A J Seymour: Collected Poems 1937-1989: Recent Episodes
Guyana SPEAKS
This podcast was shared at a Guyana SPEAKS' (GS) event on 24th Feb 2019 when Peter Fraser paid tribute to the life and works of A J Seymour. The collected poems were edited by Ian McDonald and J. de Weever and provided to GS by Brenda King. GS is an initiative started in January 2017 by Juanita Cox and Rod Westmaas. The co-founders run a programme of Guyana-themed events that are held at the Classic in Tooting Bec (nearly always) on the last Sunday of each month. As a general rule three or more distinguished guests are invited to explore a given topic from their particular perspective.
Victor Perreira (1926-2021) speaks to Rod Westmaas about his memories of British Guiana, moving to the UK and Australia, life as a Seaman and his many family recollections. (Stoll, Perreira, Van Sluytman and Adams).
This chat took place 5 years ago.
On 15th March 2019, The Lord Provost of Aberdeen, Barney Crockett, signed a twinning agreement between the cities of Aberdeen in Scotland and Georgetown in Guyana. The forging of links between the two territories will no doubt help to deepen and expand the on-going work between Aberdeen University, Edinburgh Heriot-Watt University and the University of Guyana to establish an oil and gas faculty in the country. This twinning may appear on the surface to be an unique one, yet we need only reflect on Guyanese surnames like Fraser or MacPherson, buildings like St Andrew’s Kirk, or place names like Rosehall, Inverness or Fyrish to be reminded of Scotland’s historically inextricable relationship with Guyana. In reflecting on this Guyana SPEAKS have decided to host “A historical glance at the British in Guiana” and invite the following distinguished guests to speak on their specialist knowledge in the field: the historians, Dr Randy Browne and Dr David Alston, and the well known BG-born journalist, author and editor, Mr John Mair.
DOWNLOAD: THE SPEAKERS BIOS : GUYANA SPEAKS: APRIL 28. 2019
Randy M. Browne is Associate Professor of Black Atlantic and African Diaspora History at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a specialist on slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean, especially Guyana. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly, the New West Indian Guide, and Slavery & Abolition. He is currently working on several projects, including a study of slave drivers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean. His first book, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2017 and won the Ohio Academy of History Publication Award. This book’s focus on Berbice, as one of the only places in the Anglo-Atlantic world where enslaved people had access to legal intermediaries, will form the basis of Randy’s talk. Randy will be joining Guyana SPEAKS via Skype.
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John Mair was born in British Guiana. He attended Sacred Heart RC School and won the Demerara Scholarship (top in the Colony) in 1961. His family then migrated to the UK. John attended the LSE, the University of Sussex and the University of Leeds. He has worked as a producer for the BBC, ITV, Channel Four and GTV in Guyana. In recent years, he has edited 25 books on journalism; the latest two (‘VS Naipaul: the Legacy’ and ‘Anti-Social Media?’) were published in October 2018. He also co-edited the 2019 publication, ‘Oil Dorado? Guyana’s Black Gold’ (2019). John will speak on the topic of his great, great, great grandfather, Sir Henry Clementson, a 19th century planter and proprietor of Cummings Lodge.
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Born and brought up in the Northern Highlands of Scotland, David Alston is a freelance historian and author who has been a youth worker in Toxteth (Liverpool), a schoolteacher in Wallsend (Tyneside), and in the Highlands an adult education organiser, a museum curator, a local authority councillor, and chair of an NHS Board. For 20 years he has been researching the role of Highland Scots in the slave-worked plantations of the Caribbean, especially Guyana. He is among the first Scottish historians to address the issue of Scotland’s involvement with slavery. David will share some of these historical insights with the Guyana SPEAKS audience. His website, for further information, is:
<http://www.spanglefish.com/slavesandhighlanders/>
This reading of "The Death of Quamina" is done by Rod Westmaas, a Guyanese Social Historian and Co-Founder of Guyana SPEAKS, is a resident of London the UK.
