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."

Faizal Deen's profile page

Faizal Deen was born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1968 and arrived in Canada in 1977. In 2000 he published what became Guyana's first LGBTQ poetry collection, Land Without Chocolate, a Memoir, shortlisted by the QWF for the AM Klein Prize in Poetry. He lives in Ottawa and is presently working on a new book of poems and an experimental novel.

"When Faizal wrings out poetry from the islands, war criminals, museums, film and dance halls, we are pleasantly confronted with a myriad of wonderful images and unique rhythms. "The Greatest Films" opens up a new way of looking at the pain, pleasure and potential of simultaneously belonging to more than land and landscapes. This is a welcome collection to new Canadian poetry." --Cheran