Activity: Conversation
Co-ordinator: Moray House Trust
Sponsor: The Guyana Lottery Company
Date: Thursday 15 August 2013
Brendan de Caires and Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine met to discuss themes and topics arising from Dr. Roopnaraine’s recently published book of essays, ‘The Sky’s Wild Noise’. Moray House Trust thanks The Guyana National Lottery for their sponsorship of this event.
Video Clips
Introduction
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/P667v1V8m9E
Miles Fitzpatrick introduced Dr Rupert Roopnaraine and Brendan de Caires.
Part One: ‘Waterskiing on the stream of the world’
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/iGpZenpT3dc
In his final interview, Gore Vidal lamented ‘the literary figures of our day who go from university to university and have no lives in the world’ and quoted a line from Goethe: ‘talent is formed in quiet, character in the stream of the world.’ In this initial phase of the talk, Rupert described his early life as an academic and his links with Walter Rodney at Cornell University.
Part Two: ‘Dickens is a Guyanese novelist’
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/HI2g51N552o
Rupert talked about his academic treatise on Charles Dickens’ ‘Pickwick Papers’ and Brendan and Rupert discussed the idea that ‘the greatest form of censorship is illiteracy’. Rupert talked about the need to cultivate ‘a taste for literacy’.
Part Three: ‘Cultural literacy’
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/tJTEnxQjBNw
In analysing the depth and complexity of some of the cues and references in the work of Hawley Harris, Guyanese cartoonist, and Philip Moore, Guyanese sculptor and artist, Rupert noted the ‘disappearing frames of reference’ required to decode their work.
Part Four: ‘An Environment of Appreciation’
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/kUQfo8jbZXQ
Brendan and Rupert discussed the work of Guyanese artist, Stanley Greaves and two Barbadian artists, Ras Ishi and Ras Akeym-I and their experience as artists in the Caribbean.
‘For Ishi, isolation is the necessary condition not only of the artist, struggling to create in an environment he finds inhospitable to creativity; but also of the human person, marooned in a world of uncertainty and shifting relations, driven to a continuously renewed search for wholesomeness, for the essential integrity of being in the world. Isolation is desolation; but it is also consolation.It is the withdrawal into self for the journey inward to the life-giving sources of energy…’ [‘Isolation. The paintings of Ras Ishi Butcher’, The Sky’s Wild Noise]
Part Five: ‘The Triumph of the Spirit’
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/ksm5cabnSno
Martin Carter described a poet as ‘a man who is able to make a judgement’. What, Brendan asked, has Guyana lost in losing Martin Carter ? He was, Rupert noted, ‘an extraordinary moral force’ and, notwithstanding his despair with much of what had happened in Guyana, ‘somebody who was a great believer in the triumph of the spirit’. The conversation then turned to a discussion of the ‘barbershop intellectuals’ depicted by Roy Heath, a group of self-taught critical thinkers who could discourse on any topic from religion to politics to sport and where their descendants might now be found in Guyanese society.
Part Six: Questions from the floor
You Tube Clip: http://youtu.be/ggY9XMz3O9c
“We could do a lot more in relation to our artists than we are presently doing.” noted Dr Roopnaraine as he answered a question from the floor at the end of ‘A Conversation’.