The Leaf in His Ear

Left, the golden leaf bears from his ear.
At eighteen, Bushman fighting to control diamonds
in his glass head. The waters of the river
swirl by.

I and I Rastaman, with knotty India hair, has long ago ceased.
The good Lord swallowed him up.
Into Guiana forests. North-west.
Dogs bark and howl.
In this first of May day, the Almighty is rain,
voices, wind in banana suckers.

The poem that lends its title to A Leaf in His Ear, the collected poems of Mahadai Das, exemplifies what her publisher calls the “oblique, gnomic” style of her later writing. Das, who died in 2003 at the tragically early age of forty-eight, published three collections of poems and did not manage to complete her fourth. “There is no way Mahadai Das’s work can ever be other than an unfinished project,” writes Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press. “Readers need to be trusted to see what is absolutely essential and fully accomplished in her work.” A Leaf in His Ear, edited by the Guyanese scholar Denise De Caires Narain Gurnah, assembles the poems from Das’s three previous books with forty-two uncollected poems ranging from her whole career. This is a book I’ve been looking forward to for the better part of a decade. I’m thrilled to have it in my hands at last, and a full review will appear soon in the CRB.

De Caires Narain Gurnah writes:

The poems collected here are characterised by a restless determination and energy as well as by unexpected and startling imagery. Amidst the air of sorrow that permeates many of these poems, there is a sharp wit and a keenly reflexive intellect at work sifting through the joys, disappointments, frustrations, and pain of a life lived through the fervour of nationalism and the bitter realities of independence in Guyana under Burnham and the mass migrations that followed . . . The trajectory her work charts from nationalism to disillusionment is not uncommon amongst Caribbean poets; what is distinctive about Das’s oeuvre is that this shift is so dramatically and decisively mapped. This, along with the space (I am tempted to say “jangling”) dissonance of her poetic voice and the intensity of the work, make hers a powerful and unique contribution to Caribbean poetry.

You can follow that “trajactory . . . from nationalism to disillusionment” even in the titles of Das’s three previous books. I Want to Be a Poetess of My People (1976) includes the much-anthologised “They Came in Ships”, memorialising the Caribbean’s Indian immigrants. My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982) suggests a determined turning inward, a phase of reflection. Bones (1988) explores even deeper privacies, or more private depths. Illness during the final decade of her life made writing difficult, and the handful of strange, startling poems that end this volume have been lost to us for too long.

Read two more of Mahadai Das’s later poems in the February 2010 issue of Town.

Edgar Mittelholzer

For the past thirty years Mittelholzer disappeared totally, his books obtainable only second hand, and his reputation solidified as at best being that of a literary ancestor, a pot-boiling writer obsessed with sex and race-mixing and given to right-wing, authoritarian views . . .

— At the Caribbean Literary Salon blog, Peepal Tree Press founder Jeremy Poynting writes about returning Edgar Mittelholzer to print and the importance of reconsidering the work of this writer “of immense literary ambition and imagination”:

There is his fascination with musical form as analogous to the form of the novel and his idiosyncratic take on a number of the devices of modernist fiction. There is his perception that the confrontations manifest in early nineteenth century writing (between the optimism of the rationalist project, the gothic sensibility of darkness and disorder and the romantic discovery of truth to inner feeling) were pertinent to Caribbean societies in the process of making themselves after the sleep of colonialism. And with this seriousness went a compulsive urgency to tell stories.

(For more on Peepal Tree’s Caribbean Modern Classics series, see this interview with Poynting in the May 2010 CRB.)

Lower Potaro River, Guyana, with Kaieteur Falls just visible in the distance. Photograph by Nicholas Laughlin

Deeply influenced by the “mythic method” of high modernists like Eliot and Joyce, Harris set out to redescribe his society sub specie eternitatis — through the lens of an historical consciousness which reached back several centuries and encompassed the racial memories of Europe, Africa and the Americas. The conventions of traditional fiction, which tended to dwell on the surfaces of things, simply could not do this. So Harris forged a style that let him delve into the interior life of a country that was both ancient — if seen as part of the continental land mass — and, paradoxically, in its political infancy as it emerged from the clutches of its colonial master. Eager to restore the lost perspectives of a landscape he had mapped as a professional surveyor, he had the intellectual courage, and chutzpah, to fictionalize his visionary intuitions without yielding to the lure of simplification.

