My Poetry Corner August 2023 features the poem “Betty” by Ian McDonald from his poetry collection New and Collected Poems 1957-2017 (UK, 2018). Born in the Caribbean Island of Trinidad in 1933, Ian McDonald is a poet, novelist, dramatist, and non-fiction writer. After moving to then British Guiana in 1955, he made his home there until his eighties when he migrated to Canada to be close to his children and grandchildren.

Born into a white family of power and privilege, the young Ian fell in love with literature and writing as a schoolboy. In 1955, after graduating from Cambridge University in England with a Bachelor of Arts Honors Degree in History, he began working with Bookers Ltd., then owners of the British Guiana sugar estates/plantations, where he rose to the position of Director of Marketing & Administration. When the company was nationalized in 1976, McDonald remained as the Administrative Director of the newly formed Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) until his retirement in 1999. Following his retirement, he spent the next eight years (2000-2007) as the CEO of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean, located in Georgetown, Guyana.

McDonald’s contributions to the development and promotion of Guyanese and Caribbean literature, theater, and sports are impressive and memorable. How did he ever find time to write poetry? In an article “A Love of Poetry” for the Guyana Chronicle in September 2014, he said of his writing process: “Occasionally a poem emerges in the consciousness fully formed and can be dislodged from there onto paper with a shake of the pen. Mostly what occurs is a sense of something needing to be said, a couple of lines in the head, perhaps just a phrase, and the accumulation of a poem begins and goes on with many fits and starts and adjustments, abandonments and reformulations….”

His latest 445-page volume of poems, New and Collected Poems 1957-2017, released at 85 years old, is a legacy of sixty years of recording the expansiveness of his life’s experiences in poetic verse. His love for Guyana’s diverse landscapes, its peoples, and culture is evident throughout the collection. What’s more, he brings to our attention the ordinary and commonplace that often go unnoticed in our day-to-day interactions with others. With poetic sensibility and compassion, he memorializes the stories of simple men and women.

In “Gribba” (p. 380), the poet remembers an old man from his youth:

Old and bent by his work, he never missed a day,
they said. Thirty years stacking sugar bags
high as his head takes strength. I was the soft
white boy giving out prizes for tasks
I could never do. I reward him now by remembering.
I see his eyes undimmed, fearing no one,
feel his iron-strong handshake,
do not forget this measurement of worth.

Another old man, in the poem “Reward” (p. 366), expresses his gratitude by offering McDonald what must’ve been the man’s most treasured possession. Such is the measure of a simple man.

He had asked to see me in my big office,
the old man, white beard neatly trimmed.
From its green velvet pouch, he put
the gold sovereign reverently in my hand.
It felt quite heavy in my palm. In formal
ceremony it had been given him by
a governor for loyalty in long service
to the Crown. He wanted me to have it –
a reward for getting his only grandson
work in the office, where he had to wear
a tie….

The poet also reflects on aging and his own mortality. In “My Body Which I Still Love” (p. 423), he has become an old man.

I never used to examine my body when it was good,
admire it, yes, regularly – that was different.
Now, saggy at the throat, bags beneath the eyes so sad,
not a day passes I don’t check with sad distaste 
some new blood mark, pain spot, muscle ache.
[…]
Can one delay this dilapidation? If I walk or run,
will half of youth’s easy spring return?
I know, of course, it won’t, but it may buy time,
fend off old age, which ends how old age always ends.

The featured short poem, “Betty” (p. 299), is from McDonald’s poetry collection River Dancer (2016). Though he does not state the old woman’s ethnicity, the name Betty indicates that she is East Indian. Beti (pronounced betty) is the Hindu word for daughter. In Guyana, the East Indian rural population also refers to any girl or young woman as beti.

Betty’s story lodges deep within my rib cage. McDonald must have met the former sugarcane laborer sometime during the 35 years he was a committee member of the Sugar Industry Labor Welfare Fund, established in 1947 to provide land and housing, water supply, and welfare facilities for sugar workers.

The most terrible conversation I ever had
the one that hurt my heart the most
an old woman from a rundown logie
visited to get details for estate resettlement.

On sugar estates across the coastlands in 1947, 1,247 logies or ranges housed sugarcane laborers and their extended families. Some of them, dating back to the days of slavery, were far more decrepit than the stables for mules used on the plantation. With the construction of some 10,785 houses between 1951 and 1964, only 30 logies remained standing by 1971. Convincing Betty to relocate to a new housing unit fell to McDonald.

Her eyes were filmed with sickness
said her life was nothing to her
said all women’s lives were as nothing.
No one had been pleased when she was born.
Boys were princes. Always she was hiding in corners
hiding her face, hiding. She had tried to help
by working hard. One time only she knew
some happiness. A man come and take she
to marry, and she belong to him and she
get to love him and for a while she was
a flower in his sun, but he find someone else.

In using broken English, the poet draws us into his conversation with Betty. Hardened by life as a sugarcane worker, abandoned by her family and forgotten by society, she has accepted her lot in life. The prospect of a new home holds no enticement for her. Her husband and son had put her with old women in this place. It was / what she knew; she didn’t want to move.

To read the featured poem “Betty” and learn more about the work of Ian McDonald, go to my Poetry Corner August 2023.