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Posts tagged with: Guyana
Beautiful Guyana
Its majestic landscapes, eclectic architecture, colourful flora, and fascinating fauna, make Guyana an unforgettable land!
De Surinaamse taalproblematiek (3)
door mr dr W.R.W. Donner
Belgische gebieden
Ook in de Belgische gebieden van Afrika werd korte metten gemaakt met het Nederlands (Vlaams). Kongo kwam in 1880 in Belgische handen. Dat bleef zo tot 1960. Terwijl in België de Vlamingen en Walen elkaar steeds in de haren zaten en zitten, over het primaat van de taal, is daarvan in de Kongo niets te merken. Daar is Frans gewoon de officiële taal. Dit is ook het geval in Rwanda Burundi. Dit land was een Duitse kolonie tot 1923. Toen kregen de Belgen het in handen tot 1962. Ook daar is Frans de officiële taal.
Across The Caribbean
by Lyndon Baptiste
I promise to be brief. And honest. Potbake’s 2009-10 Caribbean Short Story Competition is the brainchild of generosity and selfishness. In 2008 I published my first book, and whenever I’m “out there” struggling to market it along with my other releases I meet writers who claim they are “dying to get published – oh so badly! But there’s simply no opportunity!” Naturally as a publisher, writer and baby entrepreneur, I reasoned that such an offering could benefit us both.
Although I promoted the competition via the Internet only, the response was fantastic. There were entries from Guyana, Barbados, St. Lucia and other dots on the map. Caribbean people living in faraway lands submitted stories. Even Europeans, Africans and South Americans entered despite their nationality. When the deadline came at the end of August we had over fifty stories.
To our disappointment more than half didn’t meet the word count requirement. But that’s not the interesting part. Among the remaining stories there was a rainbow of writing styles, creativity, themes and in some cases, unfortunately, the lack of these things of which I myself am sometimes also guilty.
The competition committed to publishing seventeen short stories. The Only Man and Secret love were written by the winner, Raymond Yusuf of Guyana. The other fifteen stirred the judges in one way or another. Today you have the chance to read them yourself and become a judge, for this book, perhaps the first of its kind, is an eclectic snapshot of Caribbean literature.
[from Caribbean Literary Salon, klik hier voor inhoudsopgave van de bundel]
From Berbice to Broadstairs
From Berbice to Broadstairs (2006) by Maggie Harris is a superb collection evocative of Guyana. It is robust with poetic intelligence and sensual in its use of language.” (John Lyons) ” Maggie Harris continues to examine the ever-evolving relationship between her childhood in Guyana and her adulthood in the UK. The resulting poems are elegant, passionate flower-strewn works that stride across timescales and landscapes displaying the selfhood of a poet who carries her child-country on her shoulders. From her home in Kent – itself a region that continues to be shaped by new arrivals, different dialects and consequently, a mix of floklore – Maggie Harris’ writing illuminates the past and the present.” (John Rice)
ISBN: 9781902294285
Wilson Harris knighted
by Sateesh Maharaj
Guyana-born author Wilson Harris said he was very pleased at being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his contribution to Literature. The honour coincides with Her Majesty’s birthday celebrations this year.
“I am very pleased,” he said during a phone interview. “It was a bit of a surprise, but there you are! But it was not a complete surprise. They wrote to me a few weeks ago and told me that this was coming, but I was told not to say anything until the Queen had confirmed that it was okay. The only thing is that my wife was not there. She is not here. My wife, Margaret, would have been very pleased. She passed away earlier this year, in January.”
He says since the news broke of his knighthood “everyone has responded very well. I’ve received numerous phone calls and letters.”
Harris said these titles are rarely given to writers.
“They’re hardly given to conventional writers, and a writer like myself is hardly given a knighthood. So I feel that this is an encouragement to other writers in the region to persist in the their work, even if they feel that what they are doing is not popular, because in the long run it may tell on their behalf. It’s a question of the reality of the arts. The arts have to be pursued irrespective of what people think. And any Caribbean writer who has been working seriously should continue to do that and leave the rest to be judged by people who appreciate the importance of what they’re doing.”
He said conventional writing was different to his style of writing in that “conventional writing is straightforward writing.”
“My writing is quantum writing. Do you know of the quantum bullet? The quantum bullet, when it’s fired, leaves not one hole but two. That’s how my writing is.”
Son, Nigel Harris, who is also the Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies said his father’s knighthood “is a fitting tribute to his unique and extraordinary accomplishments as an author.” He said: “The imaginative and creative ways in which he envisioned and depicted the world around us doubtlessly proved to be inspirational for others like me involved in fields of enquiry and discovery well beyond the confines of literary scholarship.”
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Mark McWatt, Emeritus Professor of West Indian Literature at the Cave Hill campus, Barbados, said he was very happy to learn of the knighthood. “Of course I was very happy to hear that he had received this belated recognition of his achievements as a writer: He has remained faithful to his original vision and to what I have called “the language of the imagination” as a medium of expression in his novels. This has made his writing difficult for many, but very rewarding for those who persevere, as it has enabled him to come to terms with the landscape -especially the daunting landscapers of the interior of Guyana -with what he has called the “void” of history (for example the undocumented past of Guyana’s indigenous peoples), with the mix of races and cultures in the Caribbean and with events such as the Jonestown tragedy (all of which he has written about in the novels). It’s a pity this recognition comes so late in his career: he has not been well over the past year or so and in fact was in hospital earlier this year, after his wife Margaret died. I gather that he is no longer able to write novels.”
He said perhaps the award suggests that there’s still a chance that his life’s achievement might receive a more appropriate -and literary – recognition by the Sweedish Academy. “I remember a period in the 80s and 90s when Wilson Harris scholars were regularly invited to add their signatures to letters to the academy recommending that he be awarded the Nobel Prize.”
As for his personal impression of Wilson, McWatt said he first came across the author’s novels as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. “For me they were a revelation, because I grew up in the interior of Guyana and had been trying to write about the experience of that landscape myself. I understood at once why he wrote the way he did: it was in order to remain faithful to the experience, including the emotional response to the landscape which was something I had felt myself. I met him when he visited the University of Toronto in 1971 and he was one of the authors I wrote about in my doctoral thesis a few years later. I’ve met him several times since, both here in the Caribbean and in England. He is a very pleasant person and I’ve always found his conversation fascinating – on almost any topic. Over the years I’ve published about a dozen scholarly articles on his fiction and he has commented kindly on my own creative writing. For me he is the most interesting Guyanese writer.”
One of Guyana’s best known writers, the 89-year-old Harris was born in New Amsterdam in British Guiana and attended Queen’s College after which he studied land surveying and began to work as a government surveyor in 1942, rising to senior surveyor in 1955. In this period Harris became intimately acquainted with the Guyanese interior and with the Amerindian presence, his profile on the Peepal Tree Press website said.
Between 1945 and 1961, Harris was a regular contributor of stories, poems and essays to Kyk-over-Al and was part of a group of Guyanese intellectuals that included Martin Carter, Sidney Singh, Ivan Van Sertima and Milton Williams. His first publication was a book of poems, Fetish (1951) under the pseudonym Kona Waruk, followed by the more substantial Eternity to Season (1954) which announced Harris’s commitment to a cross-cultural vision in the arts, linking the Homeric to the Guyanese.
Harris’s first published novel was Palace of the Peacock (1969), followed by a further 23 novels with The Ghost of Memory (2006) as the most recent. He relocated to the United Kingdom in 1959.
[Uit: Trinidad Express, 5 juli 2010.]
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