President's College

“Thought of going back
But all I'd see are strangers’ faces
And all the scars that love erases,
But as my mind walks through those places
I’m wonderin’, what’s come of them.”
Neil Diamond

I am going on thirty years old. I am a writer. I have a six year old son whose smile is the lifeblood of the thing that will emerge and endure from the ashes of my marriage. I have found beyond expectation this beautiful woman who is also for me a symbol of rebirth, of the persistence of hope.

A few weeks ago, at a birthday party, I introduced her to the one close friend that I have consistently been in contact with for two thirds of my life, Littleton Scott, my batch mate from President’s College. As relatively little as we interact, Little and I, whenever we do, it is always with the ease of a conversation that has been interrupted by a brief telephone call, or the ordering of the next round of beers, not as if weeks or months or tumultuous and life-changing have passed.

There is this surreal compression of time, almost, as if one minute we are preparing to go down to a breakfast of watery tea and bread and jam in the dining hall; the next we are having a mini reunion at his house, his mother’s cooking wafting in the air; the minute after that, running into him on the street and introducing him to my family; and after that chatting about the fact that he’s long friends with the man my ex-wife is seeing. This state of things is unique to one particular group of people: my friends from PC.

It is hard for me not see that place, President College, as Edenic in some ways, a place of genesis, innocent even in its corruptions, its acts of violence, its trysts. I remember being invited to PC in 2003 for an event commemorating my winning of the Guyana Prize and Leanna Damond’s winning of Miss Guyana, and presenting this intellectualized lecture on President’s College as a microcosm of the diversity of larger society. Looking back on it now, I see that my intent was good, reflective of my concerns about the divisions in the society back then, but I imagine presenting that talk in front of my batch mates and coming back to sit among them and being told, good naturedly, that I was basically spouting a crock of shit.

That talk was sociological, and like most things sociological, it was incapable of capturing and reflecting the soul of the place, which was really what I wanted to communicate to those children, most of whom would have entered the school after I left or were too young when I was there to remember me.

I should have spoken about the concrete things that only the inscrutable alchemy of time would transmute into the sort of abstraction that speaks to all of us who lived there. For example, on certain nights during certain times of the year, under the white streetlights, the road would be covered with crawling black beetles, which in our innocent cruelty we would pick up and terrorise a stuttering Marlon Chichester with, Chich who is now a burly senior officer in the Coast Guard.

There were those absurd moments of intimacy and jealousy and pain that were ultimately ephemeral but which did not seem so in the immediacy and sense of eternity of youth. Like the time Tracy Smith and I sat in the swing for hours not saying anything the night after she danced close to Eon David in a party, Tracy who everybody had a crush on and who was notorious before that incident for her signature dance characterised by the swinging dangerous knees that repelled any grinding advance. Or the time that Samantha Stephens gave me a backball of all of ten seconds on the bridge but which caused a slight rift between Jody, now Ade, that was thankfully healed before he left the school.

Recalling PC is for me is to recall Walcott’s quoting of Vallejo as preface to one of the chapters in “Another Life”,

“All have left the house, actually, but truly all have remained. And it is not the memory of them that remains, but they themselves. .. The steps have gone, the kisses, the forgiveness, the crimes. What continues in the house is the foot, the lips, the eyes, the heart. The denials and the affirmations, the good and the evil, have dispersed. What remains in the house, is the subject of the act.”

PC as a subject has appeared a few times in my work, twice explicitly. In the story, “The Blacka” from Ariadne and Other Stories, it is ironically a counterpoint to the Edenic space of my childhood in Tucville Terrace, and that presentation is patently false, deliberately fictive. The PC that has appeared most truthfully in my writing is presented in a poem called “Eve and Moonlight” which I wrote a few years after leaving school.

In what is now recognisably a perhaps too self-consciously literary manner, I began the poem with the recreation of the landscape of the space as Paradise, granted a compromised version of it...

“Pishon, the straight, unwinding trench that stretched
its schoolgirl's brown, satin ribbon of water – its length
growing as tie-dyed as each season's green growth of weeds

would allow – across the school compound; watering barren mango trees,
and jamoon giants that grew wan with their want of purple
(the dead god's colour) fruit. Our linear, lesser Eden!”

To what I believe is my credit, the central part of the poem , deliberately reverts to less ‘poetic’ language, a reduction, even degradation, of the metaphor of the Edenic ideal...

“Once, this exile returned to Eden –
From the old bus the metal barrier seems,
in the hot glaze of day, a flaming sword

that, forgetting its duty, points to the sky.
In the guard hut, in a weathered old PGS uniform,
a half-senile, wrinkled, brown cherub sits and smiles.

The voices mingle, probing, sifting
through torn and perjured memories,
and the strange faces of familiar strangers.

The unshorn grass has grown, beard-like, around
the old Camp David canteen across the trench...
...on that night when we laid, upside-down to each other,
along that thin wooden length of bridge the star-filled trench
below us – above, the inky, liquid sky – and kissed

a kiss filled with all the warmth of the enormous
night, and laughter, and our own kept records of
how many times our teeth had clicked together.”

I want to think that what is essentially PC exists not in some lofty ideal, but in the end results of a material reductionism, objects, places, flesh, imbued with a spirit of sorts that is inextricably linked to that object and somehow particularly evocative of our experience there, the subjects of the innumerable acts. For example, no other thing about PC on Facebook has elicited as much discussion as the picture of a plate of those SIMAP cookies that were served to us for snacks.

It is the sum of those endowed objects – the cookies, the fibre mattresses, the drops of water from the overhead tank, the claybrick flooring of the basketball court – which define the PC experience for us, this thing that is at once both ephemeral and eternal. I believe that it is precisely because of the fact that the experience exists in these things that the bond shared by our alumni transcends generations. For example, the party at which I introduced Little to my girlfriend was the birthday party of a young woman, Lavonia Springer, neither of us was at PC the same time with.

Or, another example, seven years ago I participated in a writer’s conference in Toronto, and made contact with a friend of a friend, the former who happened to be married to a PC alumnus called Michael Hoosein. While I had met Stella, the wife, once in Georgetown, I had never met Michael – who left PC before I entered – but once he and I started interacting, Stella started to mockingly complain that it was much the same when Michael and his PC batch-mates got together, and that she felt excluded from the conversation.

I believe this is the sort of story that is enacted, in different variations, across the world perhaps on a daily basis. Of course there is the occasional alumni one would notice as devoid of this particular identification with PC, and I could name a couple, but said douches are more the exception than the rule.

I am writer. I’ve wrestled for a long time with trying to encapsulate PC in thought and thence into words upon a page. Beyond the inadequate references in my writing, as noted earlier in this also inadequate attempt, I have gone no further than hearing the magisterial voice of Richard Harris, as Marcus Aurelius, resounding in my head, raspingly delivering the words,

“There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish...”

I believe that there was once a dream that was PC, something that transcended the socialist Utopian elitism for which it was intended, this incidental element that failed the quasi-eugenicist benchmark that was set for it, and in that failing emerged as something better.

A quarter century after it began, that fragile whisper that is the true dream of PC has been effectively stifled by the machinations of a political myopia that has spread like a necrotic mass across not only our alma mater but the very society within which it existed, which provided it with the most crucial of the diverse elements which constituted it – us.

What continues to elude the vision of the myopic however is that that dream, the voice propelling that whisper has been invested in all of us who have lived it, who now irrevocably embody it, and while we have departed the house of our genesis we all truly have remained. The anniversary approaches – I can think of no better time to let it be known that the dream still exists.