In the week before Christmas, on the occasion of its 56th Convocation Ceremony, the University of Guyana conferred upon Ameena Gafoor the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters. The petition was ceremonially presented before the Chancellor on behalf of Mrs Gafoor, in absentia, in recognition of her extraordinary contribution to the nation of Guyana and the Caribbean region in the field of culture. The university admitted her into membership of the institution by awarding her the highest degree, honoris causa, for the totality of her work in the advancement of the study of literature, the arts, and the enlargement of cultural understanding.
Ameena Gafoor, D Lett (UG), MPhil, MA, BA (UWI), MS, is a literary critic, editor, publisher, author, curator, businesswoman, philanthropist, social worker and cultural activist, who has devoted a lifetime of tangible and intangible contributions to the arts and humanism. Her very acquisition of a formal education, her personal advancement in academic study, is an emphatic statement of her triumph over personal, cultural, ethnic, family history, gender related, social and political circumstances. The details of her continuous, consistent and unflinching public work, deepens that statement to include the way she transformed that personal triumph into public and national gain.
Gafoor is the founder and editor of the Arts Journal, which is among her most important contributions to literature in the Caribbean. It has been a precious outlet for intellectual work and academic research as one of the few standing academic journals in the region.
She is the founder, director and curator of the Arts Forum, an intellectual institution through which she has been able to do much of her cultural activism, particularly in the field of the visual arts and in East Indian culture in Guyana.
She has published several articles and papers on Guyanese literature in journals and through a number of conferences. She has also contributed articles to newspapers, including a weekly column on literature and matters of the arts and letters.
Her publications have accounted for her most valued contributions to West Indian literature. These include the books Aftermath of Empire: The Novels of Roy AK Heath, UWI Press, 2017; A Bibliography of East Indian Writing 1838 – 2018, (2018); and A Lantern in the Wind: A Fictional Memoir, Hansib Publications, 2020.
She has played an exceptional role in the Guyana Prize for Literature, serving as a member of the jury on four different occasions. It was for her extended service to Guyanese literature and the arts that she was conferred with the national award, the Medal of Service.
However, her public service knows no boundaries. She is a director of one of Guyana’s leading industries, Gafson’s Group of Companies; chairman of the Board of Directors of Doobay Medical Centre; and administrator of the Gafoor Foundation. Through these roles, she has been outstanding in philanthropy and a wide range of social services carried out along with her husband Sattaur Gafoor.
It is untiring work, which has not gone without high recognition. An outstanding example of this is the recognition afforded her by her peers in literature and the arts. A very important institution was established in her honour in the United Kingdom in 2020: the Ameena Gafoor Institute for the study of indentureship and its legacies. It is the only such body in Britain or Europe, and includes investigations into the indentureship involving Indians as well as freed Africans, Chinese, and Portuguese. The institute works closely with the University of Cambridge in establishing such posts as the Cambridge Visiting Fellowships in Indentureship Studies. Director of the Institute is David Dabydeen, Professor of University of Warwick and Fellow of Cambridge University.
Publications such as the Arts Journal, have already indicated why Gafoor has been so highly regarded. According to Dabydeen, it “marked her out as an outstanding contributor to Caribbean cultural history”. Its purpose was to provide “critical perspectives on contemporary literature, arts and cultures of Guyana, the Caribbean and their diasporas. Thirteen volumes were published between 2004 and 2018. Not since the pioneering literary journal, Kyk-Over-Al (1945 – 1961) edited by the legendary AJ Seymour, has such a monumental publishing project in the arts been undertaken. Apart from giving a platform to foremost writers and scholars, the Arts Journal also showcased the work of artists like Philip Moore, Bernadette Persaud, Betsy Karim, Philbert Gajadhar and many others”.
It was also through the Arts Forum that a series of exhibitions were held including these artists, whose work was curated by Gafoor. Most memorable was the exhibition and conference held at the newly opened Berbice Campus of the University of Guyana at Tain in 2000, which focused on East Indian art.
Aftermath of Empire is marked as a major text in West Indian literature as a rare full-length study of the work of novelist Roy Heath. It is a comprehensive analysis of all his novels and a considerable contribution to knowledge.
A Lantern in the Wind is Gafoor’s autobiographical work, in which her family history assumes much importance in the context of indentureship, the significant place of gender, and of women in the colonial Muslim society. It has been described as a rare insight into Muslim life in Guyana. Its most moving quality may be found in the way the narrative is a tribute to Gafoor’s mother, the bravery and resolution of a Muslim wife in years of hardship.
It is interesting to read some of what Gafoor wrote about her family background in British Guiana. Her paternal grandparents arrived in BG in 1898 from Uttar Pradesh in India. They left the plantation at Success after the five-year indentureship and took up farming in the backlands at Triumph. “Each morning they went to their farm in a narrow bateau and each evening they returned with the bateau laden with produce, my grandfather sitting in the stern like a Rajah while my grandmother fixed the fat rope attached to the bow across her right shoulder and walked barefooted on the grassy left bank of the middle walk canal pulling the boat, produce and grandfather with her”.
Her maternal grandmother “was one of the very few East Indian girl children who possessed primary education at the time as she formed friendships with the creole children and tagged along with them to school”, she wrote.
She also wrote, “my father joined the RAF in 1944 and left my mother to take care of us with a meagre allowance from the Home Office”.
Her grandmother read aloud at nights “by the light of a small ‘speakeasy’ lamp, from the Taleem Islam, about the Hijra and the Battle of Karbala and recounted to me the lives of the prophets and many tales from the Arabian oral tradition. What I did not know then was that she infused in me a thirst for books, for knowledge with a curiosity and an appreciation for story telling, so that, in decades to come, I was drawn to the literary arts. My mother also used to spew out quotations from Confucius, Shakespeare and other poets to keep us children in the line of moral rectitude; to this day I have no idea from where she learnt them”.
These things, she wrote, “seemed to lift our spirits above our poverty and when people referred to us as ‘poor’ we were puzzled as we lived a rich cultural life and did not think of ourselves as poor even though we had not a second pair of shoes. My mother was a far-seeing woman and insisted we all go to high school”.
