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Friday, July 11, 2025

Guyana prizewinner gets down to brass tacks

by

20131005

Ru­el John­son made his­to­ry in 2002 when at 22 he be­came the youngest win­ner of the pres­ti­gious Guyana Prize for Lit­er­a­ture. On Sep­tem­ber 15 he once again took the prize for his col­lec­tion of sto­ries, Fic­tions. John­son says that he plans to use his re­cent­ly launched pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny, Janus Books, "to move the cen­tre of re­gion­al pub­lish­ing back to the re­gion." He was in T&T in Sep­tem­ber. SHIV­A­NEE RAM­LOCHAN in­ter­viewed him about the prize and his work.

Q: Con­grat­u­la­tions on re­ceiv­ing the Guyana Prize for Lit­er­a­ture, twice! What would you say has changed in your ap­proach to writ­ing since your first re­ceipt of the award?

A: I re­ceived the Best First Book award back then, while this time I won the Best Book of Fic­tion, which is prob­a­bly an in­di­ca­tor I sup­pose of the de­vel­op­ment of the qual­i­ty of the writ­ing. I think my writ­ing has be­come a great deal more in­tel­lec­tu­alised–which is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a good thing–and cer­tain­ly the range of my in­flu­ence has grown. I've dis­cov­ered the work of David Fos­ter Wal­lace, for ex­am­ple, and the tremen­dous ge­nius he pos­sessed.

Do you per­ceive the lit­er­ary cul­tures of T&T and Guyana to be dis­tinct en­ti­ties?

Trinidad ac­tu­al­ly has a lit­er­ary cul­ture, where­as Guyana sim­ply has a grand oc­ca­sion­al lit­er­ary prize and sup­port for even that has been shaky in the past ten years. We have a gov­ern­ing par­ty that is com­plete­ly an­ti-in­tel­lec­tu­al, and to en­gage in lit­er­ary ac­tiv­i­ty lo­cal­ly is to place your­self ef­fec­tive­ly on their radar. Much of my time is spent in ac­tive de­fi­ance of that, in or­der that a fledg­ling lit­er­ary cul­ture can be es­tab­lished.

Fic­tions read as po­lit­i­cal in­vec­tive, pas­sion­ate in­ter­lude, mem­oir–it's a col­lec­tion of sev­er­al selves, per­haps. How far would you say these var­ie­gat­ed el­e­ments of the work are rec­on­cil­able?

I'm not sure po­lit­i­cal in­vec­tive is quite ac­cu­rate, in that where­as my pub­lic cor­re­spon­dence has fo­cused, of­ten vis­cer­al­ly and harsh­ly, on the quo­tid­i­an po­lit­i­cal inani­ty that in­fects Guyana, my treat­ment of pol­i­tics in the work it­self is, I be­lieve, far more nu­anced.Grant­ed, some of the char­ac­ters–in Cumae, for ex­am­ple–show a marked dis­re­spect for con­tem­po­rary po­lit­i­cal char­ac­ters, but the sto­ry it­self serves as al­le­go­ry to the age­less me­chan­ics that dri­ve the cor­rup­tion, hubris and trib­al­ism that is char­ac­ter­is­tic of our po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship. As to how the var­i­ous selves are rec­on­cil­able, they are as eas­i­ly as they co­ex­ist in the writer. I'm a nec­es­sar­i­ly po­lit­i­cal­ly aware man who loves women and who on oc­ca­sion has stuff to look back at in his life; for me it's in­evitable that those pas­sions and con­cerns are go­ing to make it in­to my writ­ing.

Some of the best art is con­fes­sion­al by na­ture: do you find it dif­fi­cult to avoid au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal in­ser­tions in your writ­ing?

The greater dif­fi­cul­ty isn't in avoid­ing au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal el­e­ments; the greater dif­fi­cul­ty is to con­scious­ly craft the raw ore of your life in­to fic­tion, to trans­mute the glar­ing­ly re­al in­to a thing of (hope­ful­ly) ac­com­plished ar­ti­fice. Fic­tions is large­ly a bla­tant­ly "au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal" work, yes, but peo­ple tend to con­fuse au­to­bi­og­ra­phy with "truth" in con­tradis­tinc­tion to "fic­tion," and it isn't that sim­ple. I con­sid­er my­self a stu­dent of [Ar­gen­tine writer and po­et Jorge Luis] Borges, and the ti­tle is part­ly in homage to his work, Fic­ciones, but al­so a re­flec­tion of a par­tic­u­lar at­ti­tude to this dilem­ma of fic­tion ver­sus bi­og­ra­phy, one that ba­si­cal­ly sees it as a false dilem­ma...If there is any­thing that can be read as con­fes­sion­al in Fic­tions, it has to be seen as a false con­fes­sion, an artis­tic con­struct, be­cause I am, as the ti­tle sug­gests, writ­ing fic­tion.

To what ex­tent do you think cre­ative writ­ing ought to func­tion in an ed­u­ca­tion­al en­vi­ron­ment, and how do you see your own work in this con­text?

The well-mean­ing sug­ges­tion that I get from a great many peo­ple is that I should per­haps aim to get my work on the sec­ondary schools cur­ricu­lum, some­thing I hope nev­er hap­pens be­cause it would mean that a gen­er­a­tion or two of our stu­dents would be asked to au­thor­i­ta­tive­ly pro­nounce on texts they can't rea­son­ably be ex­pect­ed to un­der­stand.I don't be­lieve cre­ative writ­ing should be pro­duced to be stud­ied, and I've seen how even ter­tiary lev­el acad­e­mia, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, has skewed Caribbean writ­ing to­wards these an­noy­ing and con­ve­nient ar­eas of "schol­ar­ly analy­sis," a self-re­in­forc­ing ma­chin­ery that the writ­ers them­selves be­come part of.I think how we view and cre­ate Caribbean writ­ing needs to be re­con­struct­ed, and if my work can be ped­a­gog­i­cal in any way, it is in help­ing our peo­ple to un­learn much of what we have come to ex­pect from our­selves as "re­gion­al lit­er­a­ture" over the past 50 years.

Have you any par­tic­u­lar writ­ing projects on the hori­zon?

With re­gard to lit­er­ary work, I have a trip­tych of novel­las that I hope to fin­ish in about a year or two, as well as a play I should wrap up by year-end. My grand per­son­al projects that I am fo­cused on cur­rent­ly, how­ev­er, are two screen­plays that I in­tend to sub­mit for the Nicholl Fel­low­ship next year.


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