Activity: Poetry recital
Host: Moray House Trust
Date: Wednesday, 3rd December 2014
On Wednesday 3rd December, Moray House Trust hosted an evening of readings from the poems of Mahadai Das and Mark Mc Watt. Stanley Greaves and Kathy Henriquo were the readers.
Mahadai Das was born in Eccles in 1954, graduated from the University of Guyana and later acquired a B.A Philosophy from University of Columbia N.Y. She began doctoral studies at the University of Chicago when illness intervened and she returned to Guyana. She later died in Barbados in 2003 after a term of illness.
Das published several volumes of poetry – I Want to be a Poet of My People (1976), My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982), Bones (1988) and a posthumous publication, A Leaf in His Ear of selected poems between 1975-1994.
Her work explores gender issues, identity, sensuality and love becoming more philosophical in the end:
‘Call me the need for rain.
For I am in want of a shower of truth.
I am starved for bread and the milk is too dear.
Call me the need for rain.’
[from Call me the need for rain, Mahadai Das]
MARK Mc WATT was born in Georgetown in 1947 and attended St Stanislaus College. He graduated from the University of Toronto and later completed his doctorate at Leeds. Mc Watt, now retired, was Head of the English Dept: at the Cave Hill UWI Campus in Barbados.
He has published three volumes of poems…Interiors (1989), El Dorado (1994), which won the Guyana Prize for poetry as did Journey to Le Repentir (2009). McWatt was the founding editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature.
His book of short stories, Suspended Sentences (2005) also won an unprecedented number of prizes – The Guyana Prize for prose, The Casas de Las Americas and The Commonwealth Prize in 2006.
In his poems, there is sometimes an identifiable puckish humour to be found in biographical references, and he identifies very strongly with the hinterland of Guyana.
You think I like this stupidness! –
gallivanting all night without skin,
burning myself out like cane-fire
to frighten the foolish?
And for what? A few drops of baby blood?
You think I wouldn’t rather
take my blood seasoned in fat
black-pudding, like everyone else?
And don’t even talk ’bout the pain of salt
and having to bend these old bones down
to count a thousand grains of rice!
[from Ol Higue, Mark Mc Watt]
