Dear Editor,
I express my sincere condolences to the family of Jan Lowe Shinebourne—Guyanese novelist—on her recent passing in the UK; I learnt that she’d been in special care for a while. We both grew up in Pln. Rose Hall (Canje, Berbice), perhaps the second largest sugar plantation in Guyana, and we lived just a couple of miles from each other. I last saw Janice (as I knew her) when we were both on a panel discussion at London University some years back: to discuss Rose Hall and its influence on our writing in a session chaired by Clem Seecharan (see the published volume, Re-Imagining the Guyanas). “This is a very visceral and emotional topic for me, it stirs up deep memories and feelings,” she’d said.
Over the years Janice and I had often been in correspondence (as she was with many others)–and I admired her candidness, her forthrightness about the writing community: as she expressed to me. Significantly, Janice and I were perhaps two of the earliest writers that Dr Jeremy Poynting, director of Peepal Tree Press (UK) published. Jeremy and I would talk fondly about Janice when we met in the UK, the Caribbean, and once in Ottawa (he’d come to edit my volume, Discussing Columbus).
Janice’s passing forces me to go back to her novels and short stories—and to once more appreciate her narrative gift: the texture of her prose-style with its inner rhythms depicting the interiority of her characters’ lives in books such as Timepiece and The Last English Plantation. Rose Hall meant a great deal to her–and to me as well. We both became winners of the Guyana Prize for Literature (fiction).
Yes, I clearly recall the time when she’d visited me, perhaps on a whim at my home in Canje after she’d moved to Georgetown to study at UG (she would subsequently emigrate to the UK with her husband). And indeed I would dwell on the kind words she perhaps instinctually wrote years later with memory tied to the imagination: “Cyril and I go a long way back. We knew each other as children and teenagers. I remember him clearly as a very pretty boy I used to admire (make eyes at)” –letter to Clem Seecharan, et al. Now my eyes are on you: Adieu, dear Janice!
Yours sincerely,
Cyril Dabydeen,
Ottawa Poet Laureate Emeritus
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