Kyk-Over-Al, Volumes 1-7(1945-51)
Caribbean Press 2014
First published in Guyana in December 1945, Kyk-Over-Al was to become one of the most significant and long-running literary magazines in the Caribbean. Over the course of some 50 issues it has featured work by many of the leading writers from Guyana and the wider Caribbean, publishing the early poetry and fiction of such groundbreaking authors as Wilson Harris and Martin Carter, as well as important critical essays, histories, and reviews. Between 1945 and 1961, the journal was edited by the poet A. J. Seymour, a “committed literary figure and cultural architect” whose editorial notes and frequent essays for Kyk-Over-Al represent landmark contributions to the forging of a Guyanese literary culture.
Following Seymour’s departure from Guyana in 1962, the journal went into abeyance until a revival in 1984 under the editorship of Seymour and the poet and novelist Ian McDonald. With the death of Seymour in 1989, McDonald became sole editor. The magazine has continued to appear intermittently into the 2000s, with activist and writer Vanda Radzik joining McDonald on editorial duties.
Kyk-Over-Al was founded by the British Guiana Writers’ Association and the British Guiana Union of Cultural Clubs, of which Seymour was Honorary Secretary. Costing a shilling and with a cover design by Cecil E. Barker, the first edition of the journal declared its intention to “cultivate among British Guiana’s writers the art of setting out a point of view persuasively even when wholly uncompromising; always giving short shrift to the brow-beating and the intolerant; that it will assist our readers with the enquiring and challenging mind; and that, in pointing the way to a clear appreciation of British Guiana’s problems, it will contribute towards the efforts of all our people to achieve full responsibility in personal and community decisions.”2 The name Kyk-Over-Al (“see over all”), taken from the ruined Dutch fort at the confluence of the Essequibo, Mazaruni, and Cuyuni rivers, was meant to signify the need “for quick and wide vigilance and the expression of an alert people.”3 As Seymour made clear in his editorial notes, the magazine was to be actively engaged in the project of building the Guyanese nation and of shaping a unique culture. Kyk-Over-Al, he wrote, will be “an instrument to help forge a Guianese people, to make them conscious of their intellectual and spiritual possibilities.”4
Seymour’s ambitions for the magazine chime with the upsurge in nationalist sentiment and the increasing agitation for political sovereignty that spread like wildfire across the Caribbean in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Against this backdrop, as Nelini Persram has observed, what “raged in the debates and expositions of Kyk-Over-Al assisted in the conscious articulation and awareness of an emerging Guyanese culture, something unprecedented in the country’s history. For Seymour the central interest was how, with the historical influence and domination of the language of English, the Guyanese could take the old colonial world and remake it into their own nation.”5 Indeed, Seymour stressed the need for Guyanese, and Caribbean peoples more generally, to “make an act of possession somehow of our environment and the faster the better.”6 Many of the stories and poems that appeared in the early issues of the magazine can be read as a direct response to Seymour’s enjoinder. The first issue, for instance, carries a fascinating piece of short fiction by Wilson Harris, “Tomorrow”, which provides an early glimpse of some of the themes (if not yet the unique prose style) that he would explore over the course his long career. Intriguingly, the story gestures to what would become a central concern in Harris’s work – the necessity of developing an original aesthetic appropriate to the remarkable landscapes of Guyana:
There was only one picture in the room. A picture of the Kaieteur Falls. When he saw me looking at it, the old man said—
‘I like that.’ He seemed to be seeking words to express his thoughts. ‘It has power. Beauty. Mystery. It is a symbol for this land. The symbol of power waiting to be harnessed. Of beauty that goes hand in hand with terror and majesty. Of the mystery that lies in men’s hearts, waiting to be explored, given form and direction and purpose’7
