Abstract
This article situates Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences in the context of a Guyanese cultural tradition. I consider the idea of a community of literary voices, both as it is figured within this formally complex text and as it is envisaged through McWatt’s intertextual dialogue with an earlier generation of writers and through his anticipation of future readers. Moving between a discussion of political freedom and imprisonment in the context of Martin Carter’s writing and an analysis of the textual power relations operating within Suspended Sentences, I focus on the concept of freedom of expression as it relates to the idea of a communally-articulated Guyana. By setting Linda Hutcheon’s ideas on the relationship between freedom and postmodernist writing against the very different views of Wilson Harris, I explore the limits of McWatt’s metafictional devices, reading them in relation to the text’s thematic concern with empty promises. I suggest that, in the context of the disillusioning social and political realities of post-independence Guyana, McWatt’s backward glance at visions of the future combines a longing to share in the optimism of his literary predecessors with a critical distance from them. In this light, I argue that Suspended Sentences at once projects a promise of community and suspends it indefinitely.