Grace Nichols

106/2020. Set in British Guiana in the early 1960s at the point when the country was transitioning into independent Guyana. The story centres on the family of a rural school headmaster who retires and moves his wife and three children to the capital city, Georgetown, and their view of the social and political upheavals of decolonisation, an elected Marxist government, the British behaving badly, and CIA plots. Alternate chapters focus on straightforward narrative, and the child's-eye view of Gem the family's 10 year old daughter. The prose is well-written, with each word a meaningful choice, as you'd expect from an author otherwise better known as a poet. The tone is poignantly honest, from personal and family relations, to the confusions and conflicts of wider society. The novel is written in standard English with individual dialogue adjusted according to the speaker without patronising either the Creole-speaking characters or the average anglophone reader. It's not only my opinion that this is a brilliant book, as high quality publishers Virago have kept this in print since 1986.

On the Duke of Edinburgh's visit: "He knew that it wasn't so much the Duke as the thirst for spectacle and drama that had brought people out in the thousands."

Motto: "housework never done and I for one didn't come down to this earth to finish it."… (meer)

84/2020. The most recent collection of poems by Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols, with a scattering of black and white photos by Compton Davis of the old wooden buildings of Georgetown the capital city of Guyana.

Preface: "One of the things we do as poets, is to try to preserve experiences, people, places important to us, in an effort to save them from time's erasure."

And those are the themes of this collection: childhood in Guyana; home in Sussex; revisiting Georgetown but with no ghosts to lay to rest; and praise poems for friends. Nichols appears to have reached a comfortable point in her life and the lack of tension in most of these poems reflects her achievement, but some of the people she's written praise-poems for are no longer among the living, and the river delta land of Guyana is under threat from climate change with some of the Dutch-colonial city of Georgetown built on reclaimed land as much as eight feet below sea level (the old buildings in the accompanying photos all conspicuously have their main living rooms above ground level). The author knows development of recently discovered offshore oil resources could change Guyana beyond recognition.

There is also the music of this accomplished poet's carefully chosen forms, with a sonnet sequence that worked especially well for me, and some outstanding images: "shooting stars of black tadpoles" being both literal pollywogs and symbols of the children who grew and changed and moved away.

If you appreciate Grace Nichols' work then you'll like this but I wouldn't say it's the best place to meet her for the first time.… (meer)