Stanley Greaves: Interrogating literature and mythology
Caribbean History
A flower falls on a leaf, the forest sleeps, and waves are on holiday
El Dorado sings of love as Columbus listens in a plastic boat.
Guacanagari flies to New York, – Nobody needs the Sargasso. Juliet watches soap operas and wonders where real heroes are gone. Magdalene stops by a store – Named ‘Apostles’ Feet’.
What are winged sandals for? Exploring city slums in a purple limousine
Cleopatra examines all painted doors.
Other VIPs visit
St. Elsewhere-in-the-sun for rum and water skis.
There is no oracle only fraudulent cinemas. Elections come now and then like bowls of free soup.
Old Moses says
– Democracy works!
Citizens of some lands stare in one-eyed belief.
But rum-jumbies dance with people, and
– who don’t see don’t care.
- Stanley Greaves
Moray House in Georgetown, now firmly established as a centre for the arts, history and culture, is the presenter of a long, continuing series of programmes covering several disciplines. Topics are discussed, ranging from politics to the economy, and culture. There have been exhibitions, panel discussions and performances. The COVID-19 pandemic restrictions succeeded only in redirecting the Moray House organisers to virtual presentations; they have been using Zoom to continue their programmes and seminars.
The former residence of the late publisher David de Caires and his family, Moray House is now a shrine for the arts and public education, having established a tradition of hosting public affairs and cultural programmes. A lawyer by profession and later editor-in-chief of the Stabroek News, de Caires was faithfully dedicated to the arts and never gave up, despite impediments, supporting publications and public programmes, including editing and producing the New World Quarterly. His defiance of the odds included his determination to print Martin Carter’s Selected Poems (1989) on the newspaper press. This was rewarded; the publication won the Guyana Prize in 1989.
The spirit of such endeavours was reborn in the establishment of Moray House and the series of programmes is now coordinated and mostly curated virtually by his daughter Isabelle de Caires from her home overseas. The most recent project was a three-part series of readings of selections of poems printed in KykOver-Al from 1945 to the 1990s. This was curated by Jacqueline De Weever, niece of AJ Seymour, the founder and first editor of Kyk-Over-Al. The third session of these readings, directed by Isabelle de Caires, was titled “Kyk Poems: Whistles and Dream Banks”. The selections were published in the journal in the years of its later existence, edited by Ian McDonald.
Many poems from Guyana and around the Caribbean were introduced and read, with a pronounced focus on Carter. However, several other poets were featured. Among them was Stanley Greaves, who was also one of the readers in the final session on Saturday, November 27.
Greaves is a published and prize-winning Guyanese poet, who won the Guyana Prize for Best First Book of Poetry in 2002 for his first collection Horizons. He went on to write two other collections – The Poems Man (2009) and Haiku (2015) all published by Peepal Tree Press in the UK. In addition, he co-authored with critic Anne Walmsley, Art In the Caribbean: An Introduction (2010) published by New Beacon Books, London and a series on Guyanese art with University of Guyana lecturer and artist Akima McPherson.
His credits continue in other disciplines; he is a guitarist, known for folk music, but accomplished in classical guitar both as a player and a composer. He was part of a festival of storytelling produced by Ken Corsbie in Barbados in the early 1990s. He played the guitar in the small resident band during that festival. He is an academic, and was the first coordinator of Creative Arts at the University of Guyana where he introduced that institution’s first studies in Fine Arts.
Yet Greaves’ most famous achievements have been in the visual arts as a painter and sculptor. He is one of Guyana’s most outstanding painters with an extraordinary record of accomplishments from major international exhibitions to being inducted as a Distinguished Honourable Fellow at the UWI Cave Hill Campus in 2003. Although his career dates back to his apprenticeship in the Working People’s Art Class under ER Burrowes, it has the distinction of exhibiting rebirths, changes, renewals and startling new cycles during the 20 years since the beginning of the twenty- first century.
As a painter, he has had a long and close association with literature. This includes dialogue with novelist Wilson Harris, one of the factors that make Greaves a Guyanese artist who has intertextual engagements with writers and with Guyanese literature. Greaves has taken an interest in literature in both its oral and literary forms. He interrogated novelist Edgar Mittelholzer and has had the most enduring association with poet Carter.
While Mittelholzer was the influence for one of his most outstanding exhibitions, “Shadows Move Among Them”, Carter was his closest ally in the writing of his own poetry, and his collection The Poems Man, was inspired by and is a tribute to Carter. He declared: “These poems, some written over the past 30 years, but most of them recently, have as their focal point an act of homage to the great Guyanese poet Martin Carter, voice of a nation. They . . . bear witness to Carter’s role as a nation’s conscience. . . The poems also investigate the power of words and the integrity and sanctity of the act of making in such circumstances of disorder”.
The poem “Caribbean History” speaks to this disorder and the power of words, while interrogating literature and myth, linking this as well to references from the history of the Caribbean. These are often merged and mixed with the mythology and literature of the world. Greaves is very much a twenty-first century poet – his first collection came in 2002 – but more than that, his style and inclination are postmodernist, as evident in “Caribbean History”.
Greaves tends to be intuitive in this way, which also links him to traditions. One of his most famous exhibitions is “The Elders”, mounted in London and Europe, and shared with Jamaican spiritual elder Brother Everard Brown, an intuitive artist. Though a trained artist – a university man – Greaves associates with folk and intuition. Another outstanding exhibition was titled “There Is A Meeting Here Tonight”, which was borrowed from a line in a song performed by wayside revivalist, spiritual preachers when they are calling people to a service on the street.
Greaves thus keeps close to oral literature and traditions. In the Moray House poetry readings from KykOver-Al on November 27, he spoke about myth, making the revelation that startled some members of his audience that Guyana did not have a mythology outside of the Amerindian mythology.
He explained that except for the indigenous people, all the other ethnic groups in Guyana were immigrants from elsewhere, who had not been able to establish a common mythology in Guyana. A mythology, Greaves outlined, has to be built among a people from an identity and a sense of origin, which, in Guyana, only the Amerindians have.
Derek Walcott had also made a similar statement about West Indian mythology. This is a theme that occupies a small part of “Caribbean History”, as it does Walcott’s essay “The Sea is History”. Greaves mentions tourists’ visit to “St. Elsewhere-in-the-sun”, a land where “there is no Oracle”. The images are fairly superficial in a place lacking in depth and real identity. A discourse on mythology, the history, origins and identity of a people, the poem makes continuous ironic references to old and new tales taken from history, literature and myth.