SINCE 2000, three journalistic travel books by three foreign writers have appeared on contemporary Guyana. They were published by three different American publishers (with European reprints).

These books are not concerned with presenting a balanced, correct, and broad view of Guyana, for example: descriptions of its past and present literature, photos of its writers, their book covers, painters, their paintings, periodicals, museums, past cinemas, postage stamps, ships, architecture, influential intellectuals, etc.

Instead, these books are new examples of how biased, sensationally opportunistic, and blindly one-dimensional writings and publications on Guyana can become. Perhaps there is a reason behind this sort of literature, which is linked to a pre-fabricated commercial foreign trend which is only interested in those examples of (Third World?) Guyanese attitudes and lifestyles which exhibit a coarse, crude, extreme, violent, uneducated, corrupt, and uncultured mentality. Such people can be found, of course, in every nation and society; but somehow they seem naturally to fit the overall definition, the correct summary of the inhabitants of present day Guyana, as presented by ‘Searching For El Dorado’ (2003, Doubleday) by Marc Herman; ‘Wild Coast’ by John Gimlette (2011, Knopf); and ‘The Sly Company Of People Who Care’ (2012, FSG) by Rahul Bhattacharya.

THE EL DORADO CLICHE

Herman’s book is mostly concerned with all sorts of adventurous Guyanese gold seekers, who trek into the remote wilderness with a desperate urge to get rich quick. We can therefore expect the sort of crude attitudes and behaviour he records. To Herman’s credit however, we can also see a larger, more corporately crude attitude to the extraction of mineral wealth and pollution of the landscape, he mentions, and those wealthy privately financed American gold seekers, totally ignorant of Guyana’s specific human and geographic identity, which we see in silly TV episodes on Guyana in programmes like ‘Gold Rush’. Indeed, the perpetuation of the term ‘El Dorado’, should remain confined to the label on Guyana’s best and most expensive rum; the rest is just the worn out exploitation of a colonial myth.

GIMLETTE’S ‘WILD COAST’

John Gimlette’s 2011 book, ‘Wild Coast’, with seldom seen historical photos and antique illustrations, is nicely written, yet foolishly marred by the writer’s obvious opportunistic choice, or selection, of certain historical data and references (which I have complete knowledge of, since I have read in entirety all the historical books on Guyana he refers to), which help him to project the fabrication of an impression he seeks to create in readers; mostly foreigners like himself no doubt. When he describes twelve local Jurors faces as: “the story of Guyana, a hotchpotch of displaced souls, slaves, Amerindians, Dutch conquerors, ‘chineymen’, Irish adventurers, Scottish cattlemen, pirates, pioneers and Pathans. Together this volatile mix made up a population…” , all this is just a frustrated exaggeration of his own revulsion before the Guyanese cosmopolitan and miscegenated identity. Because, wracked by his own historical European guilt, the writer cannot see that Guyanese who were of all these backgrounds, or were racially mixed, were no longer ‘black, red, white, yellow, etc’, but simply creole Guyanese, for whom “self esteem” is not based on the pros and cons of past historical “slave culture”, whose “favouritisms” the writer feels racially guilty of, but on the self-pride of WHOEVER, however miscegenated, they turned out to be.

It is significant that Gimlette mentions a Guyanese lack of knowledge of the huge continent at their backs (largely orchestrated by British colonialism), writing: “they’ve totally resisted the influences of the continent all around.” But which Guyanese are he referring to? The drunks, felons, murderers, con-men, various opportunists and uneducated street people he chose to consult, listen to, and report on? If the writer sought out facts about numerous Guyanese professionals, artists, adventurers, who since the 1960s have either emigrated, lived, worked, or travelled in Latin America, he would not write such stereotypical conclusions.

BHATTACHARYA’S ‘NOVEL’

Missing from both Gimlette’s ‘Wild Coast’ and Bhattacharya’s ‘The Sly Company Of People Who Care’ are educated Guyanese University, College, and High school students, professors, intellectuals, writers, artists, curators, architects, editors, etc; both books are similarly focused on negative anecdotes and reactions, as though competing for clichéd trendy sensational subject matter.
It is as if Guyana has no intelligent, well-informed, or cultured people, never had them, or indeed, is not SUPPOSED to have such people, in order to conveniently fulfill a debased and fatalistic stereotype already projected unto the society and nation by these writers. The cover of Bhattacharya’s book says its ‘a novel’. Really? But either way, as fiction or journalistic fact, it delivers nothing more than the writer’s lop-sided miniscule experience and knowledge of Guyana and Guyanese, past or present.

When the writer discovers anything more intelligent than the slang of the street (‘Gimme a lil ting nuh, soldier?’), or a class of people who call each other: chiney, Putagee, buck, coolie, blackman, redman, half-breed, etc, it is devalued and belittled. For example, when he attends a Satyagit Ray film at the Castellani House ‘Classic Tuesdays’ Film programme, he describes the audience as a “handful of mostly foreigners”. Maybe the film wasn’t that popular man! Because, as one of the founders of ‘Classic Tuesdays’, along with the Right Honorable Janet Jagan, the curator, and Sadie, a Castellani Committee member, we repeatedly had capacity Guyanese film fan crowds, when extra chairs had to be found at showings of films like Guisseppe Tornatore’s ‘Cinema Paradiso’ (the programme opener); Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’; De Sica’s ‘Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow’; Jean Negulessco’s ‘Humoresque’; Preminger’s ‘Laura’; Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’; Kazan’s ‘Wild River’, etc, and a hundred other Classic films. And as regards Georgetown’s architecture being wasted, the writer must have never seen Queenstown, Kingston, Subryanville, Bel Air Park, Bel Air Gardens, Prashad Nagar, Croal Street, north Camp Street or west Middle Street.

Such writings and publications if read by Guyanese, at home or abroad, can encourage them to have low, crude, and uneducated estimations of themselves and their abilities, and of their national identity. It also encourages foreign readers to EXPECT such stereotypes as the genuine, or GENERAL nature of Guyanese people, when they appear in creative literature by Guyanese writers, or books by foreign writers focusing on Guyanese society, past or present. A new literature, by and about Guyanese, is therefore vitally needed.

Since 2000, three journalistic travel books by three foreign writers have appeared on contemporary Guyana. They were published by three different American publishers (with European reprints). These books are not concerned with presenting a balanced, correct, and broad view of Guyana, for example: descriptions of its past and present literature, photos of its writers, their book covers, painters, their paintings, periodicals, museums, past cinemas, postage stamps, ships, architecture, influential intellectuals, etc. Instead, these books are new examples of how biased, sensationally opportunistic, and blindly one-dimensional writings and publications on Guyana can become.

By Terence Roberts