Contact author at guyind@rcn.com
MY ISLAND, MY BEAUTY
(For the people of Leguan, and to wish my friend Kali continued success on the 28th anniversary of his Kali Bharat Yatra)
(by Churaumanie Bissundyal)
Where cannons boomed and Raleigh searched for gold,
where Europe warred,
nations killing nations for forests and rivers,
where the Caribs and Arawaks
hollowed trees into canoes,
where Black slaves were whipped and hanged on trees,
where the indentured worked in music of squalor,
there I grew up on a little island
in the mouth of a big river.
Checkered with rectangles and pentagons,
my island was a geometrical board of sugar plantations.
Its rich soil was the cause of history:
the Dutch, French and English rivalled in jealousy.
The names could tell their own story:
in the east are Blenheim, Amsterdam, Endeavour.
Canefield is farther down towards the Atlantic,
adjacent to La Retrieve and Elizabeth Ann.
Midway are Greendam and Enterprise;
La Bagatelle and Maryville follow after.
To the west are Waterloo, Success, Phoenix and Theriens.
Doornhaag and Richmond Hill are on the northern side.
Like a curse from the wounds of history,
the plantations came tumbling down:
factories dismantled, cane fields abandoned.
Then there came new proprietors,
growing ground-provisions, rice and vegetables.
But the habits of the past died hard.
The ghost of Europe still ruled,
the psyche of the islanders still sweetened in stupor:
the Africans, Indians, Portuguese and Chinese
still followed the legacy of their old masters,
imitating their ways with a stronger passion.
In the fire and ice of Europe’s hold,
the enslaved lost their language,
some their gods and culture.
Some imitated the English, spoke with a fervent accent,
others borrowed a word or phrase,
patched and sewed them into a distinct vernacular.
The island is green with the flora of tropical splendour.
Tall coconut trees wave in the wind,
sakiwinkis springing on gara-gara limbs,
iguanas reposing in the branches green.
At night when the jumbies come out for pleasure,
devotees worship Dutch devatas at kumaka trees,
propitiating with white rum and cheese.
Then there are the groves of bamboo trees
with tall, spreading lukass between.
Mango trees, genip and gooseberries
are all over, with growths of monkey-apples,
plums, tamarind and jamoon between.
Here and there is a breadfruit tree,
star-apple, jackfruit and catahar.
Mangroves and courida are profuse at Dauntless
where roots form themselves into cottages for crabs.
Sumootoo and bird-vines invade trees
and press upon them for territory.
Whitey, hog-plums and wild-cocoa on the seashore
made groves for us little boys to play and wander.
Fowl-cock trees and batseed overshadow the black sage,
mucka-mucka and piri-piri,
giving shade for the growth of cana -grass.
On the road parapets are daisies with their yellow flowers
opening like smiling fairies to the sun.
Everywhere there are bahayma and iron-grass
on abandoned sugarcane beds.
In every yard are hibiscus, marigold and oleander;
awara is seen in woods thick with trees.
The para grass grow where the cattle graze,
and papoos the children reap after the rice crops are over.
In every farm are papayas,
plantain and banana suckers, cassava and sugarcane.
Melons and pumpkins sometimes grow like wildfire,
and the cucumber is a popular creeper.
Some cultures of the islanders persevere.
The Africans still worship their spirits
and dance at Cumfa and Queh-Queh.
The Moslems celebrate and fast at Ramadaan.
the Hindus observe Diwaali and Phagwah
and worship their awataars.
But all celebrate Christmas and Easter,
the legacy of the European masters.
My first impression of my island
was a man mounting up a coconut tree,
his feet, tight-roped, giving him grip to climb.
Bip bap the coconuts began dropping
like spent shells of an aerial bombing.
This alerted the red-breasted robins
and put them to flight.
The wrens, too, and the brown-cocks and several others,
all became disturbed from their nesting:
the air filled with clouds of birds trafficking the sky.
Their noises heralded disaster,
like civilians in danger at war, the siren sounding.
Growing up I loved looking at the humming-bird;
kakazooyaa we called it by its frolicking over flowers.
It trembles and frizzles like a tiny ballet dancer,
as if performing to celestial lookers-on,
its shiny green colour blends pleasantly
with the trees.
I loved looking, too, at kushay ants marching in files,
cutting and fetching leaves and building little empires.
My childhood innocence could not read their ways,
their harmony with a deeper intelligence,
no conflicts in their labour
a perfect community of beings.
I loved listening to the rain and thunder,
the swooshing and splashing sounds
with intermittent claps of thunder.
The cattle huddled together,
frozen and motionless, accepting the slanting runnels.
Then everywhere was filled with shiny pools of water,
the ducks swimming, then spreading and flapping their wings,
the white-cranes flying thickly in the air
and alighting for the fish in the canals.
I loved listening to the bees when the sun was going down,
an enveloping cheeping,
with echoes in the barns of rice-mills,
and in the groves of trees,
a symphony of nature breaking the stress of the day
and saying that night was coming.
