I did not know Folklorist Wordsworth Mc Andrew personally. I knew his narratives and later his poetry, especially his immortal’Old Higue’. Recently when he passed on I read tribute after tribute by outstanding Guyanese and made a collection of them. I cannot pretend not having some level of ill feeling that this outstanding Guyanese was forced into self exile, though I’m uncertain who to direct that ill feeling to.
One can easily understand how a force like Wordsworth would have come into serious conflict with the powers in politics and culture in the early 70s, if a careful analogy of that period and the overriding views are clinically examined. I can remember for example the Rudy Seymour comics featuring’The Preacher’, it was much later that I understood the psychology of the period and what Seymour had to do to possibly get published. I also came into contact in the late 90’s with some of the undercurrent biases that would have been much more vibrant in the early post- Independence era.
Rudy Seymour captured the imagination of an era of youth with his character the Preacher, we even swapped two foreign comics for one of his, The Preacher was constantly at war with big Mama and her entourage of Folk creatures, later many of us understood who these characters represented in the real world of our society, how concealed prejudices were acted out in forms of entertainment like comics, radio and even stage, the Preacher embodied the imagery of the standard churches with it’s Christ caricature reflective in its imagery of the old European Pagan Gods dressed up in Hebrew attire, while big Mama embodied all that was the Creole folk beliefs resident in our consciousness. Seymour was unwittingly using his talents to cloud the positive approach to the understanding of our Folk beliefs then made by men like Wordsworth Mc Andrew, but had Seymour done otherwise his comics would most likely not have been published.
I had a revealing experience much later in the mid eighties when I developed a comic book entitled the ‘Spear of Redemption’ I went to DIH for sponsorship I spoke to the relevant representative at the time in the marketing department. He liked the cover and spoke favourably about the artwork, he however advised me to leave the mock-up for perusal, because they were about to launch Malta and would sponsor the first issue at least, this I did enthusiastically, I left there happy and eager to finish the next issue, my editor at the time was Andy Anderson who taught Art at QC, yes, we were excited, until I went back to the office of my would be sponsor.
To my surprise he was almost hostile, when he pushed my mock- up across his desk, blurting out “We can’t do this, you’re trying to say Christ was a Black Man ?”
I wasn’t trying to do that, yes I had created a superhero with a magical spear, yes he was Afro – Guyanese and had some powers, not as much as superman or most other superheroes, I had crafted my story on migrations of the magical spear of the God Horus [ Heru ] from the Nile Valley to West Africa with an attempt to reflect on the Afro – world in WW 11 [I am currently redoing the same storyline].
The lesson I learnt was that the de- colonizing period was an on going process and that there were always layers one did not see on the surface, layers of deep seated colonial prejudices that existed beyond the progressive political slogans and plastic exteriors. This was the world that over a decade before Wordsworth Mc Andrew functioned in.
We were no longer a colony, we had a flag and a beautiful National Anthem, but the likes of Mc Andrew were sandwiched between the colonial rejection of self and the new colonialism of Marxist political culture.
Neither had space to accommodate the folk spirits in our soul and allow them to evolve into the childlike folk tales of other lands which we fondly share from generation to generation as fairytales, now that the French werewolf who had swallowed little red riding hood’s grandmother was tempered for the acceptable storytelling of eager young ears, instead local Folklore was castigated at all levels, some viewed the coastal lore as African and thus, it fell into the abyss of tremendous colonial prejudices, with the African Marxist, he was ashamed of these ancestral trappings described as mumbo jumbo, and would hear nothing of the power and Literature potential of Folk beliefs, which he regarded as backwardness , unfit for recognition in his newly found world of political intellectualism, for which we were deprived of any chronicle of the local discussions and experiences that preceded the evolutionary consciousness for the current positions he had taken. In fact we were becoming new colonials and we were quite unaware, though happy about it.
The grass root masses were more than confused betwixt things that they and their fathers had believed in and what they were now been told was the new truth, without the explanatory discourses, so they quietly questioned”whose truth ?”
