Promotion of Guyanese literature is necessary to capture the culture and diversity of Guyanese writings. This is the view of Prime Minister Samuel Hinds, who was speaking at the Culture, Youth and Sport Ministry’s 2013 Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lecture held at the Umana Yana on Tuesday evening.
The 2013 Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lecture included the guest speaker, Professor Jane Bryce, professor of African literature and cinema.
Also, speaking at the lecture series was Al Creighton who noted that modern Guyanese literature may be divided into two periods: pre-independence and post-independence.
He said there is also a colonial period, a period of nationalism and the contemporary period, all of which are very important.
According to Creighton, there was a very important change in the early 19th century, where the period of modern Guyanese literature began.
Meanwhile, Professor Bryce emphasised that prose adds colour to everyday life and some even brings it closer to history and show the way things really happen in history.
“Migration has been a defining feature of West Indian culture and the works of Mittelhozer is testimony to such,” she said.
Further, Byrce noted that it is useful to remember that the views expressed in a work of fiction are not necessarily the view of its author.
Prof Bryce was born in Tanzania, and educated there, in the UK and Nigeria. She has been a freelance journalist and fiction editor and has published in a range of creative and academic journals and essay collections.
She is author of a collection of short stories, Chameleon (2007) and editor of Caribbean Dispatches: Beyond the Tourist Dream (2006).
She founded and co-directed the Barbados Festival of African and Caribbean Film and curates the Africa World Documentary Film Festival at Cave Hill, Barbados.
Edgar Austin Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist, the earliest novelist from the West Indian region to establish himself in Europe and gained a significant European readership.
Mittelholzer, who earned his living almost exclusively by writing fiction, is considered the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean.
His novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean, and range in time from the early period of European settlement to the 20th century.
They feature a cross-section of ethnic groups and social classes, dealing with subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. Mittelholzer is somewhat posited to be certainly the most prolific novelist to be produced by the Caribbean. Mittelholzer committed suicide in England in 1965.
