N. D. Williams' Books & Reviews

Poems for Music Lovers (& their iPods)

2009-03-13T07:42:00.000-07:00

[Back when radio ruled the waves, the BBC, main tunnel from the world to Guyana, brought to our shores “Greensleeves” and Victor Sylvester. Lacking creole traditions like Trinis with Christmas parang, I longed to hear pop maestros of string instruments.

They sent down Cliff Richard, The Shadows, “Telstar”, well you know. And those cool girls from Jobim’s Ipanema. And dazzling 60s riffs by the Eagles and Jimi Hendrix. Those were the days Ravi Shankar turned sitar friendly.

Back then (I think) I heard Victor Uwaifo (“Guitar Boy”) four times, his scratchy Nigeria picks too many oceans far for channel shipping.

The good news is I found the tunnel’s end: on dials of the //www. Guitar music streams from every sunken port in the globe. Now I can watch Uwaifo’s video, “Guitar Boy”! the two barefoot dancing girls! his guitar licks couscous steamed in 70s highlife.

And hear this: what must be the gold coast of string harmonies rocks by the rivers of Mali, in the diamond fingers of (the late) Ali Farka Toure; Toumani Diabete.

Where were you all those years, guitar fathers? What trade winds blocked this young heart access to those kora waves, ces vieux jams? Radio Ghana. Desert moons. The faraway missed years.

Tunneling protocols, I know. Old pirates ♫] – W.W.

Emily’s Nectar, Pablo’s Guitar, Miles’ All

At the bottom of the sea,
a stone screams. At the stone’s heart,
silence spawns the blue word
the blue note, the blue blue.

(From “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan.)

Real Slow Jazz

Voices taking time to make
time feel

both tauter
and stretchier that we would

know from the limping clock,
the pace of the heart sure

beyond the need to run across
bridges of love, statements

of the tension between spark
and flame, spirit and flesh,

the tears of gods only men,
of men brimming with light.

(from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)

Lyric
- (with Joanna Rychert, after Galcynski)

Death? You’re most welcome but

I’d give anything once
more to saunter through town
at last without a care,
humming Brahms’ first Ballade

under windows where fire-
flies buzz their own shocking
songs with perfect timing
and heart, lit from within

like floating rooms of light
which the noonday shadow
in men slowly invades
with ranks of solid ghosts.

What if it’s impossible
in my zigzag way to
give life some shape
as other, straight-line men do?

What if the world’s only
as green as girls baking
cakes and crows using fresh
sprigs to build old old nests?

(from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)

Poems for Guyana’s First Lady (& Her Man)

2009-02-11T03:26:00.000-08:00

[Where to turn, in your heart of sudden darkness, when you’re locked out the bedroom, and mosquitoes in waiting swarm over that kneeded body shivering in Sati’s nighty? To sniffing cross-eyed bloggers in heat for scandal? Or columns in newspapers sworn to protect the entitlement of the nation’s First husband?

The shame of that. His wretched country. The shame.

Suniye! There’s another way out: just two clicks through the forest; past the bastard’s cave, the victims backtracking. We choose our mates, not our unruled desires. So be a tigress, lady. Turn again to poets who understand one night you’d scratch or knock on Hillary’s door; ask to come in] – W.W.

For Jane Siberry

But tenderness is hard
to inhabit. Skins and masks
to be shed. Every act is
a pretence of yesterday’s.
The pain of love, what more, what?
These stirrings of raincloud.
(from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)

To A Wife

Your obsession with your duty makes
you customs officer
to my love: I have nothing

to declare of it to you even
though the most secret pouch
of my heart is full of this

golden drug that you once discovered
and seized for no reason
but that it made you feel full

of power. But love overbears itself,
can’t stand the weight of its
own fruits of repetition

and sleep. Yet I hope mine can still move
you before you become
one more warden of the jail

where love locks itself, itself to think
free, a captive serving
life, an artist of escape.
(from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)

Angels

fall off their clouds
of care to become fools
who walk tightropes and fall
off cliffs only to learn
how to turn into safe
burghers who step sideways,
around and back or not
at all, till they fall off
their rugs of calm to turn
shocked back into angels.
(from “The Gift of Screws” by Brian Chan)

Sexy Voice You Could Trust?

2009-01-13T09:08:00.000-08:00

If you’re a bookstore browser who likes reading first pages or paragraphs before buying, here’s an interesting challenge. The opening sentences from book # 1(A Mercy, the latest novel by the American author Toni Morrison): “Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark – weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more – but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth.”

And here, the opening paragraph of book #2 (Molly and the Muslim Stick. by the British/Guianese author David Dabydeen): “Once upon a time – the night of Wednesday 26th October 1933, when I was fifteen – it happened. It. It. The dripping down my thighs. Sticky, then thickening to treacle. As bloody as flesh from Leviticus.”

