Editorial | Farewell, Ian McDonald!

It has been a season of death for towering West Indian figures.

In July, Garfield Sobers, the greatest cricketer who ever lived, whether, as the calypsonian Mighty Sparrow declared in song, Sir Garfield Sobers, died in his native Barbados. Sobers’ death came 10 days shy of his 90th birthday.

Sparrow, the griot, philosopher, truth-teller and unparalleled exponent of the art form he practised, made his own transition in September. He was 91.

Sparrow (Slinger Francisco) was born in Grenada and lived from early childhood in Trinidad. He was owned by the Caribbean.

He was not as well known as Sobers or Sparrow. He did not achieve their level of greatness. But Ian McDonald is worthy of his place in the pantheon where these men now reside.

He once characterised himself as “Antiguan by ancestry, Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption, and West Indian by conviction”. He was born in Trinidad and Tobago to an Antiguan father and Trinidadian mother and lived most of his adult life in Guyana.

McDonald lived his conviction: as a public servant, sportsman, essayist, novelist, poet and editor, a distinguished man of letters.

Last week, a memorial service was held in Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, to celebrate his life. McDonald died in Canada in July, at age 93.

On McDonald’s death, the Guyanese anthropologist and historian, Clem Seecharan, said: “A towering greenheart tree has fallen and the whole forest feels bereft, diminished.”

EPITOMISED

Ian McDonald epitomised the post-war generation of West Indian nationalists, with a twist: his talents crossed several fields and he crammed much into a lifetime.

His early years were spent in Trinidad where he attended Queen’s Royal College before going on to Clare College, Cambridge, where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in history. He not only played tennis for Cambridge but also competed in the Wimbledon Championships between 1952 and 1954, and again in 1959.

McDonald moved to Guyana in 1955, where his sporting prowess continued. He represented Guyana in squash and tennis, as well as captained the West Indies Davis Cup team.

A self-described “sporting junkie”, he also had a deep love of, and interest in, cricket. He was a member of the committee, chaired by Jamaica’s former prime minister, P.J. Patterson, that produced the 2007 Patterson Report, which recommended a radical stakeholder-based overhaul of the governance of West Indies cricket.

These achievements, on their own, would be sufficient to command attention and accolades. But Ian McDonald was also a highly accomplished executive in Guyana’s and the Caribbean’s sugar sector for more than half a century, including serving as CEO of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean in the 2000s.

However, it was in the literary field that McDonald left his greatest mark. He published a single novel, The Humming-Bird Tree (1969), which met with critical acclaim. A 1992 film adaptation of the novel received a similar reception from critics.

In The Humming-Bird Tree, set in Trinidad in the 1940s, McDonald, like many West Indian writers of his and the preceding generation, explored, through the lives of three children, the white son of a plantation overseer and the brother and sister of Indian workers, race, class, and social relationships and hierarchy in colonial society. Idyllic childhood friendships receded as they grew older and unwritten social codes asserted themselves. Reconnection later could not bridge the chasm.

POET

It is as a poet, though, that Ian McDonald, celebrated for his lyricism, sensitivity and acute eye for beauty in his surroundings, achieved, at a personal level, his most sustained literary success. His best-known collections are Mercy Ward (1988), Essequibo (1992), Jaffo the Calypsonian (1994), Between Silence and Silence (2003), and, more recently, Impossibility of Nothingness (2026). He also edited anthologies of poetry.

Indeed, McDonald’s sense of awe at the beauty in seemingly mundane surroundings, which was the key foundation upon which his literature stood, was captured in a 2009 article in Guyana’s Stabroek News, reflecting on the accommodations, physical, sensory and aspirational, that accompany ageing.

“The shocks of beauty dealt by even the most ordinary things, cloud shadows passing over savannahs, the play of sunlight on a silver river, the smell of rain on sun-burned grass, these simple shocks of loveliness no longer strike with the singular and heart-stopping force of years ago,” McDonald wrote.

His Stabroek News column ran for nearly four decades. It was also, at one point, syndicated across the Caribbean, including in this newspaper.

Those sensibilities, his appreciation of “these simple shocks of loveliness”, were part of what informed Ian McDonald’s support for a succeeding generation of writers and poets through the literary magazine Kyk-Over-Al, which he revived in 1984 with its founder, the legendary Guyanese poet and essayist A.J. Seymour. Seymour had published the magazine between 1945 and 1961. After Seymour’s death in 1984, McDonald was its sole editor until 2000, when the magazine last appeared.

McDonald was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1970, and received one of Guyana’s highest honours, the Golden Arrow of Achievement (AA), in 1986. He was conferred with an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from The University of the West Indies in 1997. He won Guyana’s top literary prize three times.

But Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali appropriately summed up McDonald’s legacy. He said: “A good life is measured not only by what one achieves or accumulates, but by what one notices, loves, gives, and leaves of himself to both people and country.”

Ian McDonald’s country, by choice and inclination, was the West Indies.