Every writer has that thing that haunts them, the evasive, wispy flickering of a story, essay or poem that lingers at the backs of their minds. It makes their fingers twitch, makes them mutter lines of dialogue or exposition that bubbles up from their subconscious to become almost real, almost tangible. It is at these …
From mid-December 2018 to now, I have been attending every literary event Moray House has hosted. I learned about Edgar Mittelholzer, A.J. Seymour, Egbert Martin and Ian McDonald. I learned about the contexts in which they wrote, about how they worked to promote our literary tradition here in Guyana. I even had the honour of …
Continue reading I saw the future today – My experience at the Commonwealth Writers Workshop
My angst about my education has been around since high school, I recently (re)discovered. A few months ago, while cleaning up my still cluttered spaces at home, I found a small collection of poetry I wrote when I was in high school. I must have been around 15 or 16 years old when I penned The …
I did a lot of things differently this year. I didn’t write nearly as much about books as I wanted to (at least not publicly) as both the good and bad parts of 2018 swallowed me whole. But amid the ups and downs of this year, two things stood out for me: my personal reading …
Continue reading Writing Journals and Twitter Threads – My Year of Reading, 2018
As you walk down the main road of the Turkeyen Campus, you too may overlook one of its least appreciated features. Art is everywhere. Murals adorn the fronts of some building and students’ paintings hang in familiar offices. One mural - a life-like representation of Guyana’s forest ecosystem - is even indoors, sprawling over the …
Continue reading Unlabelled – The underappreciated art of Turkeyen Campus
A few months ago, Carinya Sharples wrote an excellent piece about fear in Guyana. She spoke about how Guyanese - both resident and diasporic - are always channelling fearful narratives among themselves. Some of this fear is warranted, of course, but so much of it seems...exaggerated. I have grown up on a diet of fear. …
The Fallen We woke up late that Sunday morning and there she was, the swell of her belly rising like a smooth, brown hillock above the short, fluffy grass on which she lay. Hovering over her sun-warmed flesh was a single, nervous sentinel: her last, and now orphaned, foal. He pushed and prodded her body, …
Originally posted on TurkeyenReviews2018. “It was her grandmother talking that Sunday evening when Caesar approached Cora about the underground railroad, and she said no. Three weeks later, she said yes. This time it was her mother talking.” pp. 8 The Underground Railroad is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. It revolves around Cora, a …
Continue reading The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The Success “People from time to time would complain about not getting tickets. They would, like, beg us to go in and stand up in the theatre.” - Caribbean Cinemas receptionist. It has been three weeks since Black Panther proudly prowled onto the big screen in the United States. Since then, it has been tearing …
Continue reading Black Panther: What the movie means for Guyanese and Guyanese Art?
I was drawn to The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by a Guardian Article in 2016 when the publication announced that Arundhati Roy was breaking her 20-year fiction hiatus and publishing a second novel. I was intrigued. I had come across Roy’s work near the beginning of my original reading challenge when I got a kindle sample …
Continue reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