If you put aside the authors’ reputation and your book spending limits, the choice still seems difficult. You might wish to escape headlines of world economic woes. There’s so much chatter, so many messages streaming at you through headsets or hand-held devices. You might long deep down for a full-bodied text or voice you could trust.

Those opening lines from Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008) with its fairy tale overture, the promise of modern-day horror wrapped like sticky confection, could be the welcoming hand to lead you away.

The American writer Mark Twain once said, “What you have not lived you cannot write about.” Toni Morrison might decline a response to that; but David Dabydeen would beg to differ. His altruistic research skills have been hard at work over the years, scrutinizing oil paintings, reconstructing stages & events in imperial past history with praise-winning results: Turner, The Counting House, A Harlot’s Progress, to name a few.

This time around Molly invites you to consider the case of a woman who has been sexually abused by her father.

Amazingly she endures. She goes to college; she becomes a teacher and travels to Guiana, spreading her tale with gush and acrimony even as her behavior spirals into the obsessive right before your eyes. Or right before your ears. For Dabydeen urges you to listen to her voice, and follow her travels from abuse to compulsion as filtered through his high class-accented prose.

In Part I Molly sounds like an improbably heroic survivor. Her family history is laid out in sharp, short sequences. You feel as if you’re sitting beside her, turning the pages of the family album. Here she is evading her mother’s miscarriage (“I was snug in her womb”); and as a teenager in the local library, “reading productively – the legends of Greece and Rome, the lives of great historical figures.”

Her father, the abusive brute who once shoveled coal in Accrington, Lancashire in the 1930s, invites his pals home to get jolly with his daughter’s body (“from the age of fifteen into my twenties”). Here’s Molly again, an emblem of uncanny female forbearance: “When the pals departed, Dad would come and lie beside me, seeking the shelter of my swollen breasts, and I would listen to the drip drip drip of his guilt along my thighs”.)

[It. It… Drip drip drip. Readers are reminded to bring their own rhythmic breathing to Dabydeen’s prose. There’s the history of English Literature running softly like the Thames through all his fiction; but not much music in his British/Guianese bones he can truly call his own.]

You might anticipate harrowing developments, demons to be fought off, Molly’s young life “devastated” by all that has happened to her; plus some small hope of redemption (Molly meeting an older man who reminds her of her father, a kinder man.) But that would be so second-tiered, so third world. Dabydeen’s novel responds to a higher aesthetic calling; and that body of Molly’s manages to tidy itself and attempt a surreal resurgence of spirit.

She escapes her house of sexual helplessness; she redefines desire; and, packing as much “joie” as she can in her ravaged “vivre”, she goes off to college.

There she makes new friends, Corinne and Terrence, and attends lectures on Keats and Wordsworth. Her overridden appetite opens new folders. Terrence becomes her partner in torrid (or torrid depictions of) college sex and purging college introspection.

We learn she has a hip problem and must now walk with a stick. Her father dies. Her walking stick starts talking to her: “You’re no more than a fond and hopelessly failed woman.” Molly talks back to Stick. There are pages of ranting & disarray (locked up in a boarding house, or wandering the streets) – valuable grist, to be sure, for literary scholars in waiting.

As the narrative gathers momentum Dabydeen gets into a short-story rhythmic stride, his images moving fast, sketching and plumbing new depths in Molly’s self-devolution. Keeping pace depends on how willingly you give in to Molly’s voice which can be wearying at times with its troubled insistence; though there are discursive intervals as Molly and her friends probe the strange gelatinous substance that now owns her life.

Her doorbell rings often. People leave mysterious packages or deliver messages. Molly had talked as if her behavior were “predestined”; so when a stranger out of nowhere appears at her doorstep – a half-naked, shivering boy-man, exuding an unwashed “alchemy of aromas” – she becomes infatuated with him (“He’s harmless, poor thing, and far from home.”) and his aura of transpersonal convergence.

The stranger is from Dabydeen’s Guiana. He speaks a language that requires translation. He’s taken in, cleansed of his jungle residue and christened Om (not Adam.) After much enriched conversation it becomes apparent that the novel, which has been doing a hop, skip and jump – from Nov. 1918, through two world wars, across cultures and over memory ditches – will follow a narrative arc that takes Molly to Guiana. She arrives on the shores of Demerara in Jan. 1957.

On the surface her mission is to search for Om. She has been stirred by the “injustice of his deportation” (there are other imperatives embedded in her violated and off-centred “consciousness”.) Soon Molly’s issues are no longer prosaic, or even psychosexual. Guided by the author’s own pedagogical imperatives the novel transitions into metaphysical adventurism, its higher purpose realized in letters sent home like blog posts from a delirious English patient.