In a later piece of short fiction, “Fences Upon the Earth” (published in issue four of Kyk-Over-Al), Harris can be seen still struggling to find a form of narrative expression adequate to the environmental experience of Guyana. At the end of the story, the narrator declares: “Yes. I know what you will say. The words I have used are inadequate. Forgive me. I know it was inevitable that it should be so. The whole thing had been secret and wordless.”8 As Reinhard Sander has observed, this “‘secret and wordless’ thing is an encounter with the Amerindian presence in the Guyanese interior, an encounter that provides some insight into the profound and disturbing impression that the Guyanese landscape and its ancestral inhabitants were to leave on the mind of the future novelist.”9 Indeed, the description of this encounter seems to move us a step closer to a prose more familiarly ‘Harrisian’ in style and tone:
For the first time that I could remember I looked upon a human being standing upon the earth, not falsely, by force or subterfuge, or bravado, or by any sort of empty pretension, but very simply, as though to own the earth were to carry the most natural and easeful burden in the world . . . His limbs were powerful. They had the perfection of the young trees that stand rooted in the forests, breathing forth an ageless symmetry in their being.10
That Harris, one of the Caribbean’s most acclaimed and original authors, should first publish in Kyk-Over-Al is testament to the journal’s significance. There is a real frisson to be had in browsing through the yellowing pages of early issues and seeing formative works by poets and novelists who would go on to play a defining role in the development of Caribbean letters. Fifteen years after “Tomorrow”, for example, Harris would publish his first novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960), a visionary re-telling of the quest for El Dorado that sought not only to reanimate eclipsed historical perspectives, but also to imaginatively redeem a past that had never existed. In this novel, as he would do in the twenty-two that followed (the last being The Ghost of Memory in 2006, over 60 years since his first appearance in Kyk-Over-Al), Harris sifts through the ruins of history, searching for signs of its Utopian negation in the form of the unborn potential of cross-cultural community. Harris’s longstanding emphasis on the redemptive force of cross-cultural community can be seen in embryo in a number of the poems he published in Kyk-Over-Al. Many of these were later included in his collection Eternity to Season (1954), which seeks to weave together Homeric myth with the landscapes of Guyana and the lives of its people in a manner that foreshadows Derek Walcott’s epic reworking of Greek legend in a Caribbean context in Omeros (1990).
Alongside Harris, Martin Carter was another consistent contributor to Kyk-Over-Al. Indeed, his first published piece of work – a ‘fragment’ from “An Ode to Midnight” – appeared in issue six of the journal. This poem, with its “deliberate archaism” which “does little to distinguish it from the many pastiches in Kyk-Over-Al that cast back to classical and romantic structures of poetic expression”, represents, as Gemma Robinson puts it, something of a “deceptive entrance” by Carter into Guyanese literature.11 It would not be long, however, before Carter’s more familiar poetic voice – passionate, committed, protesting the squalor of colonialism in a language of lyrical beauty – would resound in the pages of the periodical. Here he is in “Death of a Slave”, for example, excoriating the brutality of plantation labour in stanzas at once both savagely forthright and dense with the gravity of history:
Cane field is green dark green
Green with life of its own
Heart of slave is red deep red
Red with life of its own
Day passes like long whip
Over the back of slave
Day is burning whip
Biting the neck of slave
It is worth comparing this poem as it appeared in Kyk-Over-Al in 1952 with the version published two years later as part of the collection Poems of Resistance from British Guiana. In the latter, the same stanzas are rendered as follows:
The cane field is green dark green
Green with a life of its own
The heart of a slave is red deep red
Red with a life of its own
Day passes like a long whip
Over the back of a slave
Day is a burning whip
Biting the neck of a slave
The addition of a series of definite and indefinite articles (“The cane field”, “a slave”) to the 1954 version subtly alters the rhythm of the poem: the Kyk-Over-Al piece has a punchy ferocity, a clipped cadence that is softened in the later rendering. While the tone and metre of the latter is perhaps more successful at engaging the reader in the subject of the poem (Carter’s aim in his lyrics, observes Robinson, was always to “pursue the goal of collective feeling” and to challenge his readers to join him in making sense of the world14), there is something about the brute simplicity of the earlier construction – especially its undifferentiated evocation of the slave as simply “slave” (“neck of slave” / “back of slave”) – that speaks to the terrifying, dehumanizing violence of slavery.
