The Weather in 1960s Airy Hall, Guyana - Analysis

By definition, memories transmuted into art work as something other than things remembered.  The imagination creates this transformative process by its play with time, the sequence of events, location and the feel for all three. A feel for the past broadens from biography to history, from a private obsession to the public realm of ethics and politics.  History that can be personal and public, individual and communal, appear to my mind as a thing rooted in landscape.  Landscape inscribes it just as the ethical imagination transcribes it.

  
England and Guyana seem to be conjoined twins as a result of their intertwined histories inscribed on my remembering body since I grew up in both places.  Therefore both places work for me as biography transmuted into art in the first instance and, secondarily, as two public histories embraced in political and ethical terms.

The places are tested on the spinal column, on the nervous system. They inhabit dreams and nightmares. Each comes with its own sensuous pot-pourhi of imperatives. Both must be linked in some way to approximate to their lived feeling in me, not simply as memories but as the plait of my life.

I say this because the intersection of biography and art, politics and aesthetics remain enduring concerns for many writers.  It is clear to me that the morality is buried in sensuous details. In addition the embryo or kernel of an idea rooted in the specifics of race, gender, class or sexuality, quickly embraces the width of humanity precisely because of this specific beginning.  When asked, as I am frequently asked, whether I am a black writer or a writer who happens to be black, I always reply, both, since both apply to varying degrees at different times depending on the circumstances.  The choice is a ludicrous one, of course, because I am first and foremost human.  But I understand the conditions that framed the question and I believe we should examine those social and historical conditions – slavery, race, class, economic underdevelopment – rather than reduce the contemplative mind to an annoying semantic binary conundrum represented by, black and/or writer.  As if I could walk away from my skin or my writing when both are enshrined in this moral code.  And as if each could be chosen as a shopper would choose a product off a supermarket shelf. Codswollop.

    
Forgive my disdain for such a formulation at such a critical time.  Pointless wars, crude ideological boundaries, and dumb or disingenuous political leaders make a travesty of international citizenry and reduce complex and reflective humanity to throw away soldiers and forgotten, outcast peoples.  How inadequate these terms feel in their necessary and limited general flavour when pitched against the necessary and much needed specific and local, though clearly ignored and trampled because deemed poor and powerless (what a fucking mess we have made of things).  It hurts to witness these times and then the pain makes this moral art.

© Fred D'Aguiar

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