And whilst the curtain of darkness was dropping,
the crickets gave a different chirruping sound —
chirrup-chirrup-tra-tra.
Then when darkness fell and daylight was over,
a jumbie bird would utter
a cutting, sharp shriek, ripping the silence.
Morning would stir me with the bush-fowls
cawing in the woods,
the parrots clucking in their flight for feeding,
the cattle mooing, the sheep bleating,
the dogs barking and yelping,
the hens and ducks, now awakened,
adding new music to the morning.
One day I stood watching the boys swimming in the river,
the waves tossing and crashing on the seawall.
A thunderous blast lasted for a second,
surfs like ruffled cotton pads were formed;
the water played a little, then dropped back again.
Yet the boys plunged and frolicked,
dived and swam as if the river was a simple game:
they had no fear of danger,
their fear bewitched by the river.
I stood watching my brother swimming,
his clothes bundled in my hands.
I seethed with jealousy of the pleasures I could not share
and cursed myself for the number of my age.
Then someone hoisted me and threw me into the river.
I sank and rose and thought I was drowning.
Soon, my arms began to work like a propeller
and my legs moved like a fish tail.
A wave came and aborted my little struggle.
I swallowed the river’s water
and saw videos of strange colours.
Then I tried again to swim.
Soon, I was like the other boys, floating, swimming.
I pitched marbles everyday, buntoos was the game.
I gambled for buttons,
staking those on my clothes.
My mother whipped me
when she found me buttonless
and strapped with blacksage skins.
I whimpered like an injured puppy,
swearing that buntoos was a bad game.
But when the sting of the whipping was gone
and my mother’s chidings forgotten,
I played again.
I played and played,
hoping that one day I would win,
but a poor pitcher I was, even in the taaga game.
In the moonlight,
when the heavens glowed with stars
when the hedges appeared like hideouts for jumbies
and the trees like huge scarecrows
dropped from the heavens,
we children came out playing the choor game,
running between lines,
playing cockodillo, hide-to-seek, wait-to-find.
Our shrieks and laughter
brought life to the dullness of the evenings;
our silhouette movements heightened the effect
of flickering lanterns burning in windows.
The older men playing cards
and the women boiling crabs outdoor
scolded us for noise and wild running.
Then Loongair, staggering on the dam,
took a drink from his rum,
snapped his tongue like a drum and sang his alaap of taan.
In Jamoon Alley where I lived
I had to be a street fighter from the day I was born.
Each day it was a game for survival:
fight to survive the day or take a beating and run away.
One day my father found me sobbing,
my nose was bleeding.
He became pink with anger
and whipped me for losing a fight in surrender.
He wanted no son who would yield, sobbing.
Winning a fight, like triumph in life, he said,
is only for the strong and brave.
The world has no place for surrender and weeping,
for without strength and triumph
life is an unhappy game.
From that day I became a great fighter,
never to lose a fight again.
It was a great lesson in my life’s order,
giving me strength in the subtleties of the human game.
School was an ordeal
with punctilious teachers of English idioms,
official grimaces on their faces,
their starched collars fitted with ties,
a cane perpetually in their hands.
Each day I came to school, I looked only at the cane
and thought when it would drop on my posterior,
a whick-whacking of brutal pain.
I hated hymns and poems;
they had no meanings except that of the teachers’ cane.
The teachers rapped my knuckles with a ruler
if my finger-nails were not clean,
or dropped the cane on my back
if my feet had specks of mud.
Each day I thought of this penitentiary
and dreamed for the open air.
The smell of books, furniture and teachers’ perfumes
brought only repulsive sensations.
I learned nothing,
save preparing for the teachers’ cane.
Then they called me a dull boy
and whipped me persistently,
my posterior marked with ruddy weals.
In this anguish,
grammar lessons and math tables were greater torture:
words and figures had become a nightmare.
My sleep was full of anger,
my dreams were stressful days of war.
Then when the school term was over,
I lay hidden behind bundarie hedges,
waiting quietly for my teachers to pass.
I peeped through the fenestration of the branches
and prepared for battle in nervous anger.
As my torturers passed,
I missiled them with rotten eggs,
eggs breaking and splashing on their faces.
Then they whipped me again, over and over;
each time whipped,
I gathered more rotten eggs to throw again.
Tash would come over each night to our home,
reading stories.
I loved the tales he read,
stories filling me with fantasies of heroic deeds.
My mother sat by the fireside,
the lantern light glowing on her sombre face.
Sometimes, I saw pearls of tears in her eyes
as Tash read how Roland was killed.
I wept, too, for King Arthur:
tragedy always touched my heart.
My little sisters liked Grimm Fairy Tales
whilst I enjoyed the bigger stories of Shakespeare.
Jane Eyre for months kept us in rapt attention;
we were torn between thinking and weeping.
Here, in these sessions of tales and scenes,
I vowed to be a writer of courage, tragedy and dreams.
The rice-fields were my altar,
where I learned that hard work is the strength of the soul.
