Ruminations by Carl Hazlewood a ‘Foreign Guyanese’ Artist
By Carl Hazlewood
Carl E. Hazlewood is a Guyanese artist, writer and curator, living in Brookiyn, New York. He is co-founder and former curator of ALJIRA, A Centre for Contemporary Art, in New Jersey.
There have been several occasions in recent years where I’ve been accused of being a ‘foreign Guyanese,’ that term being used deliberately to suggest, I felt, that I had no right to be involved with things I assumed was within my cultural sphere of interest as a ‘born’ Guyanese. As one might imagine, such encounters induced moments of extreme psychic dissonance for me. What was I? Who am I? Why do I feel such a responsibility to folks who seem so disinterested in whatever I had to offer? And what is the responsibility of that place and those people to me?
I was taken to the United States at around the age of thirteen or so. I was there to have a congenital heart defect repaired. And except for a period of about two or three years when I was a teen, I’ve since resided in America. Thus, I’ve spent only a fraction of my life actually located in Guyana. But what does that mean about the quality of my experience as someone of that place and of that soil? When my little family left Guyana in the 1960s, the country was in the grip of a vital and increasingly violent political and social struggle. Even as a child I could feel that tension present everywhere, for it affected us all. The land was an impoverished beauty, and like the rest of the Caribbean, it remains an ambivalent site of both desire and desperation.
I was away from Guyana before I was old enough or healthy enough to have the common experiences I hear about every time there is a gathering of Guyanese: parties, dancing, drinking. I’ve never climbed a coconut tree or picked a mango off a branch, or went swimming in a ‘punt trench.’ My childhood experiences were circumscribed and mainly focused on intellectual and artistic pursuits: books; whatever presentations the BBC broadcasted, like Lorna Doone or Shakespeare plays; all the international news of far away countries fighting for independence; and tales of Nationalism, bloody wars, and survival.