The letters describe swift passage through Georgetown; a journey to Om’s village up the Demerara river, passing through Edgar Mittelholzer’s Kaywana territory (“We left at dawn, the engine chugged and sputtered and smoked and cut off and started again”.) There among Mittelholzer’s Amerindians – in scanty loin cloth and feathered headdress, going about their river routines and unobtrusive semi-mythical lives – Molly finds moments of quietude; then moments of uncertainty, until Om appears.

Weeks of lazing in a hammock – “the women bring me food…I drink from the calabash as from a sacramental cup” – encourage wonderment about Walter Raleigh and those earlier journeymen who searched for El Dorado; dreamy observations about the jungle and its natives (the Amerindian cassava “liquor fermenting in my mind”); and “dream states”, since at this point her body’s tender history of abuse & seduction seems no longer important.

And then this invitation: Om wishes to take Molly to a Guiana waterfall. It’s a chance, since she’s travelled this far from the screwery of the past, to reconfigure her life trajectory, redeem the ‘poor thing’ of her soul. Will she come?

Aha, some readers will snap: we know where this is going: a boat crew will take her deep into Wilson Harris’ hinterland, into Wilson Harris’ marvellous inscrutability – the Palace? exalted insight & true understanding? Well, not exactly. There is no boat crew this time. Nor is Om, the mysterious Guianese deportee, in any mood to defy the language boundaries of the novel.

When it’s all over – in a giddy swirl of finale imagery – you might think: how extraordinary! Molly and her creator working their prose off in an art house of intricate fiction: inviting you to marvel at a curious case of female self-absorption: framing issues so that you start thinking of women you know, or met once, whose lives have been singularly messy.

But Molly, for some readers, might prove too author-fondled, too scholarly indulgent a model for our seriously knocked up times.

Whether you’re enchanted or unmoved by the fevered running of Dabydeen’s prose depends. In a surreal sense that river of allusions & images always in spate through his fiction has begun to resemble a factory of allusions & images supplying his fiction. Still, you can rest assured Molly & Dabydeen, like open-collared celebrities at a conference table, would be happy to take your comments & questions.

You could say, for instance, you consider Molly and the Muslim Stick a bloody marvellous book. And that with all its subtextual moanings & heavings, the grim, incredible sex, you had a bloody marvellous, uprumptious time with it. Molly for one would be pleased to hear you say that.

Book Reviewed: Molly and the Muslim Stick: David Dabydeen: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, England: 2008: 179 pgs.

Outsider Poet in Residence

2008-12-17T04:01:00.000-08:00

Macmillan (Education) Publishers continues its student-friendly series of Caribbean writers with Selected Poems: Ian McDonald (2008). As a book destined for classroom handling and study it would seem an admirable choice.

The front cover carries a retro-young photo of the author – wavy-haired, open-collared and pensive as a cricketer – that might flutter a few Sixth form student hearts. The back cover prepares you for a poet with “an open heart” who writes about “Guyana’s characters and events, its landscape, traditions and myths”. There’s an effusive biographical introduction by Edward Baugh, Emeritus Professor of English at the UWI, himself a poet of Jamaica.

It should all make for high student participation and exciting teacher lesson plans.

Interest will be keen on McDonald’s roots: born in Trinidad (he began writing poetry in the sixth form); entered Cambridge University in 1951 (where he captained the Cambridge lawn tennis team); joined the Bookers Group Committee in Guyana in 1955, and eventually became Director of Marketing and Administration for the Guyana Sugar Corporation. He has lived in Guyana ever since.

“So poetry was not his first and only occupation, his mission in life,” someone might ask, pushing for comparisons with native son Martin Carter even before the first poem is read. “And we don’t have too many intertextual connections to hunt down for homework, as in T.S. Eliot’s Poems.” Nor are the poems as overwrought & dream-enraptured as the poetry of Wilson Harris with its skydiver’s view for a scholarly few.

Flipping through the pages students might discover the poem: “A White Man Considers the Situation” with these opening lines:
Perhaps it is time to retreat from these well-loved shores.
The swell heaves on the beach, angry clouds pile:
The surf is ominous, storms are coming.
I see I am a tourist in my own land:
My brutal tenancy is over, they all say

At this point there might be a puzzled classroom silence. An imaginary, brooding student, indifferent to assignments & grades, could be drawn.

What is this thing, the poet’s life? why in Guyana are they constantly “considering the situation”? what is “the situation’? when did the “surf” on the beach turn “ominous” for this G/town poet? And whazzup with “tourist in my own land”? “my brutal tenancy”?

