Guyanese writer restores a lost childhood with memoir
“Writing”, says Maggie Harris, a two-time winner of the Guyana Writing Prize, is “as essential to her as breathing.” Harris recalls her childhood in Guyana with a lyricism that echoes in her memoir “Kiskadee Girl,” recently re-released by Cane Arrow Press to commemorate her 70th birthday.
“I’m talking more than 60 years ago here, and that long stretch of time I still can’t believe. It’s gone like a shot from an inquisitive child living in a time when there was no TV, no video games, nothing of that sort, living in a strict society where you had to beg to go out, girlfriends sweet-talking your mom.” Books were Harris’s “gateway to the world,” and she devoured everything from cowboy comics to True Love stories. “Reading and writing went hand in hand; like many others, I also had pen-friends worldwide. I started writing love songs, which became poems.”
Harris’s memoir of her childhood recalls a time when life was a prelapsarian dream. “My mother’s storytelling, as she sat in the rocking chair relaying family stories rich with tragedies and folly, turned on a light bright enough to outshine the street lamps. Boat rides to Kwakwani, where my dad captained the bauxite tugs, added another layer—the whisper of the rainforest, as did the silence of the bush behind my grandmother’s house.”
As a young woman, Harris aspired to be a fashion designer. Instead, she found herself drawn to writing to navigate the complexities of life and history, particularly after migrating to the UK in 1971 and becoming a mother. It’s been 60 years since those formative years, and Harris’s passion for the country of her birth and writing has not diminished. The Guyana-born author wrote 11 books of poetry and prose, won the Wales Poetry Award, and was the Regional Caribbean winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Award.
Upon turning 70, Harris reflected on her life’s journey, which was marked by a recent “surreal” trip home to Guyana, where she found almost everyone she knew had “gone” and the Guyana she knew had changed. But writing has kept that world intact, and “Kiskadee Girl” is a testament to those times, encapsulating the vibrant and tumultuous experiences that shaped her.
Wheeling
“We’re cycling. From St John St to Water St. Our bikes are stallions, flags, beacons. Moultons, Choppers, Raleighs. They told the world you’d passed your exam. That one bringing up the rear with its mudguard clanking spoke volumes. We rolled, like scores of other teenagers for whom the bicycle was a cruising machine, a step up from Shank’s pony, past families strolling round town late afternoon taking part in the activity of window shopping. Past Barclay Banks, Wrefords, the new Faaz cinema, D M Fernandes, New Amsterdam market, Bata shoe store.
These are the days when shops have counters with stern-looking assistants standing behind them asking what you want. There is no wandering up and down aisles. In Wreford’s the shop-girl takes your money and places it in a silver pot that zips crazily across the ceiling on a wire to the office upstairs. Zing! And change and receipt come spinning back. So you dream harder and longer about the things you want, press your nose to the glass at J P Santos where Lordy! A battery-operated Monkee mobile is parked, pink as candyfloss, the heads of Davy, Micky, Mike, and Peter protruding from fake leather seats.
Roll on past the Penguin Hotel, Bacchus Photography Studio, Bookers Stores. Legs slow to allow gear changes, stretch to stand on the pedals, pause to freewheel. Arms let go of handlebars: watch this, man! Wearing a creative collage of what was fashionable, what was allowed, and what was affordable–Elly with her shirtdress and chain belt, thick black ponytail, not allowed to wear a miniskirt; Devi not allowed to expose her midriff, tying the ends of her shirt baring her brown body to the sun; me, hampered by the thinnest legs New Amsterdam had ever seen, diverting attention from them with halter-tops and hippie bead necklaces; Glory, being American, the freest of us all, in short shorts ... but what could you expect from someone who undresses bold as brass in full view of everyone outside the dressing room poolside at Blairmont Estate whilst we fumble under towels, behind closed doors?
Pass the Globe Cinema where on a Saturday afternoon Indians from the rural Corentyne file in to see movies from their mother country, dressed to the nines in shalwars and saris, homemade dresses, gold bangles and silver sandals; the men not to be outdone, in bright shirts, seamed trousers, gold teeth, rings and glittering watches. These are the children of Indenture, families hailing from Madras and Lahore, Calcutta and Delhi whose cultures would come to develop and enrich our society. From a wide diversity of castes from agrarian to pottery, their journey to British Guiana to work on the plantations in the 19th C, would see the emergence of jewellers, shopkeepers, accountants and lawyers. But the movies take them back to an ancestral past where the Indian landscape was as much a star as Lata Mangeshkar and Shammi Kapoor: lovers chased each other through paddy fields and rivers, peered at each other through the cracks of temples to a musical soundtrack that reverberated through the walls of the cinema and echoed along the wooden stelling and over the banks of the river.
In the far future to come, when at last I would get the opportunity to visit Mother India, the streets of Mangalore would zoom me right back to Guyana, and these movies. When the doors opened, the audience stumbled out into the sunlight on Water St, the soundtrack still playing in their heads, their senses shocked by the light and the strangeness of this reality.
My girlfriends and I never run out of things to say, the freedom to lime was always fought-for and restricted by time. We talk of school and boys, of parents who were bad-minded and unfair, of our developing bodies and periods which we nicknamed ‘Uncle Henry’ after the doctor father of one of our friends. We sing out in Guyanese patois, discouraged by parents and teachers who constantly re-iterated the need for speaking proper English, which no, does not include Americanised slang.
We laugh at the old man ‘with he goady hanging ova he bicycle seat’, at the ‘English duck’ just come back from abroad with quack-quack in her voice, at ‘limeys’ eating roti with a knife and fork. We find these things hilarious and many of us would get a cuff from elders who caught us stifling laughter behind our cupped hands as guests looked at us askance. We cruise past the sweet drink factory, judder over the wooden slats of the stelling, beneath which crabs danced the bossa-nova and bathed their silvery children when the tide came in. Coca-Cola tops, diesel oil, cigarette packets, eels, worms and shrimps whirl and waltz as the river froths against the greenheart posts.
Sunlight cuts the water sharp as a cutlass as we lean on our bikes, wishing we had the extravagance of sunshades. The ferry docks, the circular steel floor on the cardeck revolves, vehicles nose out onto the ramps, car horns blow. Foot passengers, too impatient to wait for the doors to open on the passenger deck, clatter down the stairs, push their way through the queue of cars and buses. Motorbikes with lean hungry boys sporting sunshades scream Yamaha and Suzuki souls out into the afternoon, weaving snakelike and fearless towards Water St.
In their wake, the country buses with names such as Delilah and In God We Trust headed for the Corentyne, weighed down with rooftop produce, live poultry and mangoes, and boys riding tandem. Escaped logs from Fazal’s sawmill spin past in the wake of the Torani. Mistress Berbice bears them like bounty, gifts of appeasement, as she carries camoodies and crabs, bauxite and bones.”
–End of extract
Maggie Harris’s poetry has been featured as a public art installation in Canterbury, UK. Harris frequently performs her work internationally.