Where You Find It
I didn’t travel to Guyana seeking inspiration for The Slavemakers, the new novel–and follow-up to Invasive Species–I’m just starting to write. I visited that little-known country for a diversity of reasons, foremost among them that I’m enamored by the South American rain forest and its mysteries; I love meeting people whose lives are so different from my own; and (as I described in “The Unlikely Writer Who Changed My Life”) Guyana was the setting of a book I first read at age ten, and which influenced my choices to be a writer on nature, the environment, and exotic travel.
But the whole point about inspiration is that it can’t be planned. It just happens. So, while I never expected Guyana to become an important locale for The Slavemakers, I can’t say I’m shocked that it has. What surprised me was that it wasn’t the rain forest that got into my head, but a setting I’d barely known existed: the savanna.
The North Rupununi Savanna of southern Guyana is among the most ancient places on earth. In many places, the ground is covered by gravel. It looks like someone spread it the day before, but actually it’s been sitting there for about 300 million years: It’s what’s left of the bed of a stream that ran across the land when Guyana was part of Pangaea, the supercontinent containing what became all seven current continents.
And those mountains in the shot at the top? They’re about two billion years old…nearly half as old as the Earth itself.
Unsurprisingly in such a challenging, marginal environment–the savannas aren’t much good for either farming or ranching–the residents (mostly of the Makushí people) are strong and tough as well. This couple–a child on each handlebar–was bicycling across miles of savanna. You do what you need to do to get where you need to go.
As you can tell, the savanna and its residents inspired me. What do I do with inspiration? I write it down. It’s only logical, therefore, that in The Slavemakers I’m going to create a tough, strong band of survivors…and place them in an environment where survival has long been a fact of everyday life.
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