by Petamber Persaud
(Excerpt of an interview with Dr. Manu Chander, Georgetown, Guyana, March 2019. Chander is a Visiting Fulbright Fellow. Chander’s publications include ‘Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century’.)
PP: Very often when I’m asked about my Country, Guyana, I would direct the person or persons to our literature because our books since Raleigh’s book [The Discovery of Guyana] in 1596 to Evelyn Waugh’s books to Hudson’s Green Mansions even down to Rahul Bhattacharya [The sly company of people who care] acted as a sort of a drawing card, attracting people to Guyana, a sort of a tourism tool.
Now, your narrative of coming to Guyana is due to your interest in one of our writers; an exceptional writer, one who has produced an awful lot of work in a short time. Share with us that narrative bringing you to Guyana.
MC: First thing I must say, since I’ve come here, everyone assumes that I have a personal relationship to Guyana because I am Indian but in fact my parents immigrated to the United States from Punjab, India. I have no biographical ties to Guyana. My interest is largely motivated by my scholarly work – I was writing a book on colonial poetry in the 19th century, the book Brown Romantics. I was really interest in the ways writers across Britain’s empire were producing poetry that were inspired by but more importantly in dialogue with the English Romantic Poets.
PP: You talked about Britain’s empire which had a huge reach…
MC: Enormous span.
I focused on three specific areas within that. I focused on India, looking at Henry Derozio who was often called the Indian Keats, I look at Australia’s national poet, Henry Lawson, and I looked at Egbert Martin, ‘Leo’ as he was known to his readers. He was born in 1861 thereabout and as you said before incredibly prolific especially in the decade of the 1880s. My interest in ‘Leo’ was sparked by seeing David Dabydeen’s edition of Leo’s Selected Works and in a reference to his relationship to the English Romantic namely Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelly…and that prodded me to dig deeper into his work to see what kind of relationship between ‘Leo’ and the early 19th century English poetry existed. In the course of digging into his work, I located a number of his uncollected works including poems published in the ‘Colonist’, ‘Argosy’, ‘Daily Chronicle’…
PP: Those were all local newspapers…
MC: Yes, there were all Georgetown’s major newspapers at the time…
PP: Some of us do not know this; we need to underline that.
MC: It is good to highlight the fact; this was a period of history that is easily forgotten as is the case with ‘Leo’.
So I have uncovered a lot of work by him – poems that had not been published, essays he wrote, and one of the most exciting part was this [holding book up] edition of ‘Scriptology’ which was held Moorland-Springarn [Research Library at Howard University] in the United States and thanks to an invitation from David Dabydeen I was encouraged to do a new introduction of this for the Guyana Classics Library. All of this – Scriptology, Leo’s Poetical Works, Leo’s Local Lyrics, all the essays and all the poems that I have found – are going into a new edition, Collected Works, which I am currently in the country finishing researching.
PP: ‘Scriptology’ – an interesting title, an intriguing title…I’m looking for something [flicking pages] from the book as we going into it, a curious guy, well-read…
MC: Extremely well-read…
PP: Yes, as we find so many references to books and writers…
MC: A whole range of writers – including one of those essays I talked about that appeared in the newspaper which talked about the genius of Edgar Alan Poe – he wrote quite extensive and astute series of observations about the works of Edgar Alan Poe. But throughout his work you would find references some of the Romantics I mentioned earlier like Tennyson and lesser known figures like Henry Kirk White, Montgomery…yes, he read copiously.
PP: It means that Georgetown was no backwater in culture and literature and Leo was from Georgetown.
MC: No, not by any means. By the 1880s, when he was writing, there was burgeoning middle class of which he was a part. And importantly also there was an emerging middle class black audience. Martin, apart from his contemporaries, he really is the first Afro-Guyanese writers to be working in the poetic tradition. Prior to Martin, there were others – settlers who were educated abroad and came and settle in Guyana and wrote. But Martin was Guyana born and raised and spent his whole life in Georgetown…
PP: And published here…
MC: Some of his works was published here. Actually his first collection Leo’s Poetical Works was published in 1883 in London. Copies were disseminated here [Guyana], London, and some made their way to United States. He had a very significant audience considering at the time Guyana was still a colonial outpost, not a major hub of literary production. And his work was reviewed in New York, London, excerpts of his poems appeared in Boston – yes, he had a very wide reach. In fact, a towering figure in the American Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s, Arthur Schomburg after whom the Arthur Schomburg Library in New York is now named called Martin the greatest Negro poet in history.
PP: You mentioned the Harlem Renaissance – there was another Guyanese writer involved, Eric Walrond.
MC: Yes. In fact it was Eric Walrond who ‘is’ our link between Arthur Schomburg and Egbert Martin.
PP: Oh, research must be very interesting and satisfying.
MC: It is!
There is an essay in the ‘Crisis’ the journal of the NAACP where Eric Walrond recounts this story of going into Schomburg’s personal library and that’s where he was first introduced to Egbert Martin; Schomburg pulls a copy of Martin’s Poetical Works off the shelf and begins reading and stunning the audience and saying that this is among the highest literature we have from black people and it is not well known. Guyanese people knew him [Leo] back in the days but he was already beginning to fade by the 1920s and 1930s from memory although the was an effort starting with Clement Gomes to solidify Martin’s important position in the history of Guyanese and West Indian Literature…
PP: Yes, I remember coming across the initiative in Kyk-over-Al of June 1946 to create Leo Medal for Poetry in his honour….
You know, you academics like to put writers and their works in categories but there are many things going for Leo apart from the fact that he was the first major black poet of Guyana, he was a writer. Let’s look at his prose writing. Let me quote him: ‘Scriptology is writing about writing, history about history, storytelling about storytelling. It is a study of its own procedure’. Let’s talk ‘Scriptology’.
MC: It is a remarkable collection…(to be continued)
Responses to this author please telephone 226-0065 of email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com (Guyana Times Sunday Magazine)