The story is an excerpt from the first of a trilogy of novels by P.H Daly, spanning over a century of Guyanese history. from the French occupation in 1782 to recent and contemporary history. Each novel runs into about 100,000 words, and the completed trilogy totalled 300,000 words taking Daly four years to complete. The death of Quamina is a clue to the dramatic trend of the trilogy as a whole. Kykoveral. February 1954
Quamina is considered a national hero in Guyana. In 1985 the post-independence Guyana renamed Murray Street in Georgetown – named for former Demerara Lieutenant Governor John Murray (1813–1824) who was in charge of the colony during the unrest and rebellion – Quamina Street in his honour. A monument to him was erected at the junction of Quamina and Carmichael Streets. He is equally depicted in a mural in the dome at the headquarters of the Guyana Bank for Trade and Industry (GBTI) building in Water Street, Georgetown.
Please be aware that in this recording the author uses the N-Word on several times. Additionally the torturous method used in the actual death of Quamina, portion of the story, may be distressing to some.
Guyanese poet and civil servant, born in British Guiana (now Guyana), educated at Queen's College. He was deputy chairman of the Department of Culture, editor of the influential literary journal Kyk-over-al from 1945to 1961, among other posts, and launched the pamphlet series of ‘Miniature Poets’ (1951–3), two of whose prominent authors were Wilson Harris and Martin Carter. Seymour was a prolific poet, but only with his seventh collection, The Guiana Book (1948), did he begin to have a distinctive voice of his own. His later poetry meditates on the blood-drenched history of the Caribbean and the crucible of forces, particularly the effects of the slave trade, which have moulded the present Guyanese identity. Water and Blood (1952), Monologue (1968), Patterns (1970), Italic(1974), Mirror (1975), Images of Majority (1978), and Selected Poems (1983) are only a few of his many other subsequent collections. Autobiographical volumes include Growing Up in Guyana (1976), Pilgrim Memories (1978), and Thirty Years a Civil Servant (1982). See Ian McDonald (ed.), AJS at 70(1984).
- Love Poems
- Our father
- As water loves the moon's, The sea ply's ferry post, It's months since the young rice, I lie like Egypt in the sun, Night-long the wind was bitter and the sea, The woman we never meet and dreams to love, the thousand tangled limbs of love, One incredulous morning, Nearly all women sleep, Memories of you besiege my waking day, While yet the down, I share with Yeats the rage, I have a room, I am heavy with sleep, My naked curious self, I probe these geometered granules, Mirror the ills that plague my generation,? For my heart your breast
- Writing as an activity of mind
- A Christmas story
- Name poem-Beauty about us in a breath of names
My thanks goes to David Alston, and also Yvonne Singh - author of the Guardian article: "How Scotland Erased Guyana From its Past" (16 April 2019) - for accepting my invitation to join yesterday's Guyana SPEAKS (28 April 2019). David offered an insightful talk on the extraordinary number of Scots who ventured to Guyana from the Highlands and on making a fortune reinvested it in properties/land back in Scotland. He also highlighted the number of places in Guyana, whose names can be seen to originate from the Highlands (see map). He spoke too of John Edmonstone, a black enslaved man from Demarara, who was brought to Scotland by his master, Charles Edmonstone. John went on to educate students in the art of taxidermy at the University in Edinburgh including Charles Darwin. Edmonstone gave Darwin accounts of Guyana's rainforest, and the taxidermy he taught him is known to have helped him greatly during the voyage of the Beagle. David's website (posted last week) is a wealth of information and should be revisited for anyone interested in this area of history.
Yvonne Singh read a moving passage that will resonate with many Guyanese and that was quoted from Jan Carew's Potaro Dreams: My Youth in Guyana (Hertford, UK: Hansib Publications, 2014), p. 12. Jan Carew, whose mother was a Robertson and who died in 2012 at the age of 92, was a descendant of both slaves and slave owners at Kiltearn. His great-grandmother had said:
"There are ghosts in our blood and we’re lucky because the lowliest, the ones who suffer most in the world of the living, are always top dogs in the spirit world . . . We’re blessed with the blood of the most persecuted folks on earth – Africans, Caribs, Portuguese Jews, French convicts from Devil’s Island, Highland Scots and the Lord alone knows what else. So whenever we cut ourselves, we can see ghosts of those others peeping out from the African and Amerindian blood. The ghosts are always there talking their conflicting talk until there’s a Tower of Babel inside your head. So you’ve got to listen well and search out the kindest, the strongest, the most human of these voices and make them your own."