Return to the Lantern-lit Scene

Last week, the stories of the three winners of the 2016 Walter Rodney Awards for Creative Writing began to unravel themselves. Our main tale began when the writers and I met to

discuss their works and their lives, but then then three stories emerged from that main story and now, as you prepare to read more about Andrew Huston, winner in the Non-Fiction category and Nicholas Peters, winner of the Fiction category, we must also remember Gabrielle Mohamed, who won for her poem and was featured in Part 1 of this two part-series on the Awardees.

Hutson and Peters are two young men, as different from each other as the sun and the moon, difference reflected most blatantly in their respective styles of writing. As I go back to that night and see myself sitting at the table and talking to them, certain things come back to the mind more strongly than others: the colourful lanterns hanging above our heads, of course, the inspiration and the inner feeling of wanting to create that comes whenever several artists come together to discuss artistic matters, and the way Hutson and Peters, though on apparently divergent paths, seemed to cross at the intersection of their lives related to Guyanese literature and the Guyanese experience.

To learn about this, we must go back to that very night when they met each other. Do you remember it? Think of a cool January night, in a dimly lit café, just on the edge of the Atlantic. All around there are foreigners, experiencing what they might believe to be “local culture.” But in the middle of the café, are a group of young writers, eager and excited to talk about their own contributions to actual local culture. Can you see it now? Very well then; let us proceed.

The Weight of Midnight Blue
Andrew Hutson is a doctor. He walks in on the night of the interview wearing deep blue medical scrubs, having just come off of work. There’s a layer of confidence about him as well. It is rich, palpable and shrouds him in an air of nonchalance that befits someone who somehow managed to make it through the rigorous days of medical school and still found time to embark on a literary career, managing to produce prize-winning work.

He is deserving of this gift of confidence, something most writers tend to lack, and one imagines that it only became wearable after many years of hard work. His answers to questions are sharp and precise, exact and unwavering, as well defined as a line carved by a scalpel. This exactness, perhaps one of the ways in which his science-oriented background influences his writing and the literary aspects of his personality is shown in the precision and exactness of his values, and his thoughts and hopes for the country and its future, as seen when he sums up the reasons for writing his Non-Fiction piece, entitled “Guyana’s Evolution: Ebb and Flow”, as him wanting to highlight the fact that “Guyana needs a clear vision for where it is heading.”

It is a simple-sounding fact, and yet it when compared with the piece of work written, that same statement blossoms into something quite grander, something that reaches back into the past and wraps it up with our present to shape our future. “Guyana’s Evolution” is a multi-faceted piece – layers upon layers like rows upon rows of petals in a single flower. And perhaps that image reminds us of Hutson himself – Science and History and Literature and a wide Imagination all coming together to offer us a blossom of an essay, pink and pretty and laced with thorns that prick, injecting a steady dose of reality even as we read the essay and see his vision for Guyana fifty years from now unfold in front of us.

“Guyana’s Evolution: Ebb and Flow” reminds one of a particular shade of midnight blue, a colour that appears to be shifting from blue to black or, alternatively, is both blue and black. The essay is a hybrid, offering us glimpses of the past in order to explain the future and examining why our history, everything starting from before the split into the Burnhamite and Jaganite factions to the floods in 2005, was offered as an explanation of, as well as a contributor to, our present and our future.

It is a stark reminder of all we have endured over the years. Reading the work creates an interesting sensation: as if, blue/black wave after blue/black wave rises, like a tsunami, and crashes over the reader as you experience once more everything that the country has gone through and endured. And yet, rising up out of the midnight blue flood waters that are left behind is what can only be considered a beacon of hope that the writer manages to find and include in his essay. Hutson describes Guyana, because of its sordid history coupled with the contemporary thinkers and events, as being on the cusp of greatness and on the path of a great intellectual rebirth. It is an optimistic outlook, and yet a burden that this generation might think too heavy to bear.

Nevertheless, it is one that is welcomed, one that rises out of the water and the mud, like a lotus urging us to swim towards it.
Hutson’s essay, in some ways, reads as a brief survey of Guyanese history – it highlights some of the most poignant moments in our country’s history and the way it builds up until it comes down to its final point is a clear indicator of the skill at work, and a further indicator that Hutson is more than worthy of his award.

Fire’s Red
“The Centuries Old Flame”, by Nicholas Peters came out as the winner in the Fiction category of the Competition. It is a story that is set in Guyana fifty years into the future and it shows a land that is made up of the cumulative mistakes that we make in this present time. The story is one of those that come alive as you read it, rippling and squirming with a slow burning zeal that runs through the entire tale, aching about both the need for the fire of revolution and about why such a flame would be more necessary in the future and yet, extremely difficult to light if we do not plan ahead or start trying to change things from now.
The same fire emanates from the writer of the story.

His t-shirt is red, which only enhances the effect. He seems fiercely intelligent, with the kind of fiery brightness that you know will come to illuminate the world one day if he chooses to stay on the path of being a writer. He wears glasses, which are a bit nerdy and he is so slim, and yet that fire still remains – strong and shimmering as he speaks about the story and revolution.

As you read “The Centuries Old Flame,” certain images leap out at you, like tendrils of fire curling out and binding itself to you, pulling you to feel the heat of the story. When the story paints before our very eyes the festive, material decorations that the people are using to celebrate Guyana’s centennial anniversary of Independence – being buildings plastered with the colours of the flag – you are being steeped into a setting into one that modern Guyanese are used to; one that we know has been used to blind us to the things that really matter while using national unity as a skin-deep front.

“It’s a distraction”, one character says to the other, of the many attractions that the government has put up, while the stories of activists and governmental critics go unnoticed and unreported. Oil has been found and it is already started, like some wild dragon, to gobble up the environment. And most interestingly, there seems to be a hierarchy in the society where people whose backgrounds are of certain (racial) mixes are superior to people of other mixes. Peters gives us a society that is so different from the Guyana we know and yet, such a society can only exist because of the Guyana we know.

At various points the blur between the real Guyana and the fictional Guyana becomes so strong that the reader swims in out and out of the flames that exist now and the flames that are sure to exist fifty years from now. We fly through the fiction, our bodies burning from the knowledge, explosive and uncontrollable, that if we are unable to solve the issues in our present state then the fire that has been started in the past will continue to spread, like wildfire, consuming everything in its path, consuming the intelligent and the beautiful, consuming our hopes and dreams, consuming our entire future.

The story is speculative fiction, of course, but barely so and that is the most terrifying thing about it at all. It is so close to reality, to what we know, that you can almost feel the heat and smell the smoke, you can all almost see the dancing, spinning figure of self-combustion that appears in the end of the story – both as an image of the horrifying and literal damage that will come our way, and also a warning for us to not go down a path that lead us to destroying ourselves, a path where this country and all of us can be reduced to nothing put spirals of smoke and heaps of ashes if we are not careful.

Together, Gabrielle Mohamed, Stefan Hutson and Nicholas Peters form a trio of young, upcoming writers that are joining a movement that is slowly, but surely, gaining pace – the Guyanese New Wave, if you will. It is already evident in the field of drama that a rebirth of Guyanese literature, if pruned and tended, can develop and help to make the country one with a respected literary base. The Walter Rodney Awards for Creative Writing is an important part of such a mission and its continued discovery of new and talented writers is more than enough proof of that.