From “Son of Guyana”
(for Henry Muttoo)
Doan ‘tell me’ bout Guyana.
I’m a deh barn at t’irty-t’ree.
Meh great-granfadduh was a black man,
Puttagee was granmuddah.
One was granfadduh meh a cool guy,
Ah pull Buck, white and Chinee.
Dey calls it ‘six peoples country’
but at seven, unless you count me.
Michael Gilkes
From the “Prologue”
Noon on this beach barbecue. Sun hits
gimp dimpled the sea. My daughter, plumbing.
Adjusting the aperture of my fish eye lens I’m watching
face, dolphin head pouring with hair, dressing
a clownish dolphin smile, wings driving her in
dolphin swimming, back, shouting “Watch me, Dad!
I’ll do a back flip. ”
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The school bell. Focus on one little boy
reading. Boys background, book bags, bikes.
Narrator: “Books were rivers that he could slip into
and breathing…
Michael Gilkes
Last week in his almost daily blog that keeps a great range of Caribbean writers and critics informed of cultural developments, and in connection with one another, St Lucian poet, editor and librarian John Robert Lee reminded her that it’s now a year since the loss. of Michael Gilkes. In a sad irony, Gilkes suffered COVID-19 after a rich life in the arts and academics.
Gilkes (1933 – 2020) was a playwright, poet, director, actor, filmmaker, academic and critic. He was well known in West Indian literature for his literary criticism, his academic career, for film and as a leading stage director, especially during his time in Barbados. In Guyanese literature he was prominent as one of the most accomplished and prominent playwrights, as a poet of somewhat lesser repute, as a leading filmmaker and on-stage icon as director and actor.
Gilkes had a long career at UWI, Cave Hill in Barbados, a shorter one at the University of Guyana, and as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick. He distinguished himself as a critic, especially Wilson Harris and Guyanese fiction. At Cave Hill he also served as Head of Department.
He won the Guyana Literature Prize for Best Book of Poetry first published with his Joanstown collection in 2002. He won twice for Best Drama Book – in 1992 for A Pleasant Career, and again in 2006 for The Last of the Redmen. And yet, his earliest victory was his most defining. His play Couvade has been a hit in Guyanese drama. He was twice published and had two major stage productions – in the first Carifesta in 1972, and again in 1993, both directed by him. Couvade, subtitled A Dream Play of Guyana, stands out in Guyanese literature as a play about transculturalism, cultural unity, art and healing. Its title and emblematic concept comes from a tradition associated with Amerindian culture called ‘couvade’ in which a man goes to bed and simulates birth-related conditions at the same time as his pregnant wife goes into labor. Gilkes built the Amerindian spiritual ritual into social commentary.
His contribution to Guyanese poetry was Joanstown, a title in which three concepts were combined. His first wife was Joan, who is represented in the collection as first love and Muse, whose name was used to rename Georgetown. He lent her name to a city, memorable to the poet for its former charm and splendor, but made it more enchanting as the place where Joan lived and remembered it in more indelible terms because of her presence there. The third reference point is the Jonestown. Guyana will always be remembered for the 1978 Temple of the People tragedy in Jonestown indoors, where over 900 Jim Jones followers were murdered or drank poison at his command. “Joan” replaces “Jones” to remove the outrageous and make the poet’s home remembered for something infinitely more pleasant.
Many of the poems recall old Georgetown from the 1940s, the neighborhoods and streets where Gilkes grew up and where he interacted with his girlfriend. There is a strong sense of place that recalls the setting of Sylvia’s Life and Death by Edgar Mittelholzer. Gilkes made poetry and romance out of the setting in a way that also recalls Derek Walcott’s Another Life.
In fact, Mittelholzer is at the center of Gilkes’ play A Pleasant Career. This is a play from Mittelholzer’s biography that follows him from New Amsterdam to London and beyond. The other play, The Last of The Redmen, revisits the former Georgetown location and focuses on the life of another prominent resident. Much of it is autobiographical, though it is a fictional memory of a member of the Taitt family who owned Woodbine House, popularly known as Taitt House, which houses artists, musicians, dancers, athletes, poets and activists political and where Gilkes may have spent much of his youth. The title of the play refers to the colored middle class to which the Taitts and Gilkes belonged, and which the play presents as moribund. The Taitts included Dorothy and Dr Jabez Taitt, a Barbadian doctor who had made British Guiana his home. Dorothy founded the Georgetown Philharmonic Orchestra and the Woodbine Club and her internationally renowned daughter Helen formed the Guyana Ballet School. There were also Lawrence, Commonwealth rooster promoter, psychiatrist Dr Horace Taitt, who was also a skilled ballet dancer, theater producer, and art collector and Clairmont, a renowned actor, for whom Gilkes actually wrote the play.
As a playwright, Gilkes was also brought up in the Theater Guild in Kingston. One of the poems quoted above, “Son of Guyana” was written for Henry Muttoo, a colleague of Gilkes at Theater Guild. They learned theater craft there and went through several productions. Muttoo, a highly acclaimed actor, later specialized in set design and became one of the best technicians in the Caribbean.
Gilkes left the University of Guyana for UWA and while in Barbados became the country’s most prominent theater director. Among his most famous productions was Franklin Walcott, a revived version of the play, originally written on the Mona Campus, UWI, in 1954. Back at AS in 1993 he visited Couvade and later joined producer Gem Madhoo Nascimento in a series. from other productions, mostly film. The best known of these was the venture into the Wai Wai country in the interior of filmmaking at that location, using locals.
Incidentally, quite a few prominent Guyana writers and cultural personalities also belonged to that colored middle class. Foremost among them are the legendary Wilson Harris, as well as Jan Carew, poets and writers of fiction. Then there was playwright Frank Pilgrim, whose brother was musician Bill Pilgrim, actor and director Ron Robinson and actress Margaret Lawrence. One is tempted to mention Stanley Greaves, poet, painter and sculptor, but Greaves has written about his working-class roots.
Gilkes celebrated that pedigree in the poem “Son of Guyana” with his reference to the many races. Walcott, who also celebrated his ethnic mix, echoed in the poem “The Schooner Flight” whose narrator / persona named Shabine proclaimed his mixed ancestry and famously declared, “either I’m nobody or I’m a nation”. Gilkes placed himself in a similar position in that poem and his Creole-speaking persona is the poet himself.