Real and fantasy horrors

 Imam Baksh
Imam Baksh

Curated by Andre Haynes and Dreylan Johnson

The beginnings of Danesh, the 15-year-old protagonist of writer Imam Baksh’s fantasy novel “The Dark of the Sea,” are very much grounded in a reality that is familiar to many of Guyana’s youth.

According to Baksh, Danesh is “mostly drawn” from various young people he has encountered over the course of his life.

“Danesh was meant to highlight the children who ‘failed’ due to learning disabilities. His friends and fellow ‘failures’ were used to showcase depression, physical abuse, sexual abuse and poverty…,” he explains.

Baksh notes that all young people at the age of 11 are shunted into their lifelong fate by the National Grade Six exam and for many there is no way to prepare for it and they fail. “…not because they have less potential, but simply less opportunity or because there is no adult willing or able to prepare them. Often, the children with abusive homes, low income homes and learning disabilities have no way to overcome those obstacles,” he points out, while also adding that these children may often find the education system humiliating. “Many teachers are inadequately trained to handle low performers and try to berate and bully students into doing better rather than target the source of their problems with individual attention,” he says.

Baksh’s novel, which won the 2018 Canadian Organisation for Development through Education (CODE) Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature, also examines suicide in wake of the WHO previously identifying Guyana as one of the countries with the highest rates in the world. 

“In a way, the main purpose of this book is examining why our lives are important. This is why I chose to have Danesh go up against a Lovecraftian ‘cosmic horror’ villain. Characters in cosmic horror stories are usually driven to suicide or madness because they are over-powered with how insignificant their lives are and how little control they have over their destinies. I wanted to have a character face the idea that their life isn’t worth much and come out at the end thinking that it’s worth enough to live it well,” he explains. 

Baksh describes the work as a natural evolution of Caribbean/post-colonial writing. “I’m adapting the genre of Lovecraftian Horror, which has always been nihilistic, and using it to examine pro-humanistic ideas. It’s also been a primarily American endeavour for a century and I’m examining those ideas in a Caribbean setting where our residents are empowered and fight for their fates. This especially includes the mermaid characters who I’ve portrayed as dark-skinned warriors, artists and engineers living in their own undersea domain and who are very different from the sex-object maidens combing their hair all day with golden combs, which is what we see in old European mariner tales,” he notes.

The dialogue features substantial use of Guyanese Creole, which is spoken even by the mermaids and ancient gods, which was a deliberate choice by Baksh in the hope that it could help redefine how readers worldwide and in the Caribbean itself view literature that accommodates Creole. “Chaucer and Shakespeare became classics of English because they were able to break from Latin and use a language many considered low class and ugly and unliterary and create beauty and cleverness with it. Creole has historically been seen as ‘broken English’ and too ugly to be written much less to create literature,” he says. 

“The Dark of the Sea” is currently on sale at Austin’s Book Services and at the book department at the Giftland Mall.

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