Velma Pollard, Gleaner Writer
Velma Pollard
I had never seen a pilot so casual. I had only just got over being weighed before I was accepted into the aircraft when I noted him finally stubbing out his cigarette and waving through the cockpit window to his pardna.
Yet, strangely, I felt no fear. Snakes in the road and small boats on big rivers had given me a new attitude to danger. Looking down on the terrain below as we flew, I was sure that only the crows would get us if we went down in the Guyana rock forests. My fatalism clocked in. All my children were with me so none would be left to grieve the loss of others.
Later, I was to discover that they thought I was taking them to their certain death: 'Murder by Mother'.
The plane landed in front of a benab and new passengers climbed in. It was the first time I was seeing a thatched terminal building but the tourist attraction novelty of it struck me immediately. Those embarking were not tourists.
The plane did a circular route, beginning and ending with Georgetown, so that passengers from three benab airports in three centres could have transport to the city, as well as from one village to another. How else could the national airline be financially viable?
They were beginning to grow former imports like onion and potatoes in the interior, and these planes transported those to Georgetown - a parallel service to the one on the river.
In Lethem, the population composition was visibly different from what we had become accustomed to.
Short men and women with straight hair came out from tracts that reminded me of rural Jamaica, and from dry courses that, they told me, would become flooded rivers in another few months.
I couldn't contain my excitement. Not even the children getting sick reacting to the quinine they had had to take could daunt me.
Here were mountains! Not blue like the Blue Mountains but light grey and, in the evening, calm and restful, as if they protected the land they were overhanging. A far cry from the flat Georgetown coast which the Dutch had engineered, perhaps with Holland in mind.
You could live a lifetime on the coast and never find out anything about the interior of Guyana, except that that is where the 'Bucks' come from: Buck being the local and general name for all the Amerindians groups who inhabit the areas beyond the narrow coastline.
What do Guyanese children from the coast know about the life of the Amerindians mentioned in their history and geography books as part of the racial and cultural diversity their country boasts?
The general label 'Buck' tells its own story. It doesn't discriminate between nations and languages.
This is the most interesting place I have experienced. This is not an island - as if I didn't know. And this is not the culture of the coast - as if I couldn't have figured that out.
The landscape is different; the people are different; the food, the languages, the culture are all different. There are roots here I have never seen: cousins of taro and yam and sweet potato.
And this is the land of dried meat, called tasso, hanging from sheds in markets held in different small villages on different days of the week.
What a lovely idea! So the buyer, not the salesman, travels. So large quantities of merchandise don't have to be taken from place to place. And you, humble buyer, buy enough on the day of your village market to not need to buy for a week.
The humble buyer is short and straight-haired. There's only the occasional negroid individual, a teacher from the coast, perhaps. She probably feels strange in the presence of these mountains, like my friend from the coast who came to the university in Jamaica and felt afraid of the Blue Mountains. But me, I love them. I feel protected.
Mountains, the Pakaraimas, here. I seem to see them everywhere I go, framing the landscape. If I ever settle in this country, this is the place. I want to use my fading eyes to watch the sun go gently down as the light fades on the mountains.
The students I have brought here want to go by pontoon to Brazil: a wonderful idea. Take everything an experience offers. I can't go. The malaria pills have demobilised one of my children.
Brazil by pontoon across the river! The border discussion takes on a whole new look. Macushi, Wapasiana, Patamulla people go across on these pontoons, visit their cousins in Brazil, speak the same languages they speak at home. Neither English nor Portuguese gets in the way of interaction.
Europe's strike again frustrated, as it has been in Africa where Yoruba people speak French or English as a second language, depending on whose ancestors colonised whom. No raging nationalism here.
Why should there be? One land with a river in between. Where the Demerara parts land, it's all one country. Here, this river separates two.
Students bring back Brazilian coffee for me.
