Poets from Guyana wouldn't be poets if they ignored the ____________________________
landscape. The savannahs, the dense forests, the
grid-ordered city all invite wonder and engagement. THE JOURNEY TO LE REPENTIR
Among colonial labourers the first flicker of literary by Mark McWatt
(self) awareness could have happened late one afternoon:
someone pausing to look across pastoral rice fields or Peepal Tree Press
lush cane stalks and thinking, Hell of a country. I could England, 2009
write poetry 'bout this place. Generations later a 146 pgs.
relative or neighbour, better educated and with fine
penmanship, might have made the first self-conscious ____________________________
stab at the sonnet form.
Today we can read what happened next to that capacity for wonder and (self) possession.
Wilson Harris would travel and drill deep into Interior layers, extracting myths and mud-
obscured symbols of alchemy. The more city-bound poet Martin Carter found his fire
as street riots & political upheaval disrupted Georgetown's colonial order, and Coldstream
Guards set foot on his Demerara shores.
Newer, almost reclusive, poet Brian Chan seems "engaged" even when his poetry hints
at disengagement. Caught up in the post-Independence turmoil his city poems record
the setting up of defences, private kokers to regulate (or keep at bay) the flow of
unfriendly governing sentiment. For someone who didn't travel far around the country
Chan's poems are dry, well-insulated places of empathy, buttressed by Emily Dickinson-
style epigrams, where insight & feeling hatch.
In his latest poetry volume, The Journey to Le Repentir (2009), Mark McWatt invites
readers into new untractored terrain: The North West region. If Ian McDonald had
carved out Essequibo as his place of escape, discovery (and now faithful old world
newspaper musings) McWatt takes us to places in "the North West district of Guyana/
(before there was 'Region One'"); and back in time to the 1950s
The collection contains an introduction from the author explaining how the poems came
about, the book's narrative sequence structure; it includes the "voices" of travellers to Guiana:
an English sea captain in search of Eldorado; a Frenchman exiled to Demerara (not Chateau
d'If).
McWatt is a (retired) University professor so it's not surprising to find an academic warp-
weave of themes in his material. The Journey to Le Repentir melds history readings
and personal recollection in a way that makes for an intelligent (if sentimental) parsing
of experience.
His "journey" starts with references to his growing up years; it moves out in sections
through the Mazaruni; through "mortal-midway" poems, and postcard poems sent to
friends encountered on the way; and then to Le Repentir, Georgetown's now jungle-
overrun burial grounds.
The Mazaruni poems are not quite what you might expect, dense, ecologically sensitive
elegies to a landscape made famous around the literary world as an imaginary locus
where events foreshadowed and unforeseen occur. McWatt seems wary of some poets'
fondness for symbol-making and transcendence-offering. "I know/you poets and the
irresponsibility/of your traffic in tropes and symbols".
Still, like Le Repentir, the Mazaruni region encourages rapture, the way less talented,
more calculating Guyanese writers get rapturous about (ethnic) origins, closed
communities & victim 'hoods; reinforcing perimeters within the nation in proud columns
and often poorly constructed lines.
The Journey To Le Repentir is arranged in four sections, and readers might find pleasure
in the varied narrative voices (creole chatty, lyric evocative). The opening lines - "This is
my song of the universe/of the past that is now and the future that is never" – set a
pulpit high tone of sincerity. Again, unlike Ian McDonald – bypassing that poet's excited
scenery description - McWatt searches for language that makes the landscape more
globally meaningful, not just parochially lovable.
He is less concerned with rhythm in his lines or with word precision ("vast as estuaries, he was
that riparian aristocrat/whose alluvial accent sounded in the bedrooms of all rivers.") Craft
though important seems secondary to his heart's content and motion. When he reaches for
metaphors he picks sumptuous, ripe ones: "All the rain long/the world wept/like a wound in
the soft/of you."
There are moments, too, when you wonder what to make of strange lapses into banality:
"Beyond this destination/there are other destinations and still/another Destination". And
soppiness: "Sometimes I look at my hands/the hands that wield pen and pointer/that cup
your rounded breasts/that chop garlic and green onions."
Though one can't be sure how deep the incisions go the collection is marked by lament,
confession, gratitude, innocence; and pain, under the mask of poetry's "luxurious atone-
ment". What the back cover commends as "brave candour" in his lines feels sometimes
like the brave armature of a poet of faith who, on occasion, can be "ambushed by sudden
tears."
Readers in mid-adolescence could share McWatt's delight in revisiting places: "our first
house in Mabaruma", "the wind-kissed river"; glimpses of Amerindian "budding breasts
exposed", and a black tiger which to a school boy might have seemed a manifestation
of the forest spirit, Kanaima. These perceptions have stayed with the poet and have
accrued over years into deep affection for his cultivated swath of Guiana.
Somehow in his forays into living environments and inner life experience McWatt steers
clear of the toxic air in Georgetown politics ("fleeing the vulgar coercions of Burnham's
land" is as close and as current as he gets). There are poems that offer reprise and
variation on a familiar theme, "Independence"; and poems about love (in "The Museum
of Love") which are done with a curator's sensitivity to human loss and revaluation.
Heart-energized, magnanimous in its navigations The Journey To Le Repentir makes a
plea for teaching moments in Guyanese classrooms. As a teaching tool, beside a porten-
tous Martin Carter volume (filled with stoic lines & solitary foreboding) it could achieve
an odd coupled partnership of spirit.
Mark McWatt – winner of the Guyana Prize (1994), the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (2006)
and a university professor – has come a long way since boyhood days walking home from
school through the jungle (when not riding in daddy's Land Rover). Readers might sense
some measure of unease in the poet's divided self, as establishment and native identities
jostle. The pull seems stronger toward a romancing of McWatt's unusual forest origins – his
intimate rivers, its memories and ghosts, "the [native] solitude and detachment" they
engendered.
The Journey To Le Repentir ends with a postscript; the poet takes one last updating stroll
through the Georgetown burial grounds. "So our places of death, like our lives/are tainted
with the rot, the disorder." (Flag: authored insights like that might upset the retro
ideologues currently on stage who bristle at any form of "negative" or "unpatriotic"
sentiment).
The poet's closing thoughts are expressed in a sonorous swell, not unlike the chords ("This
is my song of the universe") with which the book opened. You sense a choral build up, and
(for all the rumours and deformities of State) a purity of message meant to bring long-
patient Guyanese readers to their feet:
"Yet we live with the transfiguration of rain
and bright sunlight on grass…
…the consecration of sorrow,
of memory, of hope – and thoughts of that chalice
filled with the blood of love, and the Amen
of forgiven yesterdays, the Amen of all tomorrows."
In other words, like those plantation labourers in the Guiana cane fields, at the end of
the day or the work song or the journey, looking back might leave you feeling tearfully
cued up to gasp or sigh, Goodness, grief! or What a country! (W.W.)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 