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Edgar Mittelholzer Lectures Vol.2 BEACONS OF EXCELLENCE: THE EDGAR MITTELHOLZER MEMORIAL LECTURES VOLUME 2: 1975-1984 Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew O. Lindsay 1 Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew O. Lindsay BEACONS OF EXCELLENCE: THE EDGAR MITTELHOLZER MEMORIAL LECTURES - VOLUME 2: 1975-1984 Preface © Andrew Jefferson-Miles, 2014 Introduction © Andrew O. Lindsay, 2014 Cover design by Peepal Tree Press Cover photograph: Courtesy of Jacqueline Ward All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission. Published by the Caribbean Press. ISBN 978-1-907493-66-9 2 Contents: Fifth Series, 1975: Racial Identity and Individual Consciousness in the Caribbean Novel by Michael Gilkes INTRODUCTION by A.J. Seymour ................................... 3 I THE DIVIDED CONSCIOUSNESS ................................ 5 II THE ASSOCIATIVE ATTEMPT.................................... 27 III THE NEW CARIBBEAN NOVEL ............................... 53 Seventh Series, 1979: Norman E. Cameron - The Man and his Works by Joycelynne Loncke ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................ 81 INTRODUCTION ............................................................... 82 PROLOGUE ......................................................................... 83 I .............................................................................................. 85 II ............................................................................................ 95 III ......................................................................................... 109 IV ......................................................................................... 125 CHRONOLOGICAL PROFILE....................................... 135 Eighth Series, 1983: Art and Experience by Roy Heath FOREWORD by Lynette de W. Dolphin ....................... 145 INTRODUCTION ............................................................. 147 I THE SOURCES OF FICTION ...................................... 149 II ART AND HISTORY .................................................... 157 III THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK................................. 165 Ninth Series, 1984: Ancient Guyana by Denis Williams PREFACE ........................................................................... 175 FOREWORD by His Excellency President Hugh Desmond Hoyte S.C. .......................................... 177 THE SETTING................................................................... 183 I THE TIDAL SWAMPS OF THE NORTH WEST AND POMEROON DISTRICTS .................... 187 3 II INTERCONTINENTAL HUNTERS AND GATHERERS IN THE RUPUNUNI SAVANNAS ... 206 III CLIMATE STRESS AND SUBSISTENCE OPTIONS IN THE TROPICAL FOREST...................................... 219 VI THE SPECIALISED COASTAL ADAPTATIONS OF HORTICULTURALISTS ......... 227 4 BEACONS OF EXCELLENCE: THE EDGAR MITTELHOLZER MEMORIAL LECTURES VOLUME 2: 1975-1984 Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew O. Lindsay 5 6 Fifth Series, 1975 Racial Identity and Individual Consciousness in the Caribbean Novel Michael Gilkes 1 2 INTRODUCTION There is a deeply significant setting to these lectures. As we in Guyana and the Caribbean move from out of the shadow of the past into the blossoming age of our political independence, we realise more and more clearly that what has been one of the unforgivable legacies of our history is the damage done to our view and appreciation of ourselves. When we disentangle those fashionable twins of politics and economics, we find that the economic system that generates and gives power to people with money (what we know as capitalism) enables them to attain widespread dominion over other peoples and other countries in the name of utilising and developing the natural resources found there (the political system that we know as imperialism). Slavery is of course one of the most intense forms of imperialism and the people of the Caribbean must be among the most definitely damaged, most malformed human fruit of slavery anywhere in history. Since the quest for identity is accompanied by a quest for wholeness of personality, Dr Gilkes subjects a leading Caribbean novelist to the relentless analysis of inner and unconscious motivations. The tools of analysis are psychological and the lecturer points to the images of inferiority and lack of worth in his mind, and the sense of damage wrought by the rejection by the parent culture which had provided him with the tools of language and its built-in values (“you gave me language and my profit on it is I know how to curse”). Dr Gilkes discusses part of the psychological content of the Mittelholzer novels, and because the creative process comes from below the grasp of man’s consciousness, he picks out from the