Comparisons such as this highlight how immensely interesting are the contributions to Kyk-Over-Al for those looking to track not only the contours of Guyanese literary history, but also the fascinating genealogies of individual poems and prose pieces. The republication of the journal in the Guyana Classics series will make easier the task of throwing light on the literary development of Guyana’s most significant authors. In addition to Harris and Carter, Kyk-Over-Al included work by a range of other significant writers in the early stages of their careers. Edgar Mittelholzer, for instance, contributed a number of intriguing poems to the journal (see issues three and nineteen). The “first of his generation to emigrate to the UK to make a serious career of writing novels”, Mittelholzer was a pioneer, penning such important works as Corentyne Thunder (1941), Shadows Move Among Them (1951), and the Kaywana trilogy of historical novels (1952-58), which cover over 300 years of Guyanese history.15 The work of Jan Carew, whose novels The Wild Coast (1958) and Black Midas (1958) are compelling re-workings of the Bildungsroman in a Guyanese context, also features in the journal, as does that of Roy Heath, who contributed some rare early poetry to issues 17 1953) and 19 (1954), some 20 years before his first novel, A Man Come Home (1974), was published.
Of equal interest when reading through early issues of Kyk-Over-Al is the vast array of literary pieces by contributors whose career did not subsequently flourish, or whose work has never received the same kind of attention as that of writers like Harris or Mittelholzer. The journal enables us to reconstruct an often overlooked portion of the literary field in which those more celebrated authors were working. The dynamics of literary consecration and canonization tend to produce relatively attenuated literary histories, marginalizing certain writers and obscuring the diverse range of work with which more well-known texts may well have been in dialogue; Kyk-Over-Al allows us to recover some of that rich tradition and to develop a more fine-grained understanding of the evolution of Guyanese literature.
This is especially so since in addition to fostering new literary talents, Kyk-Over-Al sought to preserve and bring to attention the work of earlier Guyanese writers, thereby not only “moulding a Guianese consciousness” but also “recording its tradition”, as Seymour put it. In illustration of Seymour’s point, the second issue selected the poet Walter MacArthur Lawrence (1896-1942) for “honour and commemoration”, republishing a selection of stanzas from his poem “Ode to Kaieteur” and featuring a number of essays on his work.17 This issue of the journal was notable too, for what, as Petamber Persaud has observed, may be “the first recorded call for a local literary prize”, with James W. Smith, the Honorary Secretary of the British Guiana Writers’ Association, arguing for the establishment of a literary award in the form of the Leo Medal for poetry, The Webber Medal for fiction and The Clementi Medal for non-fiction and drama.18
In preserving the Guyanese literary heritage while also supporting and even launching the careers of some of Guyana’s most well-known and critically lauded writers, Kyk-Over-Al not only helped to shape the contours of Guyanese literary culture, but also contributed more generally to the ‘boom’ in Caribbean writing in the 1950s. Indeed, the journal was one of a number of literary magazines that flourished across the region in the middle decades of the twentieth century. These included such periodicals as The Beacon in Trinidad (first published in 1931), Tropiques in Martinique (1941), Bim in Barbados (1942), Focus in Jamaica (1943), Orígenes in Cuba (1944), Asomante in Puerto Rico (1945), and Caribbean Quarterly, which was launched by the University of the West Indies’ Department of Extra Mural Studies in 1949. Alongside such outlets as the BBC’s Caribbean Voices radio programme (which ran from 1943 to 1958 and featured readings of work by writers such as George Lamming, Una Marson, V. S. Naipaul, and Sam Selvon), these magazines provided a new forum for the circulation and discussion of Caribbean literature, encouraging into print a whole host of emerging literary talents.
