Repeating Islands

Awards in the prize will be presented at an Awards Presentation ceremony on September 1, 2011 in the Savannah Suite of the Pegasus Hotel, starting at 7.00 pm.

CATEGORIES AND AWARDS

The Guyana Prize for Literature is open to Guyanese authors, for works in five categories: Poetry, Fiction, Drama, First Book of Fiction and First Book of Poetry. These will be awarded prizes of US$5,000 for the Best Book in each category and US$3,000 for each of the Best First Books.

GUYANA PRIZE 2011 SHORTLISTS

The shortlisted works are listed below in alphabetical order:

Best Book of Poetry

Brian Chan’s The Gift of Screws has a speaker who is ruminating in middle-age on a range of epiphanies of a lifetime. Whether observing a caged lioness or paying tribute to his spouse who has been “elbower and hand-holder; compass and / carriage,” he considers the various ways we recall and reconfigure the past in poetic fictions, and how these remembrances are driven by the hope that “the sheer everydayness of our miracles / outweighs the nonesuch of the ordinary.”

Stanley Greaves’s The Poems Man is a homage to Martin Carter — the “poems man” of the title. Attentive to the forms and thoughts of poetry, Greaves shift surreally between the imaginary landscapes of his own paintings and philosophical questions that engaged Carter’s poetry. Fascinated by the interplay of the visual imagination and the “intoxication of speech,” he probes the act of creation with a terseness and rhythmic economy close to the poetic voice of the mature Carter.

Maggie Harris’s After a Visit to a Botanical Garden has a speaker whose encompassing frame of references is Guyana and UK, Michael Jackson and Lata Mangeskar, botanical gardens and train stations, and who is witty and lyrical, playful and tender. One poem drolly examines technological progress; another captures the various voices of vendors at a West Indian tourist market as they entice shoppers; in yet another she has a speaker contemplating her maternal emotions at her daughter’s wedding.

Mark McWatt’s The Journey to Le Repentir retraces the growth of a curious child in the remote northwest of Guyana, paralleling the speaker’s transition to adulthood with the journey of an Elizabethan sea-captain searching for El Dorado centuries earlier. The latter parts of the collection address adolescent passions and the challenges of mid-life and old age, juxtaposing personal and political creation/destruction and the remorse of a Frenchman whose accidental fratricide drove him to rename his estates La Penitence and Le Repentir.

Sasenarine Persaud’s In A Boston Night takes us on a disturbing tour of Boston and the east coast of the US and Canada, mentioning incidents past (”Boston Tea Party”) and present (“Audience: Walcott in Boston”). A dominant aspect of these poems that feature marginalized immigrants as their speakers is their sense that they are outsiders: one sees himself as a “stranger,” who “could never meet again” with those he has met en passant. Another, a poet, who is told that his “language is weird,” asks “how to write a bastard self.”

Berkley W. Semple’s The Central Station plays on the word “station” (class, status, destination, death, home-base) and the poems (all hundred-plus that have one-word titles) look at all these meanings in mostly Guyanese contexts from various perspectives. One which views the death of many generations of fishermen as missing links in the family-tree ends with “the lack fills a whole life with trying to fill.” Of the historical killings in “Lusignan,” the speaker is paralyzed by “horrors heavier than this poem can hold.”

Best Book of Fiction

David Dabydeen’s Molly and the Muslim Stick is a novel that shifts between realism and absurdism. The eponymous English heroine is raised in grim Lancashire of the 1930s. Subjected to horrific sexual abuse by her father and his friends and psychologically damaged and teetering on madness, she finds solace in a talking Muslim walking-stick and in Om, an illegal Amerindian from British Guiana, whom she follows back to the Demerara jungle, where she learns to reject her victimhood and looks to the future with hope.

Karen King-Aribisala’s The Hangman’s Game is a novel that has an Afro-Guyanese female protagonist who attempts to write a historical novel about the 1823 Demerara Slave Revolt. Struggling with writer’s block, she travels to Nigeria, in the 1990s, in search of an explanation for the slave trade but does not return to her writing until a family friend is murdered by El Presidente’s military regime. The historical and the contemporary blur as Nigerian tyrants around her begin to mirror the brutal behaviour of the nineteenth-century slaver-owners.

Janice Lowe Shinebourne’s Chinese Women is a novel about a financially successful Canadian-Guyanese immigrant’s life-long obsession with a Guyanese-Chinese woman. The protagonist remembers his life as a young Muslim suffering the crushing segregation of estate life in colonial Guyana, where he becomes obsessed with the young Chinese girl. His thwarted devotion to her leads him years after to seek her out in contemporary post-9/11 London at a time when he seemingly is engaged in Middle Eastern subversive activities.

Best Drama

Harold Bascom’s Blank Document is a radio drama that explores interwoven themes of lesbianism, Guyanese migration, family relationship, and creative writing. The protagonist, a past winner of the Guyana Prize, has a badly kept personal secret, which, when exposed, forces her to migrate to the US, where, ostracized and depressed, her life becomes “a blank document,” a state from which she eventually recovers after a cathartic experience.

Janice Imhoff ‘s The Changing Hand portrays the lives of Georgetown’s street people, underlining their resilience to cope with and survive whatever fate throws at them. The protagonist is an eccentric old woman, who belongs to the tradition of West Indian barrack-yard stories. Imhoff brings home to the reader/audience in scene after scene the realities of poverty in contemporary Guyana, contrasting them with scenes of middle-class romanticizing observers of poverty (in a newspaper office) .

Grace Nichols’s Blood and Wedding: A Guyana/Caribbean Version of Lorca’s Tragedy is a retelling of Garcia Lorca’s rural Spanish drama of passion and love, death and betrayal. Retaining much of Lorca’s narrative development, characterization, and motifs, Nichols adapts the play to a Guyanese-Caribbean world with modifications such as a Chorus of cane-cutters (speaking in Guyanese demotic) and the figure of Death in the form of the Kanaima of Amerindian folklore.