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I’ve Known Many Rivers And Remember Stellings:
- A-QuEST (Minott)
- Aug 10
- 3 min read
A Dirge For The Lost Of MV Barima and Deep Love For Guyana
By Dennis A. Minott, PhD.
August 3, 2026
The water remembers every soul it has ever carried, holding their silence long after the brown tides of the Essequibo and the Demerara have settled. To travel the rivers of Guyana and Suriname is to step onto a floating village, a transient sanctuary built upon creaking timbers and painted steel. On those crowded ferries, where knees touch and elbows brush, the warmth of human existence overflows its narrow boundaries. Strangers do not remain strange for long under the wide blue arc of a South American sky. A wrapped parcel of cassava bread is broken and shared without hesitation; a sharp joke ripples from the stern to the bow, setting off cascades of irrepressible laughter; a mother’s watchful eye extends naturally to the little "Buck" child playing near the railing, guarded by four or five pairs of hands that belong to no single family. Here, upon the slow, powerful currents, a quiet miracle repeats itself day after day: we become one people, bound together by the rhythm of the tide and the shared journey toward the opposite shore.
How deeply I remember the stellings—those worn, wooden arterial heartbeats stretching from the forest’s edge into the mud. They are places of tearful farewells, frantic reunions, and the smell of diesel, salt water, and ripe fruit. The stelling is where anticipation gathers its breath before the crossing begins. Yet the river is an unpredictable giant, masking its dark depths beneath a shimmering skin. How well I recall those long, suspended hours when the world shrank to the size of a sandbar on the Corantijn. The engine would groan, a deep and guttural labour against the mud, while the vessel shuddered into stillness. Around us, the current shifted with a sinister, persistent hiss. In those moments, the air grew thick with unspoken tension. We laughed, yes—because to be Caribbean is to wield joy as a shield against the abyss, to meet the sudden shadow of peril with a brave, bright defiance. But beneath every joke and every shared glance ran a cold shiver, a silent calculation of the razor-thin margin separating a minor delay from irreversible tragedy. We knew the river’s power, and in that knowing lay a deep, trembling reverence.
Now, that memory returns as a heavy dirge, as news of the MV Barima echoes across the waters. The heart breaks for those lost to the deep. They were never mere numbers on a manifest; they were the very lifeblood of our coasts and hinterlands. They were parents returning home with arms full of promises, children wide-eyed with wonder, workers tired from the heat of the day, dreamers looking out toward the horizon, and neighbours whose voices filled the air with comfort. Aboard that ferry, in those final hours, they were brothers and sisters sharing the same voyage, bound to one another by the unspoken covenant of the sea.
This sorrow does not remain confined to a single riverbank. Guyana’s grief reverberates across every bay, gulf, and inlet of our shared world. It touches the shores of Suriname, reaches across the sea to Jamaica, whispers through the hills of Haiti, and rests gently on the quiet beaches of Nevis. Wherever people live by the mercy of the waters, wherever men and women step onto a deck with trust in their hearts, this pain belongs to us all. We grieve for the souls who never saw the wooden planks of the landing stelling again, nor felt the solid earth beneath their feet. We gather the survivors into our collective embrace, holding them against the clammy dampness, and we stand in solemn vigil beside the families who still watch the horizon, waiting for answers that arrive far too slowly.
Let our mourning not be in vain. Let the tears shed into these dark currents solidify into an unyielding resolve, so that memory becomes the foundation for lasting reform. No ordinary journey, no routine crossing from one bank to another, should ever demand so terrible and irreversible a price. Having known the warmth of those people, the rhythm of those stellings, and the chill of those waters, the heart finds its only remaining expression in a song that spans the distances between us, binding our sorrow into an everlasting lament: A River of Tears for Guyana--The land of the Caribbean's warmest peoples.
“A River of Tears for Guyana”. https://substack.com/home/post/p-207709754
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