With E.R. Braithwaite
Memories, feelings: about how he’d visited us, because it was all about the writing life. Truth-telling: how I construed it. Yes, excited I became because celebrated author E.R. Braithwaite would visit us: teacher-trainees as we were in the town of New Amsterdam, Guyana, in the Amazon basin. Really in 1966? Expanse of time, drawn out; time shrinking too, it seemed. And the novel To Sir With Love (1959) was still making the headlines; and the movie would be made not long after that year. Starring Sidney Poitier, yes. I became obsessed with it (still in my late teens I was, a pupil-teacher, in the British tradition–D.H. Lawrence was one such). Recall: St. Patrick’s Anglican School in the sugar-plantation Canje-Rose Hall district where I lived, and my own charges kept being before me. Pegasse and molasses smells in the air, as narrow iron barges, cane punts really, clanged: as they snaked along the canals across the coastal villages. I pulled stalks of cane from these punts as a child, regular pastime as it was; and the huge cane factory hummed, our school being adjacent to it; the factory’s tall chimney belched out smoke to the illimitable sky.
How really far away? Or far back in time? But now novelist E.R. Braithwaite was here: he, a famous writer; and I had my own aspirations, see. Yes, all he would tell us–tell me–about the writing life. Colonial times and political upheaval, nationalism on the rise. No more colonialism! The Cuban-missile crisis lingered amidst Cold War angst. East-West rifts. Not yet North-South?
I imagined how Braithwaite might have fared in his East End London classroom with kids who were, well, enfant terribles. East End London was unique, as Braithwaite describes it in his novel. Verisimilitude, indeed. And new child psychology research I internalized as a teacher-trainee, the college instructors being mostly American-educated, some former headmasters and headmistresses. Yes, I was the youngest of the teacher-trainee batch; but my creative instincts were rife; maybe there were others like me too, eager to hear E.R. Braithwaite. Did we really call ourselves the “Aspirants”?
I read other Caribbean authors: V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Vic Reid, Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon; and local ones like poet Martin Carter and novelist Wilson Harris. But in E.R. Braithwaite I saw something else: new instincts of the writerly life? Not what we had in common? Civil-rights agitation and protests in America, ongoing. New temperaments against colonial rule. In the UK alarm grew over the likes of Enoch Powell. Yes, the Brixton Riots. Were the “winds of change” really blowing? A genuine new world order was before us, see. And I was a Sandbach Parker gold-medal winning poet already: such was my sense as a creative writer!
Did I think Braithwaite was privileged because he now lived in the “metropole,” London? Not an “outsider” was he in England because of his minority race and colour? Braithwaite had come to the teaching profession almost by chance, fortuitously. He was really trained as an engineer; but an old Englishman he met at a bus stop urged him to try teaching as a career option. “The idea did not commend itself to me,” Braithwaite recalled years later, as an octogenarian. “I said that the people would not trust me with inanimate things, why would they trust me with their children?”
Braithwaite had grown up in Georgetown, some sixty miles from my own Canje district. But by sheer will or ambition he made his way by boat to London via New York. Much later when he received Guyana’s Cacique Crown of Honour (2012), he languidly looked back: “As a kid I studied very hard. My friends wanted to be policemen and things like that, but I wanted to be different. I had no friends or acquaintances who were writers. I never thought of writing as a career. England was always used as a kind of ‘Mecca’ for us boys…a place where we could develop our own talents and skills.”
Now in my teacher-college 1966, he would tell us more. His impressions. Images all. Past and present combined. Metaphors of past days yoked. The present becoming more alive. And his own father was a gold-and-diamond miner, and his mother a homemaker, in Georgetown. But young Edward Ricardo Braithwaite was studious by nature: he entered a prestigious secondary school, Queen’s College; and not long after he set his sights on the “mother country,” going there on a cargo ship. “It was a strange kid of voyage,” he reminisced. “Luckily, I had walked with several books because there was no conversation with the sailors…they were too busy, so I spent time reading.”
Later, in London, he would come to new perceptions; as he said: “In British Guiana every white man he’d encountered was of the privileged class. Now, “I couldn’t believe my eyes. I saw white men, bending and picking up cigarette butts and smoking them. “All the whites in British Guiana were in managerial positions. I never associated poverty with white persons.”
What more would E.R. Braithwaite tell us? Indeed, I would read Braithwaite’s other books such as Paid Servant (on being a social worker in London); Honorary White (about experiences in apartheid in South Africa); A Kind of Homecoming, and House of Straws (more intimate personal experiences). But To Sir With Love was special, because I too was a teacher, see, being in the “noble profession,” as we deemed it. Before my charges at my local St Patrick’s Anglican, I fantasized being Braithwaite. But my students were far unlike East End Londoners. Maybe just tame or mannered black-and-brown kids mine were, not rambunctious Londoners. Metropole and village were far apart. Polarities. Yet Braithwaite brought us closer.
