The Journey in Guyanese Literature persists with excellence

YOU want to give a book gift this Christmas? Then place Mike Jordan’s “Kamarang” novel on your list. It is a piece of local literature for adults that will grip you and take you to shadier places in Georgetown and the Gold-Bush through time frames of our social life from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The story is introduced by the famous arson of the Ritz Hotel on High and Harel Streets, Werk-en-Rust in 1960. The main character is Michael Jones, a young Bruce Lee fitness fan. This is a novel I will describe with a foreign definition that I have localised.

This novel is a ‘Tropical Gothic’ and it takes the reader into that other Guyana that our imagination is engrossed in while we seek acceptable explanations in religion to shield our primordial fears and apprehensions, we fear and openly resent, and embrace at the same time, seeking never to explore broader possibilities in the untamed forests and remoteness of nature, as most of the Guyanese characters in the book are preoccupied doing.

The plot is grounded in the assertion of lore into the habits, pretensions and perceived harmless hunting grounds of lust, that are scorned as anti-upstanding adventures into the subterranean abodes of society, where dim lights, prostitutes and strange characters gather to explore, to forget and to hunt.

This novel enters the labyrinth of folklore and explores the hunt, only this time,man is the prey and the dominant force of the hunt matches human intellect and sensibilities with a lure that has damned our better judgment since the mythical dawn of our species. Its trap is set and its prey cannot conceive of our human world, where we are masters of everything that also, we can be the plaything, the victim of that ‘other’ we want to regulate as ‘don’t exist’ despite the faculty of premonitions; that we seek to dismiss as God’s design error.

Mike throws a lot of elements into his first novel. He captures glimpses of the aches of a working-class youth in a specific political period; the latter I try to avoid because of the devastating effect our totally politicised media culture and aggression has had on our psyche and is having on creating a level economic playing field for diverse developments outside of the popular economic political priorities.

Which has led me to the potential of ‘Kamarang’ in respect to the national mechanism that should be able to facilitate the worth of this gripping Guyanese novel and advise through knowledgeable expertise toward another economic level, for even if the author comes into a contract with a private investor, who theoretically would be inspired by a cordial exchange mechanism for any area of the Arts directed first at our CARICOM area.

This was the idea that launched CARIFESTA, to enhance talents into Industry, this was also the idea behind the present National TV station, to make local films and it did. But the bureaucrats that inherited that brilliant concept allowed it as the song lamented to fall beneath their intellect like “a stone upon the water” and so it never kicked off to fill the void that has existed forever, Nothing presently exists in Guyana, and again no work has been done by CARICOM toward a viable exchange of movie, books or T-Shirt design products to even encourage [to assure a return of investment funds] among talents in member states which should be done because of the small populations we have.

But that I am preaching this, in the review of the latest work is significant to clarify the status of the Arts as Industry, and there are other adjoining concerns that have to be investigated that have occurred over the years proposing to be in our interest, that exist under serious question marks.

‘Kamarang’ is a must buy; not to be borrowed, but to be owned, with the way local self-publishing projects go when this published run ceases to exist. The author will most likely be gathering his creative and economic forces for his next project, that there are no National Deposit of Published local books in a collection for sale in any location except for Austin’s Book Services. Mike dabbles with the myriad buried inheritances of the Guyanese soul, yes we are a complete composite of many nations, and as the pages of ‘Kamarang’ unfold.

We may have inherited not only physical gifts but ancient feuds and lurking vendettas. From the diverse tribal nations that came here from Africa through slavery, the same for the Amerindians and Europeans and the contentious caste cultures of the Indians all despite our pretentions have mingled, many secretly, but all profoundly, so all are rooted in ancient rites and rituals, psychological belief imaginations that we pray in a quiet sanctuary of our minds that such things, creatures and powers do not exist.

But, suppose, as ‘Kamarang’ beckons, their presence exists and unfortunately you are having the experience to prove it? So enjoy ‘Kamarang’ folks, recognise that the incentive of the dire unknown always comes from time immemorial within the heated tentacles of the passions of fiery lust, do read, and enjoy Mike Jordan’s ‘Kamarang’.