Four feet away a Cyclone fan by Lasko rumbles like a small factory. The dusty wind it powers towards me is warm. I read a message from a notable Guyanese literary figure. He lectures that my writings of recent have come to his attention and that he is impressed. I suspect he deleted the word ‘mildly’ from before ‘impressed’ in the first draft.
He advises that I need to pay more attention to the craft for greater literary acclaim; that I should agonize and re-edit and enter the Guyana Prize.
I ponder. I agonize. I try.
In the nearby living room, through the open door a gruff police officer expounds on 98.1 in that inimitable Guyanese police style about police security measures for the Christmas season. I’ve seen them out, in Georgetown and Vreed-en-Hoop. Prominent, weapons at a ready, finger on the trigger guard. They walk around smiling with the season, looking for a raise but no need to fire, only pose.
Remember. The craft. Agonize. Here I am at a ready. Fingers at the keys. Nothing. Posing.
I’m surrounded, in this two prison cell sized study, by books. They are everywhere. On shelves, on desks, on the floor. In Dell computer boxes, in oversized Rubbermaid bins, in baskets, on chairs, on boxes, on top of now flattened Christmas wrapping paper from two years ago. There is room only to leap and shuffle, not walk.
Her law books and novels and my books on just about everything else but mostly on cricket, communications, people, society, and politics. Someone please ensure that Ian McDonald never sees the ‘cricket’ in the previous sentence. He might interrogate and find out that several years ago I had shipped several boxes of very hard to find cricket books from obscure county book sales in rural England.
- The Mensa Book of Literary Quizzes
- Ground Rules – A Celebration of Test Cricket
- Caribbean Constitutional Reform
- Rasta and Resistance – From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney
- New Rules by Bill Maher
- The Ideology of Racism
- What Sport Tells Us About Life
- Economics of Adoption of New Agricultural Technology – The Case of The Guyana Rice Subsector
- Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media
- Themes in African-Guyanese History
- Transnational Communications
And on the fire engine red arborite topped desk on top of a stack of photocopied law class handouts and study notes (written in multi-coloured extremely fine print to maximize space) rests one of those black and white animal print Composition note books.
In the Name line is written ‘Intellectual Property’ in strong black ink in her typically strong handed style. How ironic, I think. They study Intellectual Property… (wait, wait, wait) in Guyana.
A green can of Off! insect repellent. ‘Deep Woods’ it reads and I think we are but on the coastland, which Enrico Woolford likens to nothing more than a big dam. It’s strong enough to repel mosquitoes that may carry West Nile Virus. I think of malaria. I think of the time several years ago when my cousin was laid low and rendered bed ridden by dengue. I think of the last time I had vaccine shots and come up empty. Need to restock on Off!.
A pair of Gray Nicholls batting gloves. A full sized hand painted paddle, the only recollection of some GuyExpo, then and now marketed as the biggest and best trade fair in the Caribbean. Some legacy that.
A clutter of flags stuffed tight into a burnt auburn coloured vase. One of a pair of sand covered Sri Lankan bed side lamp shades. The other will be exhumed someday.
A Kindle sized silver case containing one of those thousand-and-one interchangeable screw driver sets. The pliers is missing and the tools have begun to rust. A shiny new set in the stockings might be thoughtful.
A Snickers wrapper. Hers. A Tunnocks Caramel Milk Chocolate Waffer wrapper. Mine. A Shirley Coconut Biscuit packet. Not sure, more likely mine. I eat plantain chips and egg balls, she Doritos and croissants.
A navy blue spectacles case resting on Alan Furst’s The Foreign Correspondent resting on James Chambers’ Genghis Khan resting on India in the Caribbean by David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo. And so the resting goes on.
Caught in Action – 20 Years of West Indies Cricket Photography by Gordon Brooks. Fishing for Dummies. Louise Bennett’s Selected Poems.
Three-Mile Bus
Weh yuh dah kick me basket fa?
Push i back eena place!
Ah have a mine fi pick i up
An lick yuh pon yuh face.
Ah lick yuh yes! Yuh tink ah fraid?
Yuh just galang, yaw, mah!
Ef de basket tear yuh tockin
Dat no gains de law, mah!
Yuh can cuss me, yuh can beat me,
Yuh can call me al de ‘it;
Do anything yuh want wid me
But lef me basket
For dis basket is me all-in-all,
Me shillin, pence an poun;
It is me husband an me frien,
Me jewel an me crown.
Me ha six pickney – an sence me
Stop teck dem Pa to court
Dis dutty, brucksy basket yah
Is dem ongle support
So yuh can always pick me up,
But pudung me basket –
For me wi spen de res a me days
Up a Rae Town fi it!
Not Yeates or some dead Slovakian essayist. A simple Jamaican storyteller telling stories of struggle and pride about our people of our time.
Doctor, the Honourable Miss Lou, rest, rest. Assured be your spirit that never will your teachings and observations be exposed on the op-ed page of any Sunday Stabroek. For, in their eyes you an yuh brucksy basket message betrayed their stockinged craft.
