harris argues, is part of the ‘complex background we share’. While Carter’s home has remained in Georgetown,’ Harris’s expeditions into the Guyanese interior set the pattern for his later migration ‘across other hazardous oceans rich and dangerous as the rainforest’. Harris insists that his migration to Britain as an adult has by no means led to a dissociation from his country of origin; he points out that since’ Guyana stems from Amerindian root word which means “land of waters,’’ it follows that the voyaging archetype is as native to Guyana as the homing instinct.’ The semi-autobiographical voices of Mc Watt’s poetry and fiction express a more anxious and unstable position in relation to his place of birth. While he did not, like Carter, remain in Guyana to confront the social and political problems following independence, at the same time he does not, as Harris does, celebrate his own migrations as acts which identify him with Guyana as a ‘Land of Waters’. The poems in Interiors – particularly’ Hillside: Hosororo’ and ‘Beyond Punta Playa’ – explore themes of exile, alienation, loss and longing, associated with the poet’s position as a migrant writer, which distinguish his imaginative encounter with the Guyanese interior from Harris’s.
These themes constitute only one dimension of a rich and textured collection. Offering an elaborate play on the word ‘interiors’, the book is divided into five parts: ‘The Interior’ is at the heart of the book, enclosed by two sections entitled ‘Interiors of the Mind’ and two sections entitled ‘Interiors of the Heart.’ The central section, which contains poems set on rivers in the northwest district of Guyana’s hinterland, presents the interior as a geographical location imbued with a troubled history, while ‘Interiors of the Heart: Part One’ examines the inner thoughts and feelings of an adolescent persona exploring the rivers as part of a journey of self-discovery. Running parallel to these two associated sequences, ‘Interiors of the Heart: Part Two’ deals with domestic interiors, focusing on the intimacy of marriage and familial relations. The two ‘Interiors of the Mind’ sections are less consistent in their subject matter, but tend to be more playful in tone even when they touch on painful topics.

In the preface to the first edition, Mc Watt comments on his arrangement of the poems, explaining that he had intended the divisions to ‘suggest the three aspects of the process that produces them – thought, feelings or desire and the phenomena of landscape themselves. However, the opening stanza of the first poem, ‘Porknocker’, disrupts the neat structure mapped out by the section headings:

His fingers felt
Along every neck of stone
For a vein of the mountain
Until it convulsed in his hand
Like the pulse of his desire
With sudden, secret data
To his brain
Natural features of the landscape, human desire, and intellectual thought are bound together within this introduction stanza, prevising the entanglement of the various forms of ‘interior’ explored in subsequent poems. As we progress through the book, overlaps between physical, psychical and emotional interiors recur as the boundaries between section divisions break down and the collection acquires a more fluid shape.

‘Porknocker’ ends with a reference to ‘the intimations of El Dorado / that perished – or were fresh conceived – within the dancing seam’ (11), lines which suggest simultaneously a seam of gold encased within the rock and the seam of colonial wounds inflicted on Guyana’s landscape and people. The poet’s aside – ‘or were fresh conceived’ – hints at the ongoing legacies of the El Dorado legend. Elsewhere in the collection, the repeated motif of Eldorado effects a layering of different kinds of quest; the quest of seventeenth century explorers for gold and diamond mines, the quest of Guyanese people for an independent nation, and the quest of an adolescent version of the poet for self-discovery through connection with the landscape. A ghostly golden boy surfaces fleetingly in some of the poems (Golden Flower’, River Passage’) as a reminder of unfulfilled dreams. If ‘Mt. Everand’ intimates that the broken dream of Empire – reduced to a ‘heap of rusting / metal / and rotten wood’ – might be replaced by ‘another golden city’ (36), ‘Golden Flower’ comments on ‘the fatal pollen of all dreams’ (37), and in ‘Morawhanna’ a road ‘points the way to all foundered dreams’ (32-33). In these poems, the unfounded dream of Eldorado fuelled multiple conquests of the Americas underwrites the lost dream of independence in a postcolonial Guyana burdened by political corruption and racial polarisation.

The shifting and multifaceted character of the rivers in Interiors, where the country’s past, present and future flow into each other, is compounded by the collection’s alternation between adolescent and adult impressions of the landscape. ‘River passage’ opens with an image of the speaker ‘launch [ing] himself’ into the river, in an attempt to fathom its mysteries, and the poem traces his journey as he drifts downriver(39). In ‘Hillside: Hosororo’, that sense of immersion and immediacy is lost; aware that the landscape merges into ‘the pages of [my] memory,’ this adult speaker observes the river running ‘in the distance […] without ripple’ as its offers ‘its centuries of silence to the sum’ (45). Here, the river’s untold stories of a vanished past are rendered even less accessible by the speaker’s physical detachment from Guyana. In these two poems and others within Interiors, direct impressions of Guyana’s rivers contend and co-mingle with dreamed, imagined and remembered landscapes, distorted by feelings of longing and nostalgia. The key phrase’ heartland of dream’ (38), located at the heart of the book’s inner section, momentarily draws together the collection’s intersecting strands: interiors of the mind, heart and landscape. If Guyana’s forested inland region is a ‘heartland’ in a geographic sense, it also exists within the poet’s heart, as another home’ (49), and in his imagination, as a source of creativity.
Written By LUCY EVANS : University of Leicester, UK

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