NOW FOR EUROPE, AND I NEED ADVICE FROM MY MUSE
Writers are supposed to look to their Muse for inspiration. Now, a good way through my memoir, I need guidance. But, when it comes to the muse I find dictionaries are a bit vague, and say nothing about links or access paths to it. So, in my imagination, I crank up my space-time continuum search engine and enter the word “knowledge”, and I get a response.
“My name is Knowledge and in the famous medieval morality play your name is Everyman, and I say ‘Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide.’ I assume that you are asking for guidance with your memoir. I note your earlier travel essays have focussed on your three geographical roots: anchoring you in Guyana, England and Australia.”
“Yes” I say “but I am about to step outside the comfort zone of these English-speaking regions, and feel I need some advice on how to evaluate these wider experiences.”
“I am glad you asked that question, as I do have some comments here. I have noted that your reflections on the journeys, you call them journeys of the mind and of the soul, seem to arise from things that have happened along the way. There is no template guiding your reflections in a way that supports any comparative analysis between regions. But, first of all, can you define your main interest in these journeys?”
“I suppose” I say,” that I am interested in the journeys of the peoples I meet in my own journeys.”
“Yes, I note that two of your chapters are about your own migrations. How about analysing the journeys of humanity in the countries you have lived in so far, and then use the same approach for the rest of your memoir.”
“Thanks” I say “Can I call you again later?”
“Of course. The job of Knowledge is to guide Everyman on all his journeys, but first start by revisiting Guyana.”
GUYANA. How did the Amerindian boy with the bow and arrow, the one I met on scout camp, get there? His ancestors, no doubt driven by food shortages, crossed the Bering Straits into North America. Some stayed as hunter-gatherers in North America, as Red Indians, now called First Nation. Others drifted on south, many setting up the Aztec civilisation in Mexico. The migration continued south, some stopping to set up the Inca civilisation in Peru, while others, still hunter-gatherers, spilled out into the Amazon basin, even as far as Lake Itrabici where I met the boy with the bow and arrow. All these tribal movements were driven by food scarcity and the warfare that arises from competition over scarce resources. One of my 80th birthday presents is a set of BBC DVDs covering this amazing migration of Homo Sapiens out of Africa and round the world.
Matty Mathews was Afro-Guyanese. How did an African boy get to sit next to me in year three, Queens College, Guyana? The well-known answer is, of course, that he was a descendant of the slave trade. Less well-know are its origins. The demand for cheap labour came from Brazil, the Caribbean, and what was then evolving into the USA. The supply of slaves came from a network of Arab human traffickers, European colonists, and the ships that did the round trip from ports like Bristol, down to West Africa, across to the Americas with slaves for sale, then back to Europe with booty. One of the few positive outcomes of this horrific trade was the emergence of a new form of universal music centred on Jazz. And another of my 80th birthday presents is a history of the blending of African and European musical improvisation into this music that has so dominated the world. Last month I heard that my friend Johnny Stainer, who founded the Paramount Jazz Band, had died of cancer.
How did Prasad get to sit behind me at school? What was his ancestry? When slavery was abolished the continuing demand for cheap labour was met by shipping Bengalis from India as Indentured Labour. This was no doubt helped by famines in Bengal and the promise of freedom after working on sugar estates for ten years. A Trinidadian of Bengali ancestry and one of my favourite authors, V.S. Naipaul, once returned to his Indian roots and wrote a large book called simply India. Last week was busy. I watched Shivaji, my half-Bengali grandson play basketball, referee three basketball matches, at his tennis lesson, and coming third in the 200 metres school race. He is learning Japanese.
Finally, where did I come from? One grandfather, Scottish, managed a sugar estate and the other, English, shipped sugar out to Europe. One grandmother was half French, the other half Dutch. I have a book on Guyana called The Marches of El Dorado, Tim has Dad’s history of British Guiana, and Tim has written our family history Down in Demerara. Last night I switched on the TV at random and got the last 20 minutes of Treks in a Wild World. I was so excited I rang Tim to share my experience with his of all those years ago, of watching brown creek water falling 250 metres down the mighty Kaieteur Falls.
TRINIDAD, TOBAGO AND BARBADOS, the other places I lived in then, had had similar histories of migration, but none had any indigenous peoples left. The father of a school friend in Barbados once dug up two skeletons, male and female, chained together. Maybe they were African slaves who tried to run away.
IN ENGLAND I was surprised to find strong prejudices of class and race. These existed, of course, in Guyana, but hardly at all where I spent most of my formative years, in a multi-racial school. There had been several important migrations in British history, one of which led to the industrial revolution and the creation of the modern world. In this, the English Land Enclosures forced peasants off the land and into the new industrial cities as cheap factory labour. In Scotland absentee English landlords, described in John Prebble’s famous book The Highland Clearances, cleared peasants .off the land, many migrating to America, to make way for sheep. In Ireland absentee English landlords were shipping wheat out of Ireland while a million Irish peasants were starving to death and a further million were migrating to America, as told by Cecil Woodham-Smith in The Great Hunger.
England’s involvement with the “ebb and flow of humanity’s journeys around the globe” has been complex and so intertwined with those of Europe that I will leave that discussion for a later chapter, the European Legacy. And later still I will pick up the threads again where I have been, in South and East Asia, and where I have not yet been, in Africa and Latin America.
AUSTRALIA’S first waves of migrants crossed when sea levels were lower. One of the world’s earliest known examples of cremation, Mungo Man, is estimated at 68,000 to 40,000 years ago, long before Homo Sapiens reached England. The French and Dutch, coming across the Indian Ocean, found no water and went home. The British, coming from the Pacific, found water and stayed. A hundred years ago, the White Australia Policy kept Australia Anglo-Saxon for some 50 years. Now, Australia is one of the most multi-cultural countries. There are few hunter-gatherer tribes left in the world. I have met one Amerindian one, never an Australian one. It is said that there are no pure-blood Aborigines left in New South Wales.
THE NEXT FEW CHAPTERS follow our adventures in France, Italy, Iberia and the Mediterranean. Since the impact of Europe on the world has been so staggeringly large, I will summarise it as Europe’s Legacy rather than follow its strands in each country.