During September, celebrated as the Indigenous Heritage month in Guyana, we are paying another visit to the unfathomable depths of Guyanese Amerindian literature. Last week we revisited the oral literature. This week we examine the drama and ask the question: why has there been so little? The output in theatre has not come anywhere near the inexhaustible volumes in oral literature, fiction, and poetry.
As a branch of literature, drama has essential characteristics that set it off in its own category. It is written for performance on stage. It is theatre which demands performance and throughout history most of what may have been practiced has not survived. Right across the Caribbean there is little trace of pre-Colombian theatre, and records of performance in the early centuries of European colonisation have not done much better.
In Guyana we get a sense of ancient performance traditions which were mostly linked to the spiritual in a few traditional dances. What is performed by the Surama cultural group led by Glendon Allicock may provide a few examples. But if we are to try to go further back in time, perhaps the best picture is provided by Audrey Butt-Colson an anthropological researcher. Butt-Colson, formerly of University of Oxford, was also associated with the Amerindian Research Unit at the University of Guyana (UG) and as a modern anthropologist produces studies significantly different from most of her colonial predecessors in the field. In this respect, she is similar to historian Mary Noel Menezes, Professor Emerita of UG, who was able to distance herself critically from the colonial researchers.
