Guyana in Greek at the National Art Gallery...

 

Guyana in Greek

Saturday afternoon in the National Art Gallery at Castellani House. People sitting in half of the seats near the beautiful paintings.

Professor  Stephanos Stephanides delivers the Martin Carter lecture. He talks about working in Guyana, about going to Blairmont to be involved in Kali Mai puja and about Martin Carter encouraging his poetry. 

He is from Cyprus, more violently divided (fractured) than Guyana. He talks about the Mediterranean and Caribbean. He talks about reverse gaze and Greek and Sanskrit words and 'theory' and so on. And Memory Fiction .He says that when asked for his bio for the lecture, he told the moderator 'you are a fiction writer.. go on, write something and invent me.. ".

I understood it all when listening but have forgotten some stuff as I did not make notes and the Ministry of Culture has not made the lecture public if they have recorded it.

The moderator had to stop him because 'time' runs out and there was some space for interesting questions and answers. And for one of the gatekeepers of Guyanese 'literature' to make an intervention which demonstrates his incompetence and his desperate attempt to assert relevance and inserted the tragedy of  Guyana into the event.

Professor Stephanos Stephanides donated his book 'The Wind under my Lips' to the University of Guyana Library.  

The UG Library had an exhibition of books and manuscripts which have been shortlisted and associated with the Guyana Prize. They included some of their books by Wilson Harris and Edgar Mittelholzer.

The exhibition was part of the 'Literary Festival'. 

The National Library, and other book institutions were absent from the 'Literary Festival'.  

A young writer and reader of this blog said the event was like a 'checking of a box' on the Government's part where money was spent .

Books

Sunday morning. 

I see a woman going mandir as I go to check out the UG Library exhibition and to open some of the books which we hear about but do not have easy access to read them.

It is a rare opportunity to handle the books - as one of the attendants noted 'we do not get a chance to exhibit often, there are not many book events'

Image from The Wind Under My Lips by Stephanos Stephanides

One of the poems in the Wind Under My Lips was written in Guyana, and dedicated to Kali Mai. The poem and location of writing are translated into Greek.   Guyana in Greek.

Guyana has been 'greek' to many of us who have tried to find ways of understanding and living and not despairing.

The exhibition has some of the other collections of poems. I am not a poems man but I open Bones by Mahadai Das as I think of the young Guyanese women of Indian origins who are writing poetry and have not heard of Mahadai Das . 

One of the poems is 'for Anna Karenina'., about the suicide, graphic like the one in A. J's Seymour Legend of Old Kaie. Pauline Melville , another Guyana Prize winner, has a new collection of short stories which include two connected to characters who die by suicide. 

And in the Edgar Mittelholzer collection is 'the Wounded and the Worried' - in which  the characters well.. discuss attempting suicide and dealing with despair. 

Edgar Mittelholzer died by suicide.  

There is a poems collection by  one of my Facebook frenz.who I don't really know.  Trinidadian-Bahamian  poet Christian Campbell's Running Dusk includes a poem Iguana which invokes Guyana. 

Image from Running Dusk by Christian Campbell

Is nice to see Guyana from the Cypriot, and from the Trinidadian-Bahamian. 

The exhibition includes Lots of 'diaspora' writing about Guyana too - they often write -apparently beautifully- about a place which I don't recognise but that is the nature of illusion and reality and so on. I recognise some of the names of authors whose later works we read or are about to read in book club. 

And the names of people who have not written anything else as yet.

Sunday morning of the literary festival.  

The big event the night before - the slam poetry competition- was apparently successful. Well attended.

You could tell the success from the plastic bottles and paper and plastic containers on the grass around the beautiful white chairs in the Castellani House grounds 

I am not a poems man though later on the Sunday I sit in a mandir on land made sacred by 'people from India' and we sing some of the poems brought by the ancestors from India.

Far away from the literary festival 

(This blog evolved into one of the In the Diaspora columns in Stabroek News on 20th Feb, 2023 )