Prodigiously well read, and dauntingly familiar with Marxist and Existentialist thought, Harris referred unblushingly to Heideggerian dasein and geworfenheit, and to “absent presences” in the national soul. Far from being pretentious or obscurantist, these concepts translated the struggle of the West Indian artist into language that could be understood on a world stage. C.L.R. James and Derek Walcott held similarly panoptic views of European culture, and they also possessed the intellectual confidence to respond to it on their own terms. In fact, his novels and cultural criticism fit squarely into a literary vision of the Caribbean shared by both of these men, and in some instances he even seems to have helped pave the way for their success.

— From “The Lost World of Wilson Harris”, the elegiac editorial in today’s Stabroek News, reflecting on the recent news of Harris’s knighthood, the immense creative ambitions of a previous generation of Guyanese and West Indian writers, and today’s “diminished cultural expectations.”

Walter Rodney addressing an audience in Guyana, late 1970s

“Respice, adspice, prospice” is a Latin phrase that roughly means “examine the past, examine the present, examine the future. Very few lived more completely under the embrace of this phrase than Walter Rodney. From the moment that Rodney (the 30th anniversary of whose assassination is being observed today) encountered the science of history he utilised it to serve society. In his own analytical approach he would go forth boldly to challenge assumptions that he thought required redefining if not shattering. All societies he touched experienced his restless and relentless search for the laws of social motion in the specific location, together with the method and the organization to engage the motor for change.

The lessons of Rodney’s activism in places like Jamaica and Guyana obviously have to be placed in context. It was a different time and place, but his spirit of resistance and human need to reach out beyond the corridors of academia to the poor and dispossessed (and feared and ostracized groups in Jamaica at times like the Rastafari) was a key legacy of his life and work, and is ever more needed today.

— From an essay by Nigel Westmaas on Walter Rodney’s legacies and “lessons from the past”, published today in Stabroek News.

Excerpt from The Terror and the Time, Rupert Roopnaraine’s 1979 film, including Martin Carter’s reading of his poem “This Is the Dark Time My Love”

Were Martin Carter still alive, he would be eighty-three today. Carter’s life and work have been much on my mind the past months. They offer exemplary matter for contemplation of questions about the place of the Caribbean writer in the world, about literary integrity and seriousness, about the meaning of literary success, and about the shape of contemporary Caribbean poetry.

His birthday seems an apt moment to introduce a new section at the CRB website. Readers may have noticed that the relaunched website includes a subject index page — a work in progress — where reviews and other pieces from the magazine are listed under major subject headings, making it easier to navigate our six-year archive. In the coming months, we plan to expand the subject index with pages dedicated to significant Caribbean writers, where we will list relevant CRB (and Antilles) pieces, along with a selection of interesting links to material online elsewhere.

I’m pleased that our new Martin Carter page is the first. There you’ll find links to Vahni Capildeo’s review of Carter’s Collected Poems from the November 2006 CRB, Stewart Brown’s essay on Carter’s art and legacy from our February 2006 issue, and the selections from Carter’s poetry notebooks that we published in November 2008 — as well as links to reviews and articles in other periodicals, biographical resources, and poems.

I will always be speaking with you. And if I falter,
and if I stop, I will still be speaking with you, in
words that are not uttered, are never uttered, never
made into the green sky, the green earth, the
green, green love . . .
….And I was bathing by the sea and there was a
gull, a white gull, so far, so far . . .
….I saw the weak wing flutter long before it did,
and the webbed foot dip, long before it did; and
the sudden wave, and the scarlet tinted foam of
a sunset burning like fire already gold in flames.

(From “Suite of Five Poems”, written in 1961
and first published in 2000 in Kyk-Over-Al)