In comparison with many of these other journals, Kyk-Over-Al was, as Laurence Breiner has observed, “remarkable for the high quality of its poetry from the very beginning.”19 This was down in large part to the frequent contributions made by Harris, Carter, and Seymour himself (Harris contributed some 37 poems between 1945 and 1961, Carter some 24, and Seymour over 40). The journal also “made pioneering efforts in literary criticism, and opened its pages to writers of the whole region, even publishing translations of works from the French Antilles.”20 Indeed, Breiner suggests that Kyk-Over-Al’s outlook was “closely tied to the dream of the West Indian Federation.”21 In a similar vein, L. E. Braithwaite has argued that the magazine moved from a purely Guyanese to a West Indian position with the establishment of the University College of the West Indies in 1948.22
The pause in the journal’s publication in 1961, occasioned by Seymour’s departure from Guyana, occurred just as the country was entering into a period of intense ethno-political hostilities that rent the fabric of society. That Kyk-Over-Al should fall silent at this time seems poignantly apt given its stated aim to help build the nation and its commitment to fostering a collective Guyanese consciousness. Against the backdrop of race riots that pitched communities against one another, the journal’s raison d’être perhaps appeared hopelessly Utopian. And yet such Utopianism was, and remains, fundamental to thinking beyond the apparent impasses and entrenched divisions that mark the present; and to imagining the possibility of a radically different future. As Martin Carter put it in “Looking at Your Hands”, published in Kyk-Over-Al in 1952, “I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world”.23 The last word, however, should perhaps belong to Seymour, who expressed similar sentiments to Carter in a poem published in the third issue, and which in many ways encapsulates the ideals behind the founding of the journal:
To-day they hope
But to-morrow belongs to the people.
To-morrow they will put power behind their brow
And get the skill in their hands.
To-morrow
They will make a hammer to smash the slums
And build the schools.
Like a River, the people hold history in their hands
And To-morrow belongs to them.24
1 Nalini Persam, “The Importance of Being Cultural: Nationalist Thought and Jagan’s Colonial World”, in Small Axe, 15 (March 2004): 86.
2 H. R. Harewood, “A Message”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 1.1 (1945): 26.
3 A. J. Seymour, “Editorial Notes”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 1.1 (1945): 7
4 Ibid.
5 Persam, “The Importance of Being Cultural”, 86-87.
6 A. J. Seymour, “Editor’s Note”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 2.7 (1948): 2.
7 Wilson Harris, “Tomorrow”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 1.1 (1945): 30.
8 Wilson Harris, “Fences Upon the Earth”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 1.4 (1947): 21.
9 Reinhard W. Sander, “The Quest for Form: Wilson Harris’ Contributions to Kyk?over?al”, in World
Literature Written in English, 22.1 (1983): 20.
10 Harris, “Fences Upon the Earth”, 21.
11 Gemma Robinson, “Introduction”, in University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, by Martin Carter and ed. Gemma Robinson (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2006), 17.
12 Martin Carter, “Death of a Slave”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 4.14 (1952): 53.
13 Martin Carter, “Death of a Slave”, in University of Hunger, 88.
14 Robinson, “Introduction”, in University of Hunger, 31.
15 Michael Gilkes, “Edgar Mittelholzer,” in West Indian Literature, 2nd edition, ed. Bruce King (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1995), 127.
16 A. J. Seymour, “Editorial Notes”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 1.2 (1946): 3-4.
17 Ibid.
18 Petamber Persaud, “Preserving Our Literary Heritage: Kyk-Over-Al, Part 1 – 1945-1961”, in Guyana Chronicle 30th July (2006). Web. 1 March. http://www.landofsixpeoples.com/gytodaysixelevenjs.htm
19 Laurence A. Breiner, An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 78.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 See A. J. Seymour, “Kyk at 50”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 46/47 (1995): 19.
23 Martin Carter, “Looking at Your Hands”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 4.14 (1952): 52.
24 A. J. Seymour, “To-Morrow Belongs to the People”, in Kyk-Over-Al, 1.3 (1946): 11.
Written By Michael Niblett