Around these adolescent questions creep thorny grown-up issues. Was poet McDonald ever “involved” or “consumed” like other Guyanese poets and non-poets? Did his “intellectual authorship” at any point raise the slightest suspicion? And why is he not a hyphenated (as in ‘Indo-Guyanese’) poet? How come he’s free to be unflinchingly his name? like the intrepid newspaper-builder, the late David de Caries? unencumbered men, sure of themselves, with a greenhouse passion for the arts & literature?

Unsettling, not always relevant questions.

They invoke a level of inquiry and analysis not usually encouraged outside classrooms. Or if engaged, rarely handled with intelligence and care. Our divided constituents prefer their “achievers” (with thin skins or swelled heads) to wear laurels or titles of office like tribal headdress: not to be sullied by “sensational” talk, nor probed by “biased” thinking. While character flaws and ethics questions get covered up in communal & colonial hush hushness.

Besides, there’s so much else in the collection to engage student interest, much more transparent, eminently teachable stuff.

The accessible sensory images, for instance: “In the green pool where the milk-bit cascadura is caught at morning/I meet my girl whose breasts have the scent of the sun-dried khus-khus grass.” Quotable, comment-provoking insights: “Most life is ice-melt/bells through sea-mist/dark coming home and hurrying.”

And there’s McDonald’s camera-eye for “characters” and scenic places (colonial and fading now); his Schomburgk-like search for a port of entry into the heartland of his adopted home; for a place to lose his alien-resident virginity, which finally he finds under “the star-entangled trees” of his well-loved Essequibo.

The more adventurous student is bound to make comparisons with regional poets. With Derek Walcott, for instance. Both men grew up in an education era encircled by European culture. In Walcott’s case the great man has reportedly built a silo of metaphors culled from his readings in great literature. The publication of his Omeros is perhaps its finest emblem.

McDonald’s world Lit immersion is more evident, students will note, in his newspaper Arts columns at the core of which he references the work of writers he admires (and sometimes urges readers to recite aloud): Czeslaw Milosz, William Blake, Zbigniew Herbert. In his Selected Poems, however, you will not come across Greek-named fishermen. You’ll find a gallery of local-named characters: “Jaffo the Calypsonian”, “Yusman Ali, Charcoal Seller,” Nurse Sati Guyadeen, Manuel Perfection.

And, stretching comparisons beyond exam rubric limits, students will remark on Walcott’s painterly approach to verse, the rich indigenous textures of his canvas. While in McDonald’s collection, they might argue, it’s more a case of apertures and lens, a tourist excitement at capturing with Kodak clarity unusual behaviours in wide river regions. For this task, a pleasing dexterity of tone and image is his poet’s way.

McDonald is not a fortunate globe traveler. His Essequibo is evidence of his accepted geographical limits. When he isn’t sounding off in the newspapers on IMF or EPA or “the truth about life” issues, he is your earnest daytripper to our forest Interior; the sports devotee who returns to grounds of high endeavour for a new day of Test cricket.

Still, that clever CAPE student is bound to make a prediction: one day we may refer to Ian McDonald’s Guyana the way people talk about Ian Fleming’s Jamaica.

Selected Poems is a valuable record of the poet’s productive life from the 1950s to the 1990s in Guyana, a well-organized collection for teachers to work with. Many poems are filled with the kind of arresting material you’d find in a spare novel – anecdote, exoticism, melodrama, neatly-imaged anguish. Non-students could read the collection as an antidote for all that’s absurd and substandard in our social fabric; or as McDonald’s conversations with himself, or with poet friends, in a country where public discourse is often crass & blame-throwing. The temper of our times.

There’s little trace anywhere of Martin Carter’s all-consuming search for modes of “involvement” in our nation’s affairs.

Instead McDonald assumes a committed observer’s perch: not taking political sides; if troubled, treading softly like a blogger in slippers (“Affairs in the young Republic do not go well./ Problems weigh like stones on every man” ); offering elegiac – and cloying, sometimes bemused – lines that usually lament loss and deformities in our human capital: those Mercy Ward patients trapped in “recurring routines” & “strange dreams”; our Georgetown of “no beauty”, no havens of refinement; host now to a grid of policy generators for whom the nation & its people are stubborn unfinished chapters in a doctoral thesis, wanting always sympathy, unending sacrifice, time.

Some Arts page readers have been tempted to steeuupps at his airy Sunday musings (the Stabroek columns have developed a powdered puffiness over the years); but the measure of McDonald’s pledged allegiance should not be taken lightly.

In a Republic of (B minus) power players & frequent power failures, our guytimes of desperate oil-search and routine barbarisms, there’s the often ignored conundrum: cherish or perish the poet, that wayfarer of unfiltered truth who volunteers his creative and working life in service to our new dominion. The McDonald for our nation.

Book Reviewed: Selected Poems: Ian McDonald: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2008: 121 pages.

