Guyana Prize winners bemoan lack...
Harold Bascom From 4A
Songshine, an open-mic event hosted by Gillian Moor, singer/songwriter/poet. Paula Obe, a poet and publisher and another Songshine regular, heard Osman and liked what she heard. She then told Osman about her printing press in Trinidad and her wish to see her manuscripts. Satisfied with Osman’s work she offered to publish and so Bamboo Talk Press in Trinidad became the publisher of Osman’s debut collection.
“I really owe Paula a lot for taking the whole project under her wing. I couldn’t have done it without having someone who was willing to support me,” Osman said.
Once Osman knew her work was going to be published she was more strategic and consistent in her writing. “Before that, I wrote when I felt inspired and I had a vibe to write something,” she said.
Originally her publication was meant to be a chapbook, a small collection of not more than 30 poems with which most poets start out. She decided, with encouragement, to expand it to a full poetry collection. Apart from writing some newer ones she pulled some of her older poems she thought were good enough.
“That was how ‘All Made of Longing’ became a collection of 46 poems,” she said.
Most were written during the Covid-19 lockdown, but a few were older. The oldest, “Sunshine” was written about 18 years ago.
The main theme running through the poems is different types of longing and desire from a woman’s perspective, she said. Longing for home, longing for self-expression, for growth and evolution, for freedom from societal norms and pressures, for love, tenderness and love-making.
“Longing for the closeness of the child who started pulling away as she gets older,” said Osman, who is mother to a daughter.
“Also because this is the Caribbean experience, it’s a desire for self-actualisation; a desire for independence from slavery and colonialism. It’s a desire for freedom that speaks directly to the experience of kidnapped Africans on the Trans Atlantic trade who jumped overboard,” she added.
Osman plans to continue writing and publishing. “I have some new poems since ‘All Made of Longing’ that will go into a second collection, God grant life. Writing is one of those careers that is not short and fast,” she noted.
Bascom, a five-time winner of the drama category, expected to win with his submission, “Unfounded”, a full length drama, which he wrote over a short period. When Michael Jordan suggested he enter the Guyana Prize, he said, he was not interested. A month before the deadline he changed his mind. “I write fast,” he said.
He was not surprised at winning. “I know the level of my writing and the level of the local Guyanese thinking and writing. A lot of the local guys are not reading enough. To write well you have to read well,” he stated.
When he wrote his other winning entries “Two Wrongs”, which speaks of unity; “Makantali”, a story of redemption and a Guyanese classic; “Blank Document”, a radio drama; and “Desperate for Relevance”, he knew he would have won. “I push myself brutally. I am very self-critical. My plays must be on par with those on the international level,” he stated.
His work, “Unfounded”, a tragedy, is about the racial tensions between the two major race groups, he said.
“It’s about African Guyanese and Indian Guyanese who are racially disrespectful to one another. That disrespect is not being addressed. As a playwright affected by the situation, I decided to write a play to see if once and for all we can face our racial nonsense and understand that we have one common goal and that is to make Guyana right,” he said.
Bascom grew up in New Road, Vreed-en-Hoop in a predominantly Indian community, “where when Indian and Black children got into little stories, you quickly hear, ‘Black Man stink’ and ‘Coolie man rank,’” he recalled. “That was how it went and then we got back together and played. Then come general elections and the adults get into it similarly. That has been going on since then until today.”
Recalling the race riots of 1964 and recent utterances on social media, Bascom fears a recurrence of 1964 when, “Blacks murdered Indians and Indians murdered Blacks. I told myself it is time we face this race nonsense and so I wrote ‘Unfounded’.”
He gave the play that name because the many so-called realities in Guyana are not based on facts, “such as the national motto of ‘One People, One Nation, One Destiny’ or ‘One Guyana’,” he said.
The play looks at the rumours of an impending Venezuelan invasion, which he used to ask questions to see how unified Guyanese are.
“Are we going to come together to fight a common enemy? Are we going to sing, ‘Not a Blade of Grass’ when the bombs start falling? Or are we going to look to England or America or somebody else to save us?” he questioned.
The central figure is the narrator, Budday, who has a little of every race. “On stage, Budday calls on his audience to listen while questioning to make them think. You is me and I is you. He is a figure who tries to pull the audience together into understanding that all ah we is one. All ah we is mixed up and in this mixed-upness, we could forge a nice destiny,” he said.
Aside from that there is a love affair between a Black Guyanese Tyrone Blackman and an Indian Guyanese Indranie Gunraj. Indranie gets pregnant by Tyrone. Her father sees her as a disgrace and decides to kill Tyrone but his son Ravi takes the gun away from him.
“The issue of race, religion and skin complexion is dominant in the play. In another scene, Ravi has a good friend, Quasi, whose father tells him, ‘Never trust a coolie. The only good coolie is a dead one’. In Ravi’s home, his father asks him what he is doing with a Black man as his friend,” he revealed.
Bascom said the play shows the splintered reality not heard on the road but which happens in homes.
Later on, Indranie’s father hires a hitman, a Black policeman, to kill his daughter. “I am playing with the shades of the Phantom Squad’s reign in Guyana. Writers need to document these things. We should not allow these things to go under the rug,” he said.
The hitman finds Indranie and Tyrone together and has a change of heart. He tells Tyrone to cut off Indranie’s ponytail and give it to him to take back to Indranie’s father to show he had gotten rid of Indranie.
Bascom noted that producers have approached him to stage the play. However, he does not think it will see the light of day in Guyana. He is now working on a commissioned Chinese drama.