Ian McDonald, Contributor
ALL MY life I have loved rain. Real rain, I mean, not the thin, cold, foggy, spattering drizzle out of desolate, leaden skies which I remember with no love at all from my days in England. ("It is impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches Rain! Rain! Rain!" - John Keats in a letter to a friend). But rain at home in the islands and Guyana I have loved for as long as I can remember.
When I was a romantic boy one of my favourite poems was the anonymous 18th Century poem "Western Wind" which spoke of rain and love in the same breath: "Western wind, when will thou blow. /The small rain down can rain?/ Christ, if my love were in my arms/And I in my bed again!"
And when I was a boy we spent long holidays in Antigua where my grandparents lived. Antigua suffers from severe droughts and during those holidays we quite often experienced a land burnt dry and dusty by endless days of sun. So when rain arrived the joy was unconfined. Every face seemed to light up as when a much loved relative visits. We children were allowed to run outside in celebration and dance in the showers.
DELICATE GREEN
I remember how good the cool rain felt as we got drenched. And by the next morning what had seemed dead, dry roots in brown fields were already flushing a delicate green. Rain was then a rejoicing. I wrote a poem about that sort of life-giving rain.
Yet it was not only that sweet rain that I loved, rain with a light and joyful touch, drought-ending rain. I also loved that dark and stormier rain, the sudden cool darkness in the middle of blazing days, the peace and comfort lying safe in bed at night listening to it fall outside never thinking for a moment it could do harm. I especially loved the fierce storms of rain that march up river many afternoons on the banks of the Essequibo, sweeping over us with wild winds for half an hour then disappearing, leaving sunlight and a gleaming world.
That habit of love for rain has changed. Mixed now with love of rain's fruitfulness will always be fear. I could conceive of rain's destructive power, and I imagined what a great flood could do in the poem "Between Silence And Silence," but I had never personally experienced rain which could lead to catastrophe until the deluge which started in the early morning of Saturday January 15.
There was never an onslaught of rain like that in my lifetime's experience. From the start the windless, heavy, insistent downpour without the slightest break had an unrelenting, fateful sound about it. After a few hours without ceasing it seemed a great gray canvas bag as large as the sky full of all the water in the world had been hauled right over us and was emptying its contents endlessly, slowly, relentlessly, on to us, our homes, our gardens, our crops, our city, our villages, our lives.
Sometime mid-morning I remember thinking "This rain will bury us alive." It was that heavy and suffocating, falling out of the darkest of shrouds. Tragically, it has one way or another sent many to their burials and many thousands more have lost all but their lives and the life of the country has been fundamentally dislocated in ways still to be assessed. Who would not fear rain, the sound of rain, after this?
At our home the water rose quickly and in the end destroyed much of our garden, created and tended by my wife with so much love and care over many years, and stood three feet in my study downstairs, destroying books but not my most precious collections and damaging furniture and other belongings.
But in comparison with what some of our friends lost, and even more clearly in contrast with what tens of thousands have gone through in the villages and the housing schemes, our experience of loss and inconvenience is nothing. When the sky itself has outwept this rain, the nation cannot fail to weep still for them - and provide and not forget.
Ian McDonald. is an occasional contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