In the planting season,
I marched with gangs of planters to the fields;
in deep mud and water we planted rice-shoots,
our hands working like fingers on typewriters.
The rain drenched us;
the planters’ humour gave relief to the wet discomfort.
Talking and planting became the mode of working,
working until the fields
had become billiards tables of green shoots,
bringing promise to the shiny oceans of water.
Harvesting was longer hours of work.
It began when the rice-mills bellowed in predawn.
The women rose from their beds
and lit their firesides with mangrove wood,
cooking in the amber light of lanterns.
As the curried aroma came from the kitchens,
donkey-carts trundled on the brick road,
rice cutters, with grass knives tucked at their sides,
marched to the fields for the day’s work.
Tasks were given by rods length and width thrown,
the area of a task thirty-six square rods.
The work began like a mass game in the hot sun,
hundreds of backs bent in the same motion,
then rose and paused,
bent again,
cutting the sheaves tangled like matted hair.
Then a sudden shriek was heard:
a grass-knife had slipped and severed a finger.
Faces contorted in terror;
blood spurted like that of a freshly killed bird.
The bent backs straightened again
and legs worked like scissors to give aid.
Soon, the yellow billow of gold disappeared
and stacks of paddy sheaves,
(standing like dwarfed sentinels)
were perched all over.
The drug-man came with his bull-and-slide
and fetched the sheaves to be thrashed into grains.
Then bags of paddy were filled
to give work to the mills to bellow again.
In a fowl-cock tree bristled,
and filled with red inflorescence,
I perched, watching the game I best love.
This is cricket,
a game with feelings of nirvaan,
a game I had played in wishes and dreams.
I watched my heroes batting, bowling or fielding,
tense, biting my finger-nails.
Sometimes, I walked away weeping
when my heroes lost a game.
Then when my batsman hit a ball,
I jumped down from the tree,
throwing discs of cow-dung in the air.
The ball soared and sailed high in the sky,
then it dropped out of the boundary,
dropping in the distance,
like a tiny awara seed,
dropping far away
on the mud-hut of rum-man Loongair.
I was a prince in the jamoon groves,
scouring the canals for fallen monkey-apples,
slinging on gara-gara limbs for berries.
I watched the spurwings in duckweed canals
guarding their eggs from predators,
stretching out their necks and uttering kwee-kwee cries.
The parrots came and feasted on the jamoons,
clucking and clucking
in noisy voices of war and love.
Then came the gawlins in aggressive flight
behind the ploughman ploughing the fields,
alighting and feeding on fishes and worms.
The boys, with their slingshots, shot at them,
shooting, too, chow-chows and doves.
Braks and I went searching for baby-jamoons.
We found a tree loaded with fruits and started picking.
In greed, Braks ventured out to a hanging limb
where was a follow-me wasps’ hive in the leaves hidden.
Absorbed in his picking,
and thinking how much he would gather,
his head crashed against the hive.
The wasps swelled out in their numbers,
stinging Braks with all their vengeance,
chasing him everywhere he went for cover.
The next day his face was swollen large,
his eyes could not be seen.
That was the price of greed, I learned,
and made it a lesson for my harder times.
I looked at the steamer morning and evening
ferrying from stelling to stelling.
It was looming large, or petering out to extinction.
It had some connection to me, I thought,
as if I were waiting each day for some liberation.
Today I know what it was:
the steamer was my prophet,
foretelling my travels far and wide.
(1999)
Mini Glossary
Sakiwinki: a type of monkey.
Iguana: a green edible reptile.
Gara-gara, Lukass, Ginnip, Monkey-apple, Jamoon, Batseed, Catahar, Jack-fruit, Mangrove, Courida; Whitey, Wild-cocoa, Fowl-cock tree, Awara, Baragat tree: all, native trees of Guyana,
some flowering and bearing edible fruits.
Mucka-mucka, Piri-piri, Bundarie: all, native shrubs of Guyana.
Iron-grass, Bahayma, Cana-grass, Para-grass: types of grass of Guyana.
Hibiscus, Marigold, Oleander: all, decorative and fragrant flowers of Guyana.
Jumbie: ghost.
Devata: god.
Sumootoo: a type of vine that bears edible fruits.
Bird-vine: a parasitic vine grown on trees.
Cumfah, Queh-Queh: African rituals.
Awataar: incarnation.
Aalaap: a modulation of the voice before singing.
Taan: a musical note.
Kiskadee, Red-breasted Robin, Brown-cock, Humming-bird; Bush-fowl, White-crane, Gawlin, Chow-chow, Spurwing:
all, native birds of Guyana.
Diwali: Hindu festival of light.
Phagwah: Hindu spring festival.
Buntoos: a type of game played with marbles pitched in holes.
Taaga: a type of pitching game with a flat, heavy lead material.
Choor: a type of game with the players running between lines.
Cockodillo: a type of hide-and-seek game.
Grass-knife: a type of sickle.
Fireside: a cooking-stove made of mud and brick.
Task: a job with a area of thirty-six square rods.
Paddy: rice grains borne on paddy sheaves.