Is the Interior a different country? On the coast there is cricket and all the national excitement connected with it. Indeed, you would think national till you get to Lethem. Here the annual event that everybody waits on has to do with horses. Instead of wicket and bat, children talk about lasso and corral. Young men want to excel at being vaqueros, cowboys. And this is not Texas. Nor is it inspired by Wild West films. The Wapasiana Indians of these plains are natural horsemen. So when the Europeans introduced ranches in the mid-nineteenth century there was no labour problem. So these Indians work for the Rancheros and, if they can afford it, keep their own small herds in the village. I go to see the flat, grassless, dust-filled bowl where the big annual event they talk about takes place, all the time wondering if I could return to actually experience the thing. It couldn't be further from the green of the Bourda cricket oval.
Talk about diversity. There is a whole other boss-man here. Nothing about cane or even rice production. Here it is the local white, ex-expatriate, who owns the horses and the ranch and who breeds cattle for a living. (I need a leather hammock badly. Oh, style!) I haven't been listening to the details of the games the young Amerindian man has been explaining to me. I watch the excitement in his eyes and my mind goes back, back to Georgetown, and I am trying to understand what a young man like him felt when he went to that city to look for a better life. The perennial threat: migration, my pet peeve. How could a man born to the freedom of the savannahs, a man whose greatest thrill is tied to horses and wide spaces, adjust to the claustrophobic slice of coastland that is that city? Here one pontoon ride extends his reach to Brazil, that vast land to the south. And I was thinking of the Prime Minister in Georgetown, and wondering how his constituency could accomodate the Amerindian who has known neither slavery nor indenture, who has been accustomed to wide spaces and alternatives, and for whom fun is freedom and horses and savannahs. The distinction between this sport and cricket is a fitting metaphor for the difference between the descendants of Africans and East Indians, slaves and indentured servants of the coast, and these people - these people born to own the land.
I see the power of the Amerindians here at home and their helplessness in Georgetown, where the men easily turn to drink as a response to the marginalization they feel. Where their women are routinely regarded as an easy piece by young black men who keep alive the myth that these women have something called 'suepap', flesh that instinctively tightens around the male organ. Enlightened people I know are only now beginning to regret denying their Amerindian grand- or great-grandmother.
A misfit is a misfit, and making a meeting-house, a place for your cocktail parties, in the style of an Amerindian house and calling it the Benab is symbolic, but hardly the answer. Suddenly that feels like a bad joke. The Benab will never be the same for me again.
Today's tour takes us on long walks, past huts where water gourds and hammocks are the only signs of habitation. Here, where men, working in fields in the dry season planting food crops, rest, and sometimes sleep overnight. The rainy season, May to July, sounds awesome as they describe it. They say the flat lands flood; the lower savannah is completely submerged. People simply stay at home doing the kinds of things you can do at home. This is when the finely-crafted straw mats known outside as 'Amerindian rugs' get woven, bit by bit, into squares and circles that are eventually joined into rugs that challenge the height of the craftsmen getting them ready to sit like for crotchet work on greenheart floors. This is when they weave outlines of tapirs and other animals into baskets and plant holders that will fetch a good price in Georgetown. Here the Ite palm is both shelter and a living: roofs for the houses, fiber for craft.
There are any number of small concrete school buildings in a half-finished state, waiting to heat the children into a restlessness that cannot promote learning. Then we come to the last of the old-time schools, thatch-roofed and cool, adorned with drawings of the local fauna, with names written in bold letters so people can write and spell. Again I wonder about civilization. The thatched schoolhouse is pleasant and spacious, the little concrete ones, hot and narrow. But the concrete is a mark of progress and a sure sign that the government cares. I think of the hotel where we had lunch. The owner and family live in a large thatched house. He is well off enough to do whatever he wishes and cares nothing about the Joneses.
This experience has been sobering. Very sobering. So much to know!
I decide to do two things: learn at least one Amerindian language and Portuguese. The university offers those free to staff, so why not? Africans and Indians learn several languages - why not me?
