Edgar Mittelholzer Lectures Vol.1

BEACONS OF EXCELLENCE: THE EDGAR MITTELHOLZER MEMORIAL LECTURES VOLUME 1: 1967-1971 Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew O. Lindsay 1 Edited by Andrew O. Lindsay BEACONS OF EXCELLENCE: THE EDGAR MITTELHOLZER MEMORIAL LECTURES VOLUME 1: 1967-1971 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 978-1-907493-65-2 2 Contents: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................iii NOTE ....................................................................................... v PREFACE: THE MITTELHOLZER LECTURES IN CONTEXT by Andrew Jefferson-Miles ......................vii INTRODUCTION by Andrew O. Lindsay .................... xiii First Series, 1967: Edgar Mittelholzer – The Man and his Work by Arthur James Seymour INTRODUCTION by Celeste Dolphin............................... 3 LECTURE I ............................................................................. 5 LECTURE II .......................................................................... 26 LECTURE III......................................................................... 48 LECTURE IV ........................................................................ 65 Second Series, 1969: Image and Idea in the Arts of Guyana by Denis Williams FOREWORD by A.J. Seymour ........................................... 85 I THE CONCEPT OF THE ANCESTOR ........................ 87 II THE COMPLEX WOMB .............................................. 104 III IMAGE AND IDEA IN AFRICAN AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURE .......................................... 117 IV IMAGE AND IDEA IN THE ARTS OF GUYANA.................................................................... 136 Third Series, 1970: History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas by Wilson Harris INTRODUCTION by A.J. Seymour ................................ 153 I HISTORY, FABLE AND MYTH IN THE CARIBBEAN AND GUIANAS ..................................... 157 II THE AMERINDIAN LEGACY ................................... 177 III CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY .................. 189 3 Fourth Series, 1971: Man and Making - Victim and Vehicle by Martin Carter FOREWORD by A.J. Seymour ......................................... 203 I THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY .................................. 205 II THE VICTIM IDENTIFIED .......................................... 213 III VICTIM AS VEHICLE ................................................. 220 4 BEACONS OF EXCELLENCE: THE EDGAR MITTELHOLZER MEMORIAL LECTURES VOLUME 1: 1967-1971 Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew O. Lindsay 5 6 The lectures would provide an apparatus whereby Guyanese writers and intellectuals abroad could be invited to come back home at a level of honour in order to serve the country by bringing new ideas to bear upon the community’s inquiring minds. The annual publications of the texts of the lectures would add to our small but growing Guyana bibliography, and should help to make young intellectuals aware of their own heritage, and assist as a regular stimulus towards informed discussion of the nature of the development of the arts in Caribbean Society. - A. J. Seymour on the founding of the Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lectures, 1967. i ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I became involved with the Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lectures while helping to prepare Denis Williams: A Life in Works. New and Collected Essays (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010) edited by his daughters Charlotte and Evelyn Williams. Williams himself delivered lectures in 1969 and 1984, Evelyn gave hers in 2009, and as I began to explore the others I was struck by how remarkable they were, and how little known. Early in 2010 I was speaking with Jeremy Poynting of the Leeds-based Peepal Tree Press and during the conversation he suggested that it would be a good idea if all of the Mittelholzer Lectures, most of which he had collected, could be brought together in a single volume. Like myself, Dr. Poynting regards the lectures as one of Guyana’s great scholarly assets, and one that justly deserves to be celebrated. He was closely associated with setting up the Caribbean Press which was launched in Guyana at the end of February 2010, and when I mentioned the idea of a collection to its General Editor, Professor David Dabydeen and Guyana’s Director of Culture, Professor James Rose they were both enthusiastic about the proposition, and this volume is the result. However it is principally to Jeremy Poynting that I owe my thanks for conceiving the idea, and very generously making material available to me. His Peepal Tree Press has done an enormous service to Guyanese