Bernard Heydorn

However, we both disliked woodwork, being quite useless at it. Even now my wife says I have “ten thumbs”. Mittelholzer describes in his autobiography, A Swarthy Boy (1963), an incident at Berbice High School in which a new master who was a Canadian, kicked him in the rear for galloping around at recess and disobeying his call to line up. Mittelholzer said that he responded with an uppercut. The stunned teacher reported him to the principal and he was suspended. His father supported him and after some negotiation with the school authorities, the teacher apologized and he returned to classes. Mittelholzer went on to do his Junior Cambridge and School Certificate examinations at that school.
Mittelholzer is considered by many to be the first West Indian novelist. He came on the scene with Corentyne Thunder in 1941. The book was written in Guyanese creole. Writing in Guyanese creole was revolutionary at that time and he had a hard job getting his book published.
His autobiography – A Swarthy Boy (1963) – depicts in detail, family life in New Amsterdam during the first half of the 20th century. In some strange way, my novel Walk Good Guyana Boy (1994) seems to have picked up where he left off, and describes life in New Amsterdam in the sixth decade of the 20th century. A correspondent to the Indo Caribbean World newspaper in 2003, said of Walk Good Guyana Boy, “Short of Edgar Mittelholzer, nobody has evoked Guyana like Bernard Heydorn for me – now 30 years away”.
Walk Good Guyana Boy was written in Guyanese creole and also had its share of critics when it arrived. It has been followed by a flood of books by Guyanese authors, many self published which academics and critics often look down upon.
In A Swarthy Boy (1963), Mittelholzer describes his father as having a temper, as did my father. Mittelholzer went on to say his father was fond of ballroom dancing, as was my father. My father went to the extent of taking ballroom dance lessons from Arthur Murray dance classes. They both liked the waltz which was popular in the early part of the 20th century.
Perhaps most significant of all, Mittelholzer was born into a society that was strictly race and class conscious. Edgar describes his father’s deep disappointment at seeing his first son having a swarthy complexion (darker hue). His parents, although of mixed race – his father of Swiss, German, and African ancestry and his mother of English, French and African origins – had fair complexions with hair of European texture, according to Edgar.
Edgar goes on to describe his father as a “negrophobe” (a person who fears or dislikes black people). I have often felt that my father was of the same state of mind, a trait that sadly seems to have been passed on to some of his descendants. This was not exactly unusual in the British colonial society that existed at the time. However, there was at least one distinct difference in our families, in that while the Mittelholzers could consider themselves solid middle class, the Heydorns could not.
As I look at pictures in A Swarthy Boy, Edgar has photographs of both his father and his mother. In his father I can see my own father, and in his mother I can see my father’s mother (my grandmother). It is quite uncanny.
When I lived in New Amsterdam, I can remember seeing an older man, looking very much like Edgar’s father, walking the streets in a business-like dress suit, with collar and tie. This was not unusual dress for men in the middle and upper classes to wear in a strict, British colonial society. My father wore his khaki sanitary inspector uniform, riding his ancient bicycle which we called “the Gallows”, around town and country.
I used to walk past the Mittelholzer home on Coburg Street (Station Lane) which was opposite the Police and Fire Stations. Theirs was a comfortable one storey home on stilts, with a big gallery and shuttered windows, and a large backyard with fruit trees. Below the house was an airy “bottom house”. A typical zinc roof with sheets of different wear, covered the home. At the front was a long, white, picket fence – all very respectable.
In the distance I could hear the sawmill on the Strand which seemed to run incessantly day and night. Along the Strand was the Post Office, the road to the Ferry stelling and the Globe Cinema, (originally Olympic), a “fowl house” in later years, where it is said Mittelholzer worked at one time as a ticket sales “checker”.
He also reportedly sold books at Davson’s store nearby and at the Berbice Gazette Store in the 1930’s. It was said that the customers had much more interest in foreign books than in his own writing which he was trying to peddle.
My father was mixed race (Dutch, German, African, Indian…). Like Edgar’s father, his hair was straight. He had some colour in his complexion. Both had a Teutonic background – German, Dutch, Scandinavian… So called Teutonic character istics included perseverance, discipline, hard work, iron will, courage and a refusal to surrender. My father used to say he had nerves of steel.
My mother who was Portuguese would call my father “red man” at times when she was mad with him. This might bring his kettle to a boil, but he handled it well.
Mittelholzer left the bush town of New Amsterdam and eventually arrived in England in 1948, having spent some time in Trinidad. Many years later I met Jan Carew, who like Edgar Mittelholzer and other West Indian writers, had emigrated to England. He said that Mittelholzer was a very punctilious writer, writing by the clock. If he had set himself an hour to write, as soon as the clock struck the hour, he put his pen down and went outside for his walk. This precise Teutonic characteristic, Edgar may have inherited from his European ancestry.