Cry Tough: Alton Ellis (1938 – 2008)

2008-12-02T10:20:00.000-08:00

A brief report in the NYTimes (10/17) on the death of Jamaica’s singing legend Alton Ellis – the editors must have sensed there was Times reader interest in his career and passing – gave snippets of personal information that always hits readers with surprise, filling in gaps of knowledge for those C/bean music fans who know only his old-style music and the pleasure it gave.

Among the bits: born and raised in Trenchtown, like Bob Marley; lived in Middlesex, England for nearly two decades; cause of death, multiple myeloma, a form of bone cancer; one of the exponents of 60s rocksteady, “a sweeter, slower sound that formed the bridge between the hard-driving brass of ska and the rebel reggae that Marley later spread”; father of more than 20 children; and financially robbed of revenues for his music over the years (the last two details not as entirely unrelated as they may seem).

For students arriving at the UWI (Mona) campus Ellis and rocksteady music were a form of initiation into the island’s vibrant music culture. Waking to morning sounds would never be the same for this music lover.

In Guyana in the 60s you woke up to the radio of imported music (from India), pleasing in its own sentimental-retro way; evoking ethnic-rural reverie; and uplifting spirits for the working day in villages and cane fields. In Jamaica at sunrise on cold Mona Heights mornings Marcia Griffiths (singing “Feel like Jumping”) suddenly felt just right. Her clear, buoyant songs still pop up to spin on my turntable of memories.

To new resident ears rocksteady encouraged curiosity about the source of its material, the creative island spirit – “tougher than the world,” as Ellis sang – that under the hardest destitution refused to wilt.

The music was not always at easy reach on island radio stations. You had to venture out – the way people once went out to jazz clubs – to venues in and around Kingston to experience that blast of grassroots energy. Before they became accessible on discs the Cedric Brooks’ horn arrangements & the drumming of Count Ossie were heard in afternoon ‘grounation’ settings barely advertised in the local media. The venues and the music left indelible imprints. Tourists and transients and accidental researchers found a path to the island’s soul.

Alton Ellis’ music was usually a short trip away, at dance venues. At the student union, an open-air venue on the ledge of a valley, curvy dance rhythms threatened to sweep you up & away in pleasure-filled balloons even as the taut bass lines held you rooted to the earth.

Ellis’ vocals, which sometimes strained at intense high registers, didn’t grip you in that honey smooth way Ken Boothe’s did; or Toots Hibbert’s with its gritty parish roots. His reputation rests on those classic dance hits. “Girl I’ve got a date” “Better Get Ready, Rock Steady”, “Can’t stand it” (that pounding big-boned bass) and “Change my Mind” defined for a 60s generation moments of unbelievable promise & pleasure.

Rarely did his music invite you to listen; though “Cry Tough (cause you know you’re getting old)” with its hint at human mortality, those anticipatory images of rice & peas and church bells (in “Ooooyeah, Sunday’s Coming”) and “Going back to Africa” demonstrated a range not limited to romantic sets and clichés about “a girl to love”.

People muttered that Ellis perhaps had been too enamored of imported sound, doing covers of foreign hits and steering clear of disgruntled Rudie culture (“Rudie at Large”). It’s worth remembering that Marley would start in a fairly similar groove of apprenticeship, doing early covers before turning full-beard champion of the Rudie/Natty dreads railing against baldhead injustice.

And in fairness Ellis made those imported hits supremely danceable. Who would have ever imagined dancing back in the days to anything by Blood, Sweat & Tears until the Ellis blues-tinged version of “You make me so very happy”?

[Often submerged beneath the artist’s fame and consumer pleasure is Ellis’ struggle with unscrupulous promoters. That struggle, like that of the legendary Phyllis Dillon, and their eventual departure overseas, makes for heartbreak discovery. It’s a reminder of the callous side of the music industry back then: how it squeezed young artists dry of faith; left their field labours often unpaid. And the bitterness that would settle like salt in their souls.]

Jamaica’s music generosity of spirit, its talent for wrapping dance forms and song around themes of sorrow, memory, love and dread, is embedded in the island’s culture. The music was a catalyst for ambitious campus thinking back in the days. Student minds began to envisage an arc of shared human capital stretching over islands and sea and linking related territories. It would encourage the exchange of service and residency, clear roadways for a wider regional understanding.

Against that background a recent observation by author George Lamming sounds “profoundly” ominous. Based on the latest assessment the student body at the UWI (Jamaica) campus now comprises 95% Jamaicans. We have witnessed, he suggests, a return to that miscellany of (proud but) insular little states.

These are narrow, fallow times in the region, oui!

Ellis’ death coincided with a ‘groundings’ conference (10/16-10/18) on the Mona campus to mark the anniversary of the Walter Rodney street protests in 1968. It also recalled the island’s symbiotic relationship with a generation of Guyanese students.

