Customer Reviews (11)

Metegee
In a nutshell, Metegee is a treasure chest of Guyana's who, why, when, where, what and how. Abrams covers Guyana in all aspects of our history and culture. On a scale of one to ten, Metegee is a big, fat ten. A must have for every Guyanese or anyone else who may wish to know as much of Guyana as they possibly can.

Roxanne De Cruiz-Shung(...)

Plane spoken and informative
Metegee is a metaphor for the people of Guyana, and for this book by Ovid Abrams, both are a mix. Mr Abrams has a very lucid and plane spoken style, and his collection has much to offer. I did find it enjoyable and informative, and would certainly recommend it.
I do take issue with a few things Mr Abrams said.

(1)Secondary education was readily available in Georgetown, and was not so costly as to be exclusive. It was also better, or at the very least as good as anything I've seen in both Canada and the US.
(2) I don't think that the British ever considered the "indentured" Portuguese their equals. The Portuguese came mostly from the little island of Madeira, either because of famine or political instability, I don't really know, however I do know that both commerce and agriculture were well developed there, and I'm sure that when they came their intention was to work out their contract and go into bussiness for themselves. This is what they did, and they prospered.
(3) As far as Obeah is concerned I never knew it as a religion, but rather as something akin to witchcraft. In fact in the late forties there was a famous case in which three people were tried and hanged, because they had sacrificed a young child in an Obeah ceremony.

Evidently Mr Abrams is very keen on language and folklore, and that's fine, but there's too much. I didn't find the proverbs and saying so interesting, and many of the customs, beliefs, superstitions I wasn't familiar with. I do wish he had spent more time saying something about other ethnic groups like the Portuguese and Chinese. I also wish he had said something about the cattle ranchers in the Rupunnuni District.
Lastly though I know there was nothing altruistic about it,it should have been mentioned that but for Dutch engineering, Georgetown and the entire Atlantic coast would have been uninhabitable. Further though British colonialism was thoroughly detestable,it is worth noting as Mr Abrams points out that the exchange rate on the BG$ was 2 per US$ in 1960, and that after the Jagan-Burnhasm nightmare it stood at 140 BG$ per US $.

The book badly needs editing, but that is a minor distraction

The Classic Guyanese
Ovid Abrams did a super job with this piece of writing.It takes discipline to work very hard.In my opinion, in general, Guyanese people should support writers.Writing requires courage.Metegee is now a powerful asset and resource for the aspiring writers in Guyana.I enjoyed this book thoroughly. Thank You Mr. Ovid Abrams.

Bravo!
Exceptional!A metegee is a traditional Guyanese dish with everything included and that's exactly what this is.As a daughter of Guynana, I was blown away.This will be my gift to all family members for the next year.Metegee includes culture, politics, sayings and was a fascinating study of life in a British post-colony.I was never bored reading it and suggest not only that all Guyanese families own one, but all Caribbeans.For a self-publishing volume, this book was very well done.I would love to take a class with the creative and gifted author.

Why didn't someone PROOFREAD this text before printing??????
I bought this book with great expectations of sharing it with non-Guyanesefriends, and then keeping it in my personal library. I was sorelydisappointed........The colonial history and more recent political historyare long on factual details, but superficially analyzed....and the"culture" element of the book is more about folklore than culturein a pure anthropological sense, with dozens and dozens of pages of localsayings and idioms, but no story to hold them together.... But my greatesthorror about the text itself is the absolutely abysmal quality of theproofreading and editing....EVERYWHEREthere are typos, and mis-spellings,and incomplete ungrammatical sentences, and parts of sentences repeated insuccessive paragraphs, etc. etc.....to the point where it is so totallydistracting that I put the book away in disgust.....it was disappointing tothink that this text could have been cleared before printing by the authorwho is a professional journalist. For shame!!!!! ... Read more

Product Description
Guyana has recently come to the attention to global strategic planners.This report puts these executives on the fast track.Ten chapters provide: an overview of how to strategically access this important market, a discussion on economic fundamentals, marketing & distribution options, export and direct investment options, and full risk assessments (political, cultural, legal, human resources).Ample statistical benchmarks and comparative graphs are given. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Jumbee, Culture of Guyana, Wordsworth Mcandrew Award, Guyana Pepperpot, National Library of Guyana. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 26. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: A Jumbee, Jumbie or Mendo is a type of mythological spirit or demon in Caribbean folklore. Jumbee is the generic name given to all malevolent entities; however, there are numerous kinds of Jumbees. The various kinds of Jumbees reflect the Caribbeans complex history and ethnic makeup, drawing on African, Amerindian, East Indian, Dutch, English, and even Chinese mythology. Jumbies are imagined as dark. This phenonemon is widely believed in by people in the English-speaking Caribbean states that were colonized by the British and which practised "Obeah", a form of mystical wizardry that encompassed traditional African beliefs merged with Western European, primarily Anglican, images and beliefs concerning the dead. Various islands including Antigua and Barbuda in the east to Jamaica in the north and as far south as Trinidad have had a long held set of folklore that include the jumbie. In the folk religion of Montserrat, a jumbie is a ghost, or spirit of the dead. Jumbies are said to possess humans during ceremonies called jumbie dances, which are accompanied by jumbie drums. Jumbies receive numerous small offerings from Montserratians, such as a few drops of rum or food; they are also the subject of numerous superstitions. Four couples perform a set of five progressively quicker quadrilles during the jumbie dance, switching out with other couples until someone is eventually possessed by a jumbie. Now, different cultures have a varying tales of the conception of jumbies. But the general idea is that people who have been evil during their lives are destined to become instruments of evil (jumbie) in death. The s...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=5603551 ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Countries and Their Cultures, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 329 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Covers the broad range of popular religious culture of the United States at the close of the twentieth century. Beliefs, practices, symbols, traditions, movements, organizations, and leaders from the many traditions in the pluralistic American community are represented. Also includes cults and phenomena that drew followers, such as Heaven's Gale and UFOs. ... Read more

