In Year of Plagues, the award-winning poet Fred D'Aguiar, reflects on a year of turbulence, fear, and hope. D’Aguiar will be in conversation with Juanita Cox, co-founder, Guyana SPEAKS. This will be followed by an audience Q&A. To be part of the Q&A segment, please send your questions in advance via guyanaspeaks@gmail.com.
Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020 (Carcanet, August 2021) is the first nonfiction book from acclaimed British-Guyanese poet, novelist and playwright, Fred D’Aguiar. The plagues referred to in the title include the Covid19 pandemic, the author’s own battle with cancer and the social unrest brought about by the public lynchings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and murder of Breonna Taylor in the States, and the subsequent growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Despite the pain and hardships of D’Aguiar’s subject matter, Year of Plagues is a musical, poetic, often humorous mixture of autobiography and meditations on society and literature.
The author’s illness is intimately and graphically chronicled, but the gravity of the subject matter is boosted by the poetry of his descriptions. The author shows his artistic influences and makes references to Phyllis Wheatley, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Martin Carter, Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris.
Where D’Aguiar turns his lens towards family history, he ventures beyond the biographical to understand his parents’ socio-political contexts, producing a portrait of a Caribbean couple relocating to London as part of that first ‘wave’, or the so-called ‘Windrush generation’: “Every other stricture placed on them by post-World War Two Guyanese society: honor your father and mother; fear a just and loving God; pledge allegiance to the British flag; lust is the devil’s oxygen. All that circles in their veins.”
“Fred D’Aguiar comes to seem like Derek Walcott’s true twenty-first-century heir... Fred D’Aguiar has written ‘a canticle of water’, a book for the individual bowed, imperilled, under the wave of history –monarchical and imperial - and crying out for collective action to stop it from consuming further shores.”