The Greatest Films

This long poem addresses the imaginations of cultural hybridity as they are formed through passages between real and imagined homelands and host lands, be they Guyana, Canada, or India. The speaker narrates his own past through a splicing of moving pictures taken from a wide selection of twentieth-century cinema. The poem thus employs disjunctive poetic techniques that exteriorize the personal and public histories of the Indo-Guyanese Canadian diaspora. The Greatest Films refashions and revivifies these improvisational sources into a collage of repeating lines of verse that pulls readers back-and-forth; regardless of which direction the poem pushes or pulls the reader, what awaits is always an encounter with the residual nostalgia for "origins."