Sunday, October 04, 2009

McWatt, Mark. "Landscape and Identity." An Interview with Lucy Evans. KAIETEUR NEWS September 27, 2009.

Sometimes you think in terms of the Guyanese mindset or the Guyanese identity, usually in terms of the Guyanese problem, in terms of the racial polarisation and the political problems. But I always think of that too as part of a regional thing, and part of a process of growth and development out of colonialism towards whatever it is we’re headed towards – towards being members of an international community. I think here, too, Wilson Harris has been very helpful, because he has suggested that all those boundaries and fences are in a sense artificial, and that the mind, the creative imagination, quite easily leaps over them, and finds correspondences in sometimes strange and originally exotic cultures.I suppose to some extent this exists in other writers too. Someone like Kamau Brathwaite can pick up on the African influences, perhaps because he has visited and lived in Ghana for a number of years. And Walcott can hark back to the Homeric epics. He can feel quite comfortable in the imaginative world that they depict, and he is able somehow to import that into his own experience and, as it were, continue that epic tradition in a poem like Omeros. In a sense, this negates the need for an obsessive concern with national identities, and what’s happening in particular countries.When I said that I had this idea of a Caribbean audience, it’s just in the sense that you have to have some kind of idea of readership, not in terms of any set notions or principles of identity. Just that these are the people closest who might be reached by what you say. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2009/09/27/landscape-and-identity/.

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