Hurricanes and delusional behaviours have fogged up the windows that once allowed these two nations, Jamaica and Guyana, to view and enter each other’s territorial experience. Given the dance hall brand of island riddims (that seems stuck in chord-killing monotone); and considering the self-segregating cultural ignorance that appears to shape governance & “vision” at that sagging end of the regional spectrum, there seems little chance of reinvigorating that cross-fertilizing movement of minds & talent.

At least for awhile – and for a generation not dancing much these days – there was pulsing hope. Events of that 2008 October week will encourage reflection on what might have been, the possibilities for vital, lasting connections, the once soaring idealism.

Alton Ellis’ work might not attract the sometimes tedious and overlanguaged commentary of cultural scholars (an NY radio station paid a four-hour, all-music tribute recently); but the dance hits will endure.

And for a pre-Marley student generation (Hi, Carroll!) there’s an immovable cache of memories: those blissful (“Ooooyeaah!”) Saturday nights, the crisp October Sunday mornings; the ‘cry tough’ sound of Alton Ellis rocking steady, spurning the tick tock of reckoning time.

1823: Blood, Sex & Angst

2008-11-22T09:21:00.000-08:00

1823 might one day come to be regarded as a hinge year in Guyana’s historical development, outsignifying other years and events, like 1834 in Essequibo, or 1763 in Berbice. And some good day when our nation is brimming with prosperity, and can boast a film studio and film-making talent, someone might secure the financing to make a movie or documentary based on events of that year.

1823 saw the uprising of slaves on the Demerara plantations in what has been described as “one of the most massive slave rebellions in the history of the Western Hemisphere”.

It has inspired several books, the most acclaimed so far “Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood” ( 1997) by the Brazilian professor (History/Yale) Emilia Viotti da Costa. This book is recognized as a serious work of reconstruction, well researched, careful with facts and the nuances of relations among the many power players. But long before the publication of that scholarly work there was Ratoon (1962), a novel by Christopher Nicole.

Based on events of the same year Ratoon takes fictional liberties with the historical record. In an author’s note Nicole states that incidents described in his book were “based on eyewitness accounts of what actually took place”; but the main characters were invented.

The novelist like the professor attempts a many-angled chronicle of events, though for his purposes Nicole inflates the number of slaves involved in the uprising from the estimated 12,000 to a potential 20,000. Nicole’s fiction covers those history-altering days in prose that feels confident if at times distant from (to use George Lamming-like words) the profound implications of that human tragedy.

The locus of the novel is the Elisabeth Plantation House. It stands in an almost exotic setting, “in the centre of a carefully created paradise of soft green lawns, deep flower beds brilliant with multi-coloured zinnias, and borders of heavenly scented jasmine and spreading oleander bushes.” Beyond it, the slave compound, a vegetable patch; then the chimney of the boiling house, the canefields and irrigation ditches.

Readers get a sense of what life was like for slaves and slaveholders in East Demerara villages stripped now (though not completely) of their colonised character – Plantation Nabacalis, Plantation Le Ressouvenir, Le Reduit, Vryheid’s Lust, Mahaica, Felicity, Success.

We are guests at the August meeting of the Demerara Racing Club in Kitty, “a teeming, brilliantly coloured ant-heap, winning and losing, drinking and sweating, betting and gossiping”. At Camp House, the Governor’s Residence “overlooking the silt-discoloured estuary of the Demerara River” , we listen in as Governor Murray and Captain Bonning argue over what to do about rumours of slave insurrection, and how to deal with the insurgents. We’re curious as the young English missionary John Smith passes by “astride an emaciated mule, proceeding slowly up the coast.”

Nicole seems very much attuned to the speech rhythms of the ruling white oligarchy (“Ah, Bonning,” Murray called. “Resting your men. Good. And this is Packwood? Come inside with me, my man.”) He is on less certain ground with his “invented” creole-slave talk (“She done sleeping. And it time. She going feel them blows for she life.”) which often sounds invented, and might dismay regional linguists; though no one can be sure what creole voices sounded like in 1823.

Employing old-fashioned chapter headings (“There will be Great Alarm”, “An Army will be Assembled”) Nicole catches the state of heightened anxiety in the colony.

As the anti-slavery lobby gains momentum overseas, slaves hear rumours of freedom promised, freedom delayed. Planters offer quick reforms. They’ll do away with the whip as “an institution” of overseer control in the fields; and they’ll stop the flogging of women. But they draw the line at a proposal from that firebrand missionary John Smith (and his “over-conscienced preaching people”) to grant Sundays off to the working slaves. That would mean too many lost days of production. Their investment in estate and human property was already under threat with all the talk of emancipation back in England!