Product Description
Compact collection of proverbs and idioms that reflect folklore and culture of Guyana. ... Read more

Product Description
Large softcover, staple bound. Green & yellow covers. Includes music and words for 25 songs of Guyana ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

book
my book was old but it was for school, it lasted enough for me to do my paper ... Read more

Product Description
Wilson Harris, many times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a British writer of Guyanese origin, one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century, and probably the first to use and interpret the aesthetically fruitful notion of cross-culturalism. Harris's insights into the profound symbiosis between history, culture and artistic expression were initially inspired by his encounters with Amerindians in the Guyanese rainforest interior, where he led many surveying expeditions. These encounters aroused his interest in pre-Columbian peoples, who figure prominently in many of his novels and stories. His perception of the Guyanese landscape is the source of his unique narrative rhetoric, richly metaphoric language, and philosophy of existence: i.e. the epistemological and phenomenological interrelatedness between man, animal life, and nature. The present study offers magisterial, in-depth interpretations of Harris's exhilaratingly complex and shape-shifting fictional worlds. ... Read more

Product Description
For us as citizens of Sweden is freedom of speech,freedom of expression and press freedom a naturalpart of our society. In some countries is pressfreedom a law on paper but represents something elsein reality. The need for information and objectivenews is a brick stone for a stable democracy.According to us, media have the power to shape anddirect the advancement of a society, with that powercomes a responsibility to provide a neutral andobjective picture of the reality. Guyana provides twoindependent newspapers, the Kaieteur News and theStarbroek News. When we conducted this research wereour objective to investigate which role the freenewspapers had in Guyana, the responsibilities theyhad, and the level of free speech in the newspapers.We have based our empirical data upon qualitativeinterviews with prominent persons from Guyana?s mediacommunity. We have also done a participantobservation and a content analysis. ... Read more

Product Description
"This book deals with British colonial strategy in its colonies of Trinidad and Tobago and British Guiana/Guyana to deal with an East Indian threat to the political order it desired in the run up to independence for Trinidad and Tobago in the 1960's and the threat of Communist subversion in Guyana in the 1950's and 1960's. In both instances the British strategy called for the creation of a racist political order that destroyed the East Indian threat in Trinidad and Tobago and placed a minority race in power through successive fraudulent elections until the decade of the 1990's in Guyana. The British legacy in both instances is a racist social order premised upon racist hegemony." ... Read more

Product Description
The Caribbean Community(CARICOM ), is an organization of 15 Caribbean nations and dependencies. CARICOM's main purposes are to promote economic integration and cooperation among its members, to ensure that the benefits of integration are equitably shared, and to coordinate foreign policy.[1]Its major activities involve coordinating economic policies and development planning; devising and instituting special projects for the less-developed countries within its jurisdiction; operating as a regional single market for many of its members (Caricom Single Market); and handling regional trade disputes. The secretariat headquarters is based in Georgetown, Guyana. ... Read more

Product Description
This book investigates the problematical historical location of the term 'religion' and examines how this location has affected the analytical reading of postcolonial fiction and poetry. The adoption of the term 'religion' outside of a Western Enlightenment and Christian context should therefore be treated with caution. Within postcolonial literary criticism, there has been either a silencing of the category as a result of this caution or an uncritical and essentializing adoption of the term 'religion'. It is argued in the present study that a vital aspect of how writers articulate their histories of colonial contact, migration, slavery, and the re-forging of identities in the wake of these histories is illuminated by the classificatory term 'religion'. Aspects of postcolonial theory and Religious Studies theory are combined to provide fresh insights into the literature, thereby expanding the field of postcolonial literary criticism. The way in which writers 'remember' history through writing is central to the way in which 'religion' is theorized and articulated; the act of remembrance can be persuasively interpreted in terms of 'religion'. The title 'Memory and Myth' therefore refers to both the syncretic mythology of Guyana, and the key themes in a new critical understanding of 'religion'. Particular attention is devoted to Wilson Harris's novel Jonestown, alongside theoretical and historical material on the actual Jonestown tragedy; to the mesmerizing effect of the Anancy tales on contemporary writers, particularly the poet John Agard; and to the work of the Indo-Guyanese writer David Dabydeen and his elusive character Manu. ... Read more