authors, past and present, whose works would otherwise have remained out of print or never have been published at all. I am indebted to Jacqueline Ward for her photograph of Edgar Mittelholzer which graces the covers of these volumes. I am grateful to Dr. Juanita Cox and Dr. Andrew Jefferson- Miles for reading through my draft and offering constructive advice. I am grateful to many people in Guyana for their enthusiasm and assistance. Jennifer Wishart of the Walter Roth Museum was instrumental in reviving the Memorial Lectures after a long hiatus, for which we should all be extremely grateful. She also provided me with new information about iii Canon Bennett’s lecture, and facilitated my liaison with the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport in setting up this project. Dr. Joycelynne Loncke graciously afforded me a long interview and provided some very helpful insights and background information into the Lectures in general, and her own contribution in particular. To the Ministry I am grateful for their backing of the project and their granting of the necessary permissions. The book has been enhanced by a thoughtful Preface by Dr. Andrew Jefferson-Miles, Guyanese artist and author, who has provided an extremely thoughtful preamble, and whose insights at all stages have been creative and helpful. The staff at the University of Guyana’s Caribbean Research Library, the National Library and the National Archive were unstinting in their help and patience in dealing with my endless requests and demands. Finally to Dr. Lynne Macedo at the University of Warwick for her patience and meticulous attention to detail in her preparation of my draft for publication. I cannot conclude without mentioning my partner Eve whose insights, suggestions and advice have been, as ever, of immense value. Andrew O. Lindsay iv NOTE The lectures, together with any introductions, prefaces, references and footnotes, have been reproduced as they originally appeared. My editorial endnotes appear within square brackets to distinguish them from notes provided by the authors themselves. For the convenience of the reader, obvious mis-spellings, oversights or typesetting errors have been corrected without comment. To ensure consistency of stylistic convention within the texts of the lectures themselves, italics replace bold, underlined or capital letters to indicate titles of works, foreign or technical terms, or emphasis. Substantial citations within the texts have been set as indented block quotations. Where the authors, within the body of their texts, have provided extended bibliographical details about works from which they are quoting, I have placed these details in endnotes instead. The conventions for citation and reference have been standardised. The dates of the various lectures are as shown in the table of contents, but it should be noted that these are occasionally earlier than the year of actual publication, and any incorrect references and cross-references have therefore been rectified. Technically the spellings ‘Guiana’ and ‘Guyana’ hinge on 1966, the year of independence, but the authors’ various choices of spelling have been retained because the contexts and intentions are clear. v vi PREFACE: THE MITTELHOLZER LECTURES IN CONTEXT In July 2012, an exhibition entitled ‘Drowned Landscapes’ presented the radar, sonar, ultra-sound, and thermal imaging from the North Sea, where explorations led by oil drilling companies have discovered a drowned world, a submerged, formerly-inhabited land, connecting Scotland to Denmark, of towns, cities, industries, and a population in the tens of thousands. The exhibition cited above was founded on fifteen years of advanced imaging and exploration technologies. It is to be expected that a similar initiative in Guyana would demand a comparable horizon. Like Mesopotamia’s cities, with which the whole of South America shares troubling similarities, Guyana’s sunken cities would have been constructed with adobe bricks of local, baked mud, which local rivers supply aplenty. As in other such locations - in South and Central America, off the coast of Japan, in the Indian ocean, and under the sands of modern Iraq, near modern Baghdad - we would expect to find Guyana’s sunken cities built on a megalithic foundation of stone blocks the weights exceeding 30 tonnes and quarried sometimes hundreds of miles away. Located on the low-lying coast, such cities would have been taken underwater in a gradual, or in a sudden deluge. The flat, monotony of the Guyana coastline indicates the latter – a sudden great deluge. The former, now-drowned coast of Guyana is perhaps twelve to twenty kilometres in the Atlantic, ending likely where the continental shelf slopes to the ocean bed, twenty kilometres

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