My father of Dutch, Germanic and creole ancestry was also controlled by clocks. He had at least one clock in every room of our house. He wound them up first thing every morning before he went to work. If a clock wasn’t working, he turned it all sides, including upside down, to get it to work. This required trying to stand on one’s head to read the time!
Edgar stated in A Swarthy Boy, that he was fascinated by watches and clocks from an early stage of his life. He was also very interested in weather watching. My father was obsessed by the weather. He had a barometer in every house that we lived in. He would check the weather every day before he set off, although the needle of the barometer was rock steady, day after day, as the weather in the Caribbean hardly ever changes, except if a hurricane is coming!
I too have a tendency to be strict about time, which drives my wife crazy. She is the opposite of me in many ways and for her, time does not exist, which is frustrating for me.
Edgar was considered by some to be eccentric with his writing and activities from an early stage of his life. The same has been said of me by strangers and even worse, by relations.
A Guyanese native – and particularly one of mixed race, aspiring to be a writer at that time bordered on lunacy. Edgar did not help matters by dressing in unconventional clothes and refusing to wear his collar and tie in a civil service job. He also reportedly refused to salute a visiting white Governor at the Town Hall in New Amsterdam and lost his job. He self-published his early writing and tried to peddle it from door to door in New Amsterdam. A number of similar rebellious activities strike close to home for me.
Sadly, for reasons unknown, Mittelholzer took his own life in England in 1965, pouring gasoline all over himself and setting it alight. His output of books was prodigious over the years. He was subject to much rejection and was criticized by a number of literati, arm chair academics and well known critics, with comments such as “There is little or no aesthetic value to his work” and his work as “sub-literary”. However, his books remain popular to this day.
Many stories and anecdotes surround the life of Mittelholzer that cannot always be verified. It was said that he suffered from depression from time to time. Three well known Caribbean writers reportedly attended his funeral – Andrew Salkey, George Lamming and Jan Carew.
The mystery surrounding his tragic death may perhaps be traced back to his childhood and genetic make up. Edgar himself said, in A Swarthy Boy, that he did not believe in “the pontifications of psychologists – people are born what they are. Environment and traumatic experience cannot change character.”
He may be right, but I have a notion that because of his mixed race, he lived in a world, both inside and outside of Guyana, where he was neither “fish nor fowl”. Racism was ingrained in English society then, as it was in Caribbean society when I was growing up, as it exists in today’s Trump America. It was said “The races have to “know their place.” History keeps repeating itself.
The “mother country” turned out to be less than motherly, as West Indian writers, cricketers, calypsonians and other immigrants such as my black Barbadian father-in-law, who left Barbados for England during World War Two to help with the War effort, soon discovered.
The overcast skies of England cast a dark shadow, deep into one’s soul. Themes of darkness and death often surfaced in Mittelholzer’s writings. I have had similar experiences living in England and other places. Sometimes it gets too much for a sensitive person and reaches the tipping point.
It is intriguing the number of mixed race Guyanese writers, including Mittelholzer, Carew and myself, with roots in New Amsterdam. Many of us left New Amsterdam but New Amsterdam never left us. If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines, I’ll be talking to you.

By Romeo Kaseram
Jan Rynveld Carew was born on September 24, 1920 in the coastal village of Agricola in what was then British Guiana, to Alan Carew and Ethel Robertson. Four years later the family moved to Harlem in the US, living there until 1926 when Jan and his elder sister returned to British Guiana following the kidnapping of their younger sister. The kidnapped Carew returned to British Guiana in 1927. Later, his father spent several years abroad, living both in the US and Canada. While in Canada, the senior Carew worked with The Canadian Pacific Railway, travelling from Halifax to Vancouver. Tales to Jan of the criss-crossing by rail along the vastness of the east to west coast of Canada no doubt fuelled the young man’s imagination with the lure of travelling. Notably too, the village where Jan was born was named Rome, before it became Agricola.
Carew was educated in British Guiana from 1926 to 1938, where he attended the Agricola Wesleyan School. This was followed by attendance at the Catholic Elementary School, and then Berbice High School, which was Canadian Scottish Presbyterian, in New Amsterdam. In 1938, he was successful in his Senior Cambridge Examination. Following this, in the time before war broke out in 1939, Carew taught at the Berbice High School for Girls. His teaching career was then interrupted when he was called into the British Army as World War II escalated in Europe. Here he served in the Coast Artillery Regiment until 1943. Returning to Georgetown that year, Carew served as a Customs Officer until 1944. Travelling that same year to Trinidad, he worked in Port-of-Spain in the Price Controls Office. His university years were spent at Howard University and Western Reserve University from 1944 to 1948; he also attended Charles University in Prague from 1948 to 1950, and spent time at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Carew’s movement among countries was already evidence of what he later described as his “endless journeyings”. Among these “journeyings” was time spent in the Netherlands, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the US.
