Guyana owes much to ‘Mac’

Wordsworth McAndrew would be eighty-five if he were alive today, November 22. Nevertheless, some men who have left us still speak to us through their works. Mac is one of the few people Guyana owes much to for making citizens proud of their natural Creolese Language. He did this mainly through his radio programmes, especially “What Else?”, “Focus on Folk”, and his reading of short stories sponsored by the Guyana Marketing Corporation in the 70’s. As a stickler for the non-dilution of cultural practices, he sometimes named people to me, whom he said spoke Creolese as if it were English, or those who tried killing the language altogether.

In his article, Guyana – A Cultural Look, under the subhead “Need for Rethinking on Folk Things”, Mac expressed his concern that Guyana has neglected its folklore for a long time. An aspect of neglected folklore that troubled him was “…most young people today find it hard to understand proverbs when they hear them in speech.” Mac saw proverbs as a significant part of Creolese and thought that they were going to waste, rather than being utilized to strengthen the language. Both on radio and through his writings, Mac brought subjects such as obeah and comfa from secret closets to the public. In dealing with these, he, as a purist, did not in any way try to alter information he gathered through research. Other than his authentic writing on obeah and comfa, another example is his immortal poem “Ol Higue”, which some people read for facts on the myth. There is a further immortal work that Mac has left Guyana, which is his list of “Forty Stages of Love”. That list is in his folk manual Ooiy!, the first Guyanese folk manual published in 1979. Anyone reading the list should know that Mac created nearly all the names of the forty stages of love. Although Mac is best remembered for his poem “Ol Higue”, he has written scores of poems and has self-published some books of poetry. Those I’m familiar with are: Blue Gaulding (1958), 40 Meditations on a Theme (1963), Selected Poems (1966), and More Poems (1970). He compiled two sets of unpublished poems that he had not titled, but I named them Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Competition Poems and Poems Written in the USA, respectively.

Martin Carter sent Mac a small number of his poems with a note dated 8. 10. 63, saying: “You being perhaps one of the only persons I know with a practitioner’s interest in verse, I enclose these five poems for you to see.” I’m not sure how many of Mac’s poems Martin was able to read, but he would have been proud that Mac the practitioner wrote beautiful poems such as “Blue Gaulding” (in the book of the same name), “Barriat” and “Legend of the Carrion Crow” (Selected Poems), and “For Clive Thomas” (More Poems). Wordsworth McAndrew was a dedicated, altruistic Guyanese with the burning desire to enlighten all Guyanese on the country’s Mother Language and folklore, generally. He felt that a country which disregarded its culture was one that had set itself adrift. Although Mac would not ask for any monetary or social reward, I believe that a street in the South Cummingsburg area where he lived as a boy should be named “Wordsworth McAndrew Way” to honour Guyana’s shortest giant, who was a major force in showing the country the cultural way forward.