In the final story of Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences (2005), a fictional version of the author comments on “the purgatorial sentence imposed (by its own people – all of us) on the independent country of Guyana.” Although Suspended Sentences is on one level a celebration of Guyanese national identity, on another level it comments on the social turmoil, racial polarization and political corruption of a ‘free’ independent Guyana. In this paper I will explore the issue of freedom of expression, examining the relationship between Suspended Sentences and the work of two very different figures of the Guyanese cultural heritage: the poet Martin Carter and the novelist and philosopher Wilson Harris.
Carter, who was closely involved in post-independence politics, was assaulted in the 1978 protests against Forbes Burnham’s government. I will consider to what extent McWatt’s location outside Guyana obstructs or enhances his freedom to engage with his country’s social and political problems. For Harris, freedom is to be found not in politics, but in “provisional bridges” between “closed minds, closed disciplines, closed orders.” I will argue that the formal innovation and generic indeterminacy of Suspended Sentences work towards this notion of freedom. I will focus on how the complex narrative structure of Suspended Sentences offers McWatt and his community of fictional writers the freedom to negotiate a national identity which accommodates their physical distance from their country; and in doing so, to reinscribe the Guyanese landscape as an intertextual space which bridges racial, social and geographic divides.