The central characters in Ratoon are born-in-Guiana natives: Joan Dart, daughter of a plantation owner Peter Dart, but not “representative” of Demerara white women. Unmarried (at twenty six) she had spent all her life in Guiana and had come to view Plantation Elisabeth as “home”. Then there’s Jackey Reed, “a young negro, tall and slim”, fascinated with the crusading ideas & energy of the young missionary John Smith. He adopts Christianity and joins the movement plotting the slave revolt.

Their dissimilar plantation-creole identities converge one fateful day. Jackey Reed makes a break for freedom but is pursued, captured and placed in the stocks by Peter Dart who, multiple heartbeats later, collapses and dies. In that instant his daughter must assume owner responsibilities.

Joan Dart had kept her father’s books; she had helped him run the plantation after his wife died. But at the moment when she must give the order for the branding and flogging of a runaway, she hesitates.

It is a cathartic moment. With responsibility suddenly thrust upon her, Joan Dart begins to weigh issues of ownership, belonging (“Sugar and heat and mud were in her blood”), the moral welfare of slaves, and the plantation as “home”. Later when the leadership role is thrust upon him, Jackey Reed, too, is forced to grapple with issues: of duty to his race, the unchristian values of his “Congo” brothers who indulge “their Damballas and their cane rum”; and an eruptive desire for Joan Dart whose white body “behind the thin muslin” stands six feet away from him in the stocks.

The order to flog and brand is given, but the troubled new plantation owner pays an uncharacteristic visit to the plantation dispensary to view the flesh-torn body of her first flogged slave. It’s the start of a process she will try hard to reverse, the granting of personal identity and humanity to her father’s slaves.

After the first 100 pages – of Dart family dispute, slave restlessness, gathering clouds & screaming kiskadees – the weighty issues blur into background, and the revolt gets under way. It is the night of Sunday August 17, 1823.

Nicole switches reader attention between the clashing forces, tracking the shift in fortunes with movie-making craft. There are scenes & set pieces & torrid images of violence and battle and rape; the slaves celebrate prematurely, settling scores and drinking free rum. Slave-General Jackey Reed’s hope for an insurrection without casualties is quickly dashed. He argues with his co-conspirators (Gladstone, Obadiah, Quamina, Cato of Felicity, Paris of Good Hope) over tactics, and is alarmed at how quickly the slave will to fight evaporates after early setbacks.

The outnumbered whites rally to the sabres of Capts Bonning and McTurk. They, too, argue over tactics, about what might happen if they advance precipitously, or fail to rescue in time the white women on faraway plantations. Their fusiliers fall upon the hastily armed bands (who are convinced their superior numbers will carry the day), sabre blades chopping, the muskets raining fusillades of shot on routed slaves. With an eye for period detail Nicole sets it all down in pages of entertaining, episode-driven prose.

And as in old Hollywood movies where amidst exploding ordnance or circling Indians a hero takes time out to cradle the head of a dying man and share dying seconds of conversation, Nicole at the height of the insurrection has his conflicted couple meeting and slipping off to share tense moments in the canefields. At issue, whether they should commit fornication.

Joan Dart, fighting back a “spasm of shudders” in her thighs, reminds Jackey Reed he is six years younger, in her eyes still a boy; and for all intents and purposes still a slave. He reveals the lust he harbours for her, and the Christian faith that has kept these feelings locked away. In any case, he reminds her, he’s in control now of the plantation.

They argue back and forth for several pages, sorting through fears and desire, until Nicole’s pen decides the issue for them: “Her arms moved of their own volition wrapping themselves round his neck in a paroxysm of delicious agony”.

If there’s a governing idea in his “explosive bestseller” novel, Nicole points to issues of intercultural curiosity, evolving identity and individual freedom (albeit at an unformed, ratoon stage) that engulf the two natives of Plantation Guiana; and how easily an eruptive interest in “the other” can be swept away in the tide of “events”. Not that this is news to tribe-wary & warring Guyanese who still observe each other’s ways and means through averted plantation eyes.

First published in 1962, round about the time a self-ruling Guyana was teetering toward those US/GB-engineered “racial disturbances”, Ratoon is routinely mentioned among the best-known published works of Guyanese fiction. For some readers it might appear to trifle with grave historical matters. Christopher Nicole, its 1930 Guiana-born white author who resides overseas, must have had personal reasons for inventing & inserting his characters in the maelstrom of that pivotal year. The book is hard to find these days (back in the ‘60s it was available for US.75cts at airport bookstores).

To bring lyrical closure to the predictable course of events Nicole serves up an invented coda to remind readers his novel is not just about a doomed uprising and an impossible romance.

Captured and held hostage for awhile, weary and disheveled from lovemaking in the canefields Joan Dart is rescued by a Colonel Leahy (“How long have you been like this…? Anderson get a carriage… Damnation. Have a litter made, then, and I want four of your strongest men.”) But in the very next minute, on receipt of “an express from Mahaica Post” delivered by a horse militiaman, he places her under arrest for consorting with the enemy.

