Last Sunday this newspaper published an episode in the series ‘132 Carmichael Street’ by the artist Stanley Greaves. The first two instalments appeared in our editions of December 4th and 25th last year. They tell the story of Mr Greaves’s childhood growing up in a tenement yard located on the site of what is now the Ptolemy Reid Rehabilitation Centre. We have carried reminiscences of life in a tenement yard before, but those were briefer and less comprehensive than the Carmichael Street sequence.
Life in this land of ours has changed so dramatically in the last 50-60 years or so that two, or possibly as many as three generations have grown up without any direct experience of what a tenement yard was like, or perhaps even a familiarity with the term at all. What is especially notable about the Carmichael Street accounts is the fact that not only do we learn about daily life, household technology and the celebration of Christmas, but we are introduced to a whole cast of residents whom we could almost feel we were acquainted with personally. We know where they lived in the yard, their work, their foibles, and occasionally their crimes. The grand sweep of Mr Greaves’s recall and his capacity for detail richly illuminates a world long gone and men and women who are no more.
The trouble with this society is that it is still largely ahistorical. What history we are obsessed with is of the political variety dating from after the end of the Second World War, and those accounts are frequently anchored by oft repeated myths emanating from one party or the other. We learn, in school, of course, of the generalities of slavery and indentureship and potted narratives of the people who came, beginning with the indigenous first-comers, but how many of our children have any idea of what life was like in their great-grandparents’ time, or even perhaps that of their grandparents? Social history has little credibility here.
The tenement yards were an urban phenomenon, but an understanding of how people lived their lives in an earlier era in the countryside is probably no more pronounced than it is in the city. In times gone by there have been some local historians in the villages, and places like Victoria have been fortunate to have more than one publication covering their origins and development. There was a particularly good booklet first published in 2010 and reprinted in 2016, for instance, dealing with Plaisance. While these works always give an account of the people who contributed to the development of their community, or went on to distinguish themselves in one field or another in society at large, that sense of personal familiarity which is conveyed in Mr Greaves’s remembrances is generally absent.
There have been various other writings on social and cultural history of one kind or another from men like Allan Fenty and in more recent times Vibart Cambridge, among others. There was also the late Godfrey Chin who depended on his personal recall like Stanley Greaves, but who scanned an infinitely larger canvas over a longer time-frame. There have in addition been specialist pieces on street characters, to give one example, and an interesting interview in our village series done by our Berbice reporter of the time describing how Sandvoort so quickly lost its African cultural traditions of which it was a key exponent.
To replicate the more intimate understandings of how people lived requires folk researchers who preferably make recordings. Karna Singh, trained in India did some important work on folk history in the Indian community before he migrated, but undoubtedly the doyen of folk researchers here was the late Wordsworth McAndrew. The real tragedy of his unique work was that the radio station taped over so many of his remarkable audio-recordings because they were short of tapes to be used for infinitely more trivial purposes. Any more mature society would have regarded that as a criminal act: a wanton destruction of our cultural and social history.
In the absence of personal recollections committed to paper, what is needed to access ordinary people’s feelings and lifestyle from long ago, not to mention their account of events, is an organised programme of oral history. However, this has always depended on individuals like McAndrew who was animated by his own interest in the field, although the radio station where he was employed could certainly have built on and expanded his work had they had any imagination. But it was too small-minded and politicised an institution to rise above its limitations.
Some decades ago a Ghanaian historian was here who spoke of the oral history programmes in the universities in her country where it was recognised that a lot of understanding of the past at a social and cultural level, and even a political level, was not committed to paper, but was locked in people’s memories. Despite our government’s obsession with science and technology, one hopes it is not too late for them to recognise that we need a link to what has gone before that is not tethered to the political, but allows insights into the everyday life, aspirations and challenges of some of the generations which preceded us. Even more recent generations in the villages can be a source of older traditions which have been passed down to them and if not grabbed now will be lost forever.
Developed societies, the UK being a case in point, have extensive oral history programmes, in the case of that country particularly where situations of conflict are concerned. The British Library, for example, has set out to “capture personal experiences … and create a permanent record for future generations.” The Imperial War Museum has 33,000 recordings relating to conflict since 1914. And these are from ordinary civilians and soldiers, and not just members of hierarchies.
Mr Greaves’s recollections are fortunately on paper, but what they remind us of is how much we have forgotten as a society about our not so distant past. We need a programme of remembering.
