"Poetry has been my greatest love," confessed Dr Ian McDonald.
Dressed in a crisp pinstriped shirt, with a shock of white hair flecked with grey and black, this bespectacled poet, retired businessman and former tennis champ shared some of his life's creative journey with an audience of West Indian Literature lovers at the National Library last Friday.
The Friends of Mr Biswas and the National Library hosted the event, entitled West Indian by conviction–Readings and conversation by Ian McDonald.
The full quote was originally from the back cover of Mercy Ward, McDonald's first collection of poems, and goes: "Ian MacDonald is an Antiguan by ancestry, Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption, and West Indian by conviction."
The elderly gentleman–he's 81–was lyrically described as the "soul of two places" by Prof Kenneth Ramchand on Friday.
McDonald was gracious and humble in his acceptance of the Distinguished Friend of Mr Biswas designation, formally bestowed on him by the Minister of National Diversity and Social Integration, Rodger Samuel. (Distinguished Friends are chosen from West Indian artists, particularly writers, and from international scholars working on West Indian writing or any related aspect of Caribbean culture, according to Ramchand.)
"I have never, ever, ever lost touch with Trinidad, my original homeland," said McDonald on Friday. "Trinidad has been extraordinarily kind to me....basically I have lived in Guyana since 1955, yet I have never forgotten Trinidad, and much, much more extraordinarily, Trinidad seems not to have forgotten me, and that is a wonderful, wonderful thing for anybody to be able to say."
New work
The highlight of Friday's event was McDonald's sharing of several of his poems, including some as yet unpublished work which is among more than 100 new poems he's recently written–"an unlikely flowering in an old man who has always loved poetry," he said.
McDonald's clear, well-modulated reading voice filled the room with eloquent images from his work, starting with The Sun Parrots are late This Year (from the 1992 collection Essequibo)–a celebration of biodiversity as well as a lament for the impending loss of South America's great rainforests.
He wrote it in tribute to Chico Mendez, the murdered Brazilian environmentalist.
?
The final lines go:
The roar of the wind in trees is sweet,
Reassuring, the heavens stretch far and bright
Above the loneliness of mist-shrouded forest trails,
And there is such a feel of softness in the air.
Can it be that all of this will go, leaving the clean-boned land?
I wonder if my children's children come this way,
Will see the great forest spread green and tall and far
As it spreads now far and green for me.
Is it my imagination that the days are furnace-hot,
The sun-parrots late or not come at all this year?
The love for nature so evident in this poem has been a deep part of McDonald since his boyhood days in Trinidad.
When he moved to Guyana, he delighted in exploring its savannahs, great rainforests and waterfalls, and has a special love for the immense Essequibo River, Guyana's largest river. The Essequibo is so immense (more than 600 miles long, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) that its estuary, about 20 miles wide, contains several islands.
McDonald also read from poems including God's Work (from the Mercy Ward series), Jaffa the Calypsonian, Zoe Sleeping, Red Moon, and I Remember Dying.
He became emotional during the reading of the last poem, River Dancer, in which he conveys the timeless love of a woman who stays by her man's side even as he suffers with 50 days' hard treatment for cancer.
The poem also conveys his deep love for her, as he remembers her beautiful youth:
The night is cold; she has gone awhile
The white smoke of age gets in my eyes
Still I see her as she always was:
Young and fierce, and I in love with her.
A fusion man
Ramchand described McDonald as "a fusion man" because "all the streams that flow in him, criss-cross and energise one another, and produce wonderful, unpredictable fruit.
"In this sense, he is a true representative of the fusion society that is the essential T&T," said Ramchand.
Ramchand said McDonald "became the voice of reason and compassion, the voice of feeling and the voice of poetry in his new, unstable society, with his viewpoints and sports views on radio, and phenomenally, in his 'Ian on Sunday' columns in the Stabroek News which began in 1966, and have continued up to this day without missing a week."
Memories of Naipaul
McDonald, early in his conversation, said he had only briefly touched Vidia Naipaul's life, when he was in fifth form at QRC and Naipaul was in the sixth. He recalled lunchtime chats when a charismatic Naipaul would sit precariously balanced on a ledge overlooking the courtyard, and talk animatedly with other sixth-formers about films he'd seen.
Said McDonald, "I remember being very impressed by his cutting criticisms and unusual insights, and I knew for sure he would have a brilliant career in some form."
Later, Naipaul's books became part of McDonald's life.
"He wrote a spare and beautiful prose which would adorn the English language forever. A House for Mr Biswas is certainly one of the greatest novels of the 20th century."
McDonald went on to describe the care with which he has written his own weekly columns, and the different kind of creative process and mindset required to write journalism as opposed to literature. Of his essays, he said, "They are certainly legitimate children of my intellect, if not so much of my imagination."
Literary career
From his early novel The Humming-Bird Tree, to his years of editing the literary magazine Kyk-Over-Al ("a seminal Caribbean literary and cultural publication"), his time at Demerara Publishers (whose six titles included the historic first edition of Martin Carter's Selected Poems), and his more recent involvement with the Caribbean Press as a consulting editor for the Guyana series, McDonald sketched aspects of his literary career, stating that "Every country should have a publishing house with a classic series."
Poetry, however, is the art form that most moves him. His poetic education began at home, reading classics like Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and unfolded at QRC under the guidance of an inspiring teacher, John Hodge. Moved by Derek Walcott's early poetry, and the writings of so many others, he soon attempted his own poems when he was a teenager.
"I've been writing poems–and trying to write poems–for more than 60 years."
Speaking of the difficulty writers face, but also the ambition and hope that should inspire them, he quoted French writer Gustave Flaubert (from Madame Bovary, 1857): "None of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows. And language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time, we long to move the stars to pity."
In the programme accompanying the event, McDonald expressed his love for poetry this way:
"If you do not read poetry, you miss much....You miss the fire that lights itself. You miss the hawks that soar towards the sun. You miss the marigolds in your path. You miss the sudden jolt of newness in an old world."
About Ian McDonald
Ian McDonald was born in Trinidad and has spent most of his life in Guyana. He is the author of The Humming-Bird Tree and several poetry collections, and the editor of the literary journal Kyk-Over-Al. His Selected Poems were published in 2008.
Ian McDonald is a poet, former sportsman, retired businessman and current newspaper columnist born in Trinidad who is perhaps best known for his 1969 coming-of-age novel The Humming-Bird Tree, made into a BBC film shot in Trinidad in 1992.
A T&T junior tennis champion for many years, McDonald played at Wimbledon, captained for Cambridge, and was Guyana's 1957 Sportsman of the Year.
McDonald attended Queen's Royal College (Trinidad) and Cambridge University, where he graduated in 1955 with a degree in history. After growing up in St Augustine, Trinidad he migrated to Guyana (then called British Guiana) in 1955 to join the Booker Group, and made his career in the sugar industry there until retiring in 2007.
He continues to write poems and newspaper columns. McDonald's writing includes the poetry of Mercy Ward (1988); Essequibo (1992); Jaffo the Calypsonian (1994); Between Silence and Silence (2003); and The Comfort of All Things (2012); and prose works of The Humming-Bird Tree (1969) (fiction) and A Love of Poetry (2013) (essays). He has also edited works including The Bowling Was Superfine (an anthology of writing on WI cricket).
In 1986, McDonald received the Guyana National Honour, Golden Arrow of Achievement.
In November 1997 the University of the West Indies, at its St Augustine campus, awarded him the honorary degree of doctor of letters for his services to Caribbean sugar, sport and literature. (Wikipedia and Friends of Mr Biswas)