Pork knockers still carried Benas into the bush, people still rubbed oils and other substances on their bodies before going for a Visa, the office is still a dangerous place from a who doing who spiritual this or that for an ideal position. People do not escape the beliefs of the past because their leaders decide they must do this, the old gods in our soul will fight for space based on the levels of our desperation and the rational maturity of our intellect. They can only be subdued by our reinterpretation of them. I once did a cartoon of an old man and a young boy sitting together looking at the night sky, when suddenly an object dashes across the sky, the old man shouted”Old Higue” the youth shouted”U F O” two mythologies, each probable to the relevant cultural space , yet ; a vacuum separated them, had there being an evolution through the two eras of folklore their immediate response may have been”wuh’s dat ?”.
Mc Andrew should have headed a national construct titled’The Department of Folk Heritage’ way back, and in the last Carifesta a designer would not have produced an ET character as his interpretation of the folk lore creature, the Bacoo , we cannot blame the young designer when the generation before him had abandoned the potential of a Wordsworth Mc. Andrew for the illusion of a spiritless communism. While either ignoring or being unaware that the Soviets themselves were involved in research on UFO’s and Para- Psychology, as all followers eagerly do they proceed not knowing when the leader had changed his direction, or what was his innermost strategy based on his undeclared experiences from the inception .
Each of our Folklore characters embody a geographic sphere of our nation, connecting people to land and rivers, whether in the early years of Georgetown when Comfu Mary was celebrated along the Sussex street canal [ It must be noted that when sacred places become stagnant and physically unclean, the rites and rituals cease in that location ] to the Massacuramen that were reported to have roamed the Timber Grants and Bartica river areas according to a cousin of mine [ Laureen ] who grew up in Bartica and reported to have seen one, years later this creature was described to me by an Amerindian friend when I lived for periods on Baribina hill in the North west, Torres had worked in the Timber grant and other strange stories were told about life on the Timber grant. But it was on Baribina that I spoke in the company of others to two children who reported that their grandfather turned to Jaguar and” hunt fo food”these children had travelled from distant Barima, and nothing anyone said changed their story, this was around 1981 /2..they even explained how he did it in their own innocent way. Was this the power of legends constantly repeated, that had come alive in their childish imagination, or was there something else ?
I cannot help but ponder had we explored our rich folklore, demonstrating the power of the human intellect over the mystic, reducing the Old Higue to a defeated vampire in small film or drama or as a graphic tale demystifying the potency of the lore belief, then would we have been able to potency of the lore belief, then would we have been able to save a poor Old woman had died on the East Coast not so long ago because Villagers thought she was an Old Higue ?.
Other civilizations used cruder methods to institute change in the context of folklore versus established religion, the Europeans waged a holocaust against every one in Europe who did not comply with the dictates of the Church, in the era of the Inquisition women suffered the most from the apparent malice of a male clergy against the Mother Goddess, especially the African Mother Goddess Aset [ Isis ] imported into Pagan Rome by Agustus Ceasar from Sudanic Kush. But even the church recognized the virility of Folk beliefs, so they quietly transferred the Ancient Folk Lore of the Mother Goddess without the rituals into the virgin Mary, [the Madonna and child ] in remembrance of Aset and Heru [ Isis & Horus ]. In case you haven’t realized every day in the week is named after a different deity of European Folklore/Mythology, and that is how one evolves from one age of belief into another, by placing the thoughts of yesterday in the living room of today, recognizing that they have evolved and we understand the process.
The advent of technology gave a new life to folklore, in the 1930’s a young Hollywood took Bram Stokers book based on Transylvanian vampire folk lore merged with the brutal 15th century warrior King, Vlad the impaler and the world was entertained by Count Dracula for decades, we couldn’t get enough of the demon king, until in 1993 when a descendant from the old country [ Rumania ] took Hollywood to court for some of the hundreds of millions they had made while Rumania was languishing in the Warsaw Pact nations.
In Guyana a new generation has got to stimulate a resurgence of self, with most of the relevant expertise outside of the realms of effective decision making, I am yet to imagine how this would begin to happen, but it has to or Wordsworth Mc Andrew would have lived in vain, recently I saw the film’National Treasure 2’wait isn’t that our El Dorado they’re talking about ?, I’ll always learned, what you don’t use you lose.
