Dear Editor,
It is with sadness I read from Dhanraj Bhagwandin of the passing of Shri Rooplall Monar of East Coast (SN March 5). He was one of Guyana’s finest writers, a forerunner or pioneer of using Indian Creolese vernacular in literary writings. His writings were full of emotions, irony, and empathy. They carried a rich repertoire of memories using metaphors to capture the lived experience in revelatory terms. Indian culture runs deep in his writings that started in the 1960s.
He was a very good poet, a class of his own. His works were recognized by the Guyana Literature Prize selectors, and he was honoured with the AA but was not prominent on literary reading lists of the University of Guyana and UWI and in CSEC and CAPE. Like every other Indian writer and cultural proponent, he did not receive financial support from the state. Indian arts (music and writings) are not considered important or worthy of support by politicians, not even those who depend on Indian votes to win government. And as expected, Monar’s great contributions to Guyanese literature continue to be marginalized in his home country as well as in the English Caribbean.
I confess the first time I heard of and read Monar’s writings was when I was a post-graduate student during the 1980s. Thank God for the White man in America for including Indian writers on reading lists of students pursing secondary and tertiary education, treating them with equality with that of Europeans and Blacks or Africans. When will governments in Guyana and the Caribbean treat Indian writers with equality? As I browsed public libraries and those of secondary schools and universities, it fills me with pride that works of Guyanese, brethren of my homeland, have been available and have also been figured in the reading list of colleges in a White country. The leaders of brown and black countries don’t care for these literary things. Pursuing power for self-aggrandizement is more important to them. Most of the writings of Rooplall Monar and other prominent Indian writers are yet to be listed in English literary studies in the Caribbean.
Rooplall Monar was an outstanding writer whose literary works should be on any reading list at UG and in any university in the Caribbean. His writings are relevant to subjects pertaining to Guyanese, Caribbean, and Indian diasporas. He, like all of us from the plantations, had a most difficult childhood and experienced a life of struggle. He was not ashamed of poverty and a life of struggle. He was a witness to Indian plantation life and he wrote about it.
Monar displayed an affinity with others from his ethnicity but he also displayed same of other ethnicities who were fellow writers, poets, cultural figures, and sports enthusiasts. He socialized with Wordsworth McAndrew, for example, and he gravitated towards Jeremy Poynting, and he jogged with educators and writers (like Jagnandan Singh) of his age group as well as those much younger and older than him. Poynting’s Peepal Tree press started with Monar’s first book.
Monar’s legacy of lyricism and writing craftsmanship, combined with themes of societal significance, will be prized by readers of Indian Caribbean literature.
Yours sincerely,
Vishnu Bisram
