Coincidences can be an intriguing part of life. For the past two weeks, for example, I had been in a back-and-forth with a publisher, Desmond Roberts, of the Guyana Diaspora Times magazine, produced electronically in New York. He had asked me to consider doing a story about the origins of the song ‘Not A Blade O’ Grass’ that I wrote some 40 years ago and on the history of it since. I have written about this before, in this newspaper and elsewhere, and felt I had covered the subject. I thought the case was closed.
And then, a few days ago, I picked up the phone at home one day, and out of the blue, Dennis Chabrol of Demerara Waves, another publisher, was on the line telling me that Al Jazeera was coming to Guyana and wanted to interview me. The trigger, of course, was the Venezuela-Guyana border controversy, again in the news. Doing research on the story prior to coming here to cover it, Virginia Lopez, who represents Al Jazeera in Venezuela, had run into the ‘Not A Blade O’ Grass’ story and wanted to include it. Apparently, Desmond Roberts was right – the case was still open, and now to a wider audience, so I agreed. Virginia and her very professional crew of two, shepherded by Chabrol, took over our downstairs verandah one afternoon rearranging some furniture, and even taking one of the paintings from the wall and placing it in a new location behind me. (The painting, by the way, is one by Merlene Ellis and it’s a Buxton landscape during the ʼ05 flood.)
Virginia wanted to know how the song came about (perhaps she had heard the occasional speculation that Forbes Burnham had suggested it to me) so I told her it had come purely from a suggestion by the late Pat Cameron of Radio Demerara, and from no one else, and that