Science and belief share the common space of human evolution, whether the puffer fish has created the zombie rather than the hand of Baron Semedi [ the Voodoo God of Death ] the fact is that the zombie was created. Folk research is at times compelling and other times disappointing. Some years ago myself and Kenton Wyatt visited a Kali Mai ceremony after some negotiations with a colleague who was a kind of official at that church, I began to take photographs when the ceremony began, suddenly we were accosted by a woman with her eyes turned backward who was previously consuming nuggets of fire, she approached us speaking in a deep voice, accusing that someone had on their shoes, the fact was, we had not taken off our footwear and we were the only people there with our footwear still on. This we had planned based on beliefs that I had previously learnt. That it was better to wear footwear to avoid the potency of the rituals, neither of us were that confident at that time to test one belief against the other, there were other instances when for the sake of folk authenticity I confirmed to ritual standards, but not then. So it was click, click and we were gone.
I was not surprised during the Crime spree / insurgency beginnings 2002.. of how many of the Phantom operatives were dying barefooted with shaven heads, who knows the extent of belief in any of the cited cases, What transpired is any ones guess, did the Kali Mai devotee see us with our foot wear on and pretend not to ? what beliefs were the Phantom operatives following? we will never know.
Another encounter with the strange was a night in West Ruimveldt in the 1970’s standing next to a neighbour the late”Jules” a ceremony was going on in the pasture facing our range, the details I can’t remember, however there were drums. Suddenly Jules started to respond to the music, off course I’ve heard of catching’hanta banta’but I’ve never witnessed it, not until that night I saw Jules girate, twist and turn as I’ve never seen him do ever before, this was a youth that didn’t even go to the Saturday night dances around the Scheme, he was reserved in that area, nor was he or any of the family known to have been followers of any Spirit church movement, the trance like state initiated by Drums remain mystified, veiled in the unexplored landscapes of the deeper Folk experience, it was a good thing there were some residents who understood what had to be done, they splashed some water on his face, one burst an egg on him and because there was a crowd I did not get to see what else they did to bring Jules back to his previous self .
I credit superstition with many aspects of dramatized behaviour and assumptions about medical developments which are blamed on spiritualism, supernatural beliefs have filled the pockets of many a shrewd confidence trickster, but somehow, a 2 % of these occurrences leap from the unpredictable, and remain largely unexplained.
Folklore like Music archives historic spaces in our evolution as a people, a nation or even families in that they refer to specific beginnings in the face of new interpretations and perceptions .
The creatures of Folk will remain nature spirits, taking us to a time when we saw nature through different eyes,we had not yet become enveloped in our three Dimensional materialistic existence which is a necessity to master the material world. In that age of innocence when milk and bananas were fed to Baccoo, when water people visited your dreams and insisted that you decline from eating fish, smoke and high wine summoned the spirits of the bush and Old Higue was defied with calabash and rice, Brian Pimpler and Manicole broom were special, the accoutrements of Folk chemists remedying the spiritual ills of their communities. Crapoud when rubbed on big foot in it’s early stages healed that ailment, incidentally I was reading some where about the medical usefulness of enzymes omitted from the backs of frogs when excited, one can never understand unless explored the wholeness or emptiness that embodies Folk beliefs.
What I have discovered in the exploration for different graphic projects that required Folk lore character descriptions, is that they are based on fixed belief systems derived from dreams, visions or even physical encounters as some have indicated , they are not made up on spontaneous speculations, people that subscribe to those beliefs tell a consistent tale whether they are on the Berbice River or on the East or West Coast or at North West, they expect you to engage them with a level of seriousness and respect .
Science has impacted on the improvising of both Folklore and its big brother ; Religion.
Scientists have been searching for decades for the reasons why we look skyward and talk to an unseen power or assume that higher forces dwell on mountains , there’s even a famous book that covers the subject : Why God Won’t Go Away written by Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and Psychiatrist / Anthropologist Eugenie D’Aquili from a purely scientific stand point, coupled with other literature on the subject it is so far concluded that the consciousness of spiritual beliefs are wired into our brain, that activities that affect the Parietal lobes, activating the Temporal Lobe result in heightened religious related experiences, of course they could not explain why this is part of our metabolism, nor can we be definite that the nature spirits of Folk were really based on too much bush rum imaginations, I guess in spirit Wordsworth Mc Andrew would have been elated and excited that we could read and contemplate our folk spirits and beliefs in open discourse with out the blush that we are not quite intellectual or modern to do so.