unconscious harvest of Mittelholzer’s recollections the major fluid images which typify a fragmented Caribbean consciousness and the bundle of emotional contradictions and inconsistencies that are involved. Mittelholzer was an unusual example of Caribbean creature – heir to the fractured regional consciousness but 3 blessed with a creative spirit and with abundant energy and determination and the ability to use literary form to give effect to his images and ideas. He becomes the prototype and supreme example of the Caribbean citizen who has preserved in his own personality some of the more significant values of Western civilisation, through his love of music, painting, poetry and philosophy, and so has used his broken mirrors to let his readers see the inheritance of our society, and very important, what can be effected by private art to show us our predicament. He therefore shows us the road along which we must travel to heal ourselves as a people. He has mirrored our society and given great pleasure and enjoyment to millions in the process. Dr Gilkes has made a sterling contribution to the Mittelholzer corpus, assisting us in our understanding of the novels examined carefully one by one, to seek in the character-analysis signs of the divided consciousness, or signs of the attempt of the physician to heal himself. He has had access to valuable unpublished materials in the possession of the author’s widow and made skilful use of these additions to literary history. A. J. SEYMOUR September 3, 1975 4 I THE DIVIDED CONSCIOUSNESS The problem of Racial and Cultural Heritage, the ‘Search for Identity’, has become something of a cliché in the discussion of Caribbean Literature. Indeed, the work of certain writers has often been praised or censured almost entirely on the basis of his racial or cultural stance arising out of a ‘crisis of identity’. Thus we are told that the work of a John Hearne, or a V. S. Naipaul, or a Derek Walcott shows a ‘dangerous’ degree of Europe-orientation, or that V. S. Reid and Roger Mais embody an unresolved ‘crisis of identity’. That George Lamming’s work has, as its main impulse, a right-minded, peasant awareness, while the work of Wilson Harris is too individual, esoteric, cerebral. The possibility of a deeper response to cultural and racial identity, a response which is neither a revolt against, nor a passive acceptance of, a divisive condition, is too often denied, or missed, by commentators on the Caribbean novel. Revolt and acceptance, the twin products of our racial and cultural schizophrenia, tend with remarkable rapidity to become stock responses and as such prone to stasis. As Derek Walcott puts it in What the Twilight Says: Once we have lost our wish to be white we develop a longing to become black, and those two may be different, but are still careers.1 The ‘search for identity’, as I see it, comes from an awareness of a ‘Division of Consciousness’ – the result of racial, cultural and psychic disorientation – and is largely the product of a colonial Caribbean condition of fortuitous racial and cultural admixture, where no background of long established habit, no social, political, religious or cultural traditions exist to give a sense of individual stability. The Caribbean writer’s need for roots within the context of his own landscape as well as for the cultured, metropolitan atmosphere in which his art can grow and flower, is a dilemma 5 which still exists and makes possible the apparent paradox in which the successful Caribbean writers – with few exceptions – live and work abroad, mainly in Britain and North America, but quarry their material from within a Caribbean consciousness. This division of consciousness is a peculiarly Caribbean theme, the main leitmotif in the Caribbean novel, and one that is capable of a much deeper and altogether more meaningful formulation than ‘a search for identity’ suggests. It is the writer’s awareness of a racial and cultural split and his attempt, by examining his relationships to the environment, to the natural and historical condition of the Caribbean, and to himself, to define and to preserve the integrity of the psyche against the constant danger of disintegration; a threat presented by outer, historical and social, as well as by inner, psychological forces. And this is an enterprise, a theme, which is finally universal. It is the theme which may be seen as a major impulse in the Romantic and symbolist movements with their insistence on imagination as an associative art – an impulse towards unity of Being. It is the principle which underpins the psychological theories of ego-dissociation from Freud and Jung through to the work of modern psychologists like Erich Fromm, W. R. D. Fairbairn, R. D. Laing and Anthony Storr. There can be no doubt that the question of racial
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