Perhaps it is these perspectives of travels abroad and the opening up of this worldview that led to him later focussing the lens through which he viewed the Caribbean. According to Wikipedia, Carew felt being part of the Caribbean world should be within a framework of inclusivity, namely, “the island archipelago, the countries of the Caribbean littoral and Guyana, Surinam, and Cayenne.” With his feet having landed on many different international soils, Carew presented a different take on what he saw as the paradoxical unity of the Caribbean way of life. He felt the Caribbean frame of mind had been shaped from “a mosaic of cultural fragments – Amerindian, African, European, [and] Asian”, through “successive waves of cultural alienation”.
That Carew was born in Agricola, formerly known as Rome, offers even more than a sharp glint of irony to his view of the Caribbean, and his considered position on the Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, and the putative “discovery of the New World”. According to Eusi Kwayana, writing in Stabroek News in 2012, Carew made a thorough exploration of the ways in which the navigator Columbus had gone astray, opening up the hemisphere of the “New World” for the genocide of its original population. Wrote Kwayana, “For [Carew], it was Columbus who wielded the double-edged sword of medieval genocide on the two continents facing each other across the Atlantic, the Americas, and Africa, with extensions to Asia. Faced with the whole complex outcome of an accomplished, multi-faceted genocide, Carew seems early to have made the resolve to make his jihad the unearthing and revealing of the hidden strengths, hidden genius, and forgotten accomplishments of these magnificent peoples whom history had all but written off.”
He did so in his first published novel, Black Midas (1958). Set mainly in the Amazonian rainforest, it explores race and class in British Guiana, making significant use of folk myth; also outstanding in this well-known novel is its reification of the pork-knocker, a small-scale prospector seeking gold and diamonds through hardship, toil, and danger in Guyana’s interior. In his exploration, ‘Race, Colour, and Class in Black Midas’, York University Professor Emeritus Dr. Frank Birbalsingh writes: “The events in Black Midas undoubtedly carry the universal stamp of Eurocentric imperial domination, but since they occur in a British Caribbean colony, these events also reflect the specific values and special peculiarities of Caribbean history and culture which are indelibly marked by slavery and indenture, the displacement of populations chiefly from Africa and Asia, and the exploitation of their labour by white colonial rulers.” In so doing, Birbalsingh declares Carew has “admirably captured” the “complexity of the [Guyanese] society”.
There are similar themes in Carew’s second novel, The Wild Coast (1958). His third novel, The Last Barbarian (1960), explores the experiences of a Caribbean student during the civil rights struggles in the US. Also among Carew’s works are poetry collections Streets of Eternity (1952) and Sea Drums in My Blood (1980). Among his books are Moscow Is Not My Mecca (1964); Green Winter (1965); Cry Black Power (1970); children’s books, Sons of the Flying Wing (1970), The Third Gift (1974), Twins of Dlora (1975), Children of the Sun (1980), and Computer Killer (1985); Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again (1985), Fulcrums of Change (1988); Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England and the Caribbean (1994); Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Birth of Racism in the Americas (1994), and others. His memoir Potaro Dreams: My Youth in Guyana, was posthumously published in 2014.
Carew maintained contact with the Caribbean despite such prolific writing output. In 1962 he served as director of culture in British Guiana under the administration of Cheddi Jagan. A “strong supporter” of the People's Progressive Party, Birbalsingh says Carew was “quite fearless when it came to politics” Based in London in the 1950s, Carew was present during the incipience of what would later grow into a cadre of post-colonial writers writing back to the Empire. There he worked as a journalist and a writer for radio. Writing and working alongside the upcoming V.S. Naipaul, Carew recalled years later: “We would do broadcasts at the BBC and then go to a pub nearby.” Carew also spent time on stage, working with the Laurence Olivier Productions stage company, and appeared in plays by Shakespeare and Shaw in London and Liverpool, and at the Ziegfeld theatre in New York.
In 1955 he worked at the Kensington Post. Later, he taught race relations at London University, and was the first editor of Magnet News, a black-oriented newspaper. He also taught at Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities, and was Emeritus Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University.
Carew died on December 6, 2012, in Louisville, Kentucky, at the age of 92.

(Sources for this exploration are Margaret Bushby’s 2014 eulogy published in the The Guardian, Wikipedia, Stabroek News, and , ‘Race, Colour, and Class in Black Midas’, published by Dr. Frank Birbalsingh in 2002.)

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