Readers interested in how the colonial justice system dealt with straying (repressed then impetuous) white women must get through the last 30 pages to see how that turns out; see if Joan Dart gets to go home again.

Those pages might also encourage the kind of discourse on ‘broader issues’ regional academics take pleasure in – ‘the whole question of the role and responsibility of native white proprietorship in C/bean society’. Though not a few might argue that Ratoon with its blood-heated inventions is not a useful place to start this inquiry.

Book Reviewed: Ratoon: Christopher Nicole: Bantam Books/St Martin’s Press: New York, 1962, 246 pages.

Divergent Fates: Ikael Tafari

2008-09-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

1

When he entered the University of the West Indies (Mona) in the late 1960s his name was Michael Hutchinson; a former student of Harrison College, Barbados (one of the island’s elite high schools); from a privileged white family. When he returned nine years later to his island home he had changed. He was Ras Ikael Tafari, lush beard wearer of his new faith, and fierce believer in the prophetic eminence of Haile Selassie I.

He would join the faculty of Social Sciences UWI (Cave Hill) as lecturer. From his campus base he would become active in Pan African affairs, joining the Pan African Commission in 1997. In 2004 he was appointed its director.

The task here: how to explain the transitions and transformation of this extraordinary individual?

He was a student during the Walter Rodney street upheavals in ‘68. So volcanic was that event it would take many years for the fallout of cultural values and assumptions to resettle. A rearrangement of the social boundaries between blacks, browns and whites was in full swing in the early 70s. Had he chosen a different island campus (say, St Augustine) or faculty programme (Medicine) he might have been sufficiently insulated from events & temptations of the time.

Many students, bearing the heaviness of parental expectations, elected to rise above the turmoil. They stayed focused on tertiary aspirations, arguing, this is not my island; no need to feel connected. It seemed a rational, commonsense approach. It was adopted by, for instance, many Indians from Trinidad, many blacks from the Bahamas.

Ikael’s immersion into the Nyabinghi faith was gradual. Changes in his features were the first signs of inner transformation: from clean-faced innocence to facial hairiness, marijuana’d eyes, his general appearance roughened-up as if to blur his distinctive island origins.

His language and modes of communing slowly altered. The tools of academic discourse were put aside or interspersed with the messianic I-Words of Rasta I-Manity. At times a self-conscious smile on his face seemed to question what he was doing: entering himself, entering the moment on the island.

But these were in many ways extraordinary post-Rodney times. Youth culture had been at the forefront of rebellious activity in European capitals (Paris in ’68). Some of that youth optimism carried over to the 70s in Jamaica where praises to ‘de youth’ formed part of an ascendant reggae romanticism.

At the same time a unique confluence of brilliant teachers, students, pioneers in thought and creativity had emerged in Kingston; young men & women in the prime of their intellectual & creative life: among them Vaughn Lewis, Kamau Brathwaite, Rex Nettleford (professors); Owen Arthur, Bruce Golding, Ralph Gonsalves (students) Bob Marley, U Roy, Count Ossie (music pioneers).

With minds & talents functioning at their highest capacity, the campus was bright with ideas for changing the course of Caribbean history & politics. Few were aware of the roles and destinies they would later be asked to fill.

Among his friends Ikael encouraged a kind of introspective “reasoning”, a variant of Walter Rodney’s “groundings” with the underclass. They were in effect interpersonal (I & I) “conversations”; confessional at the beginning, argumentative often; filled with student impulse and hypothesis.

Listening you sensed his anxiety about his blue-eyed identity, the “sins” of his privileged upbringing. He worried, too, about his postgraduate role in an intellectually unaccommodating region (how would he fit back in?). Jamaica offered a laboratory for experiment and redefinition.

In the 60s Jamaica was the island for transient souls eager to fulfill escapist longings. Playgrounds of pleasure could be found in its lovely music & liberating sex, in the fashion of dread and the bounty of marijuana. Tourists, who saw no need for caution in those days, flocked to the North coast to sample & indulge illicit freedoms. After Rodney “conscious” students discovered the wayward possibilities for (self) discovery if they ventured into the wards and valleys of Kingston.

In Ikael’s conversations there were early indications of what he would later become: the good shepherd of the Nyabinghi, its philosopher-scribe. Not just giving intellectual validation to the faith, or working in an advocacy role (as trade union rep, or academic housekeeper). He believed the Ras had the power to transform & rebuild the region’s human resources after the depredations of plantation. “Rastafari is the most important consciousness to have arisen in the 20th century.” he has said. The House of Nyabinghi would be his new psychic home.

Here our thinking diverged. It was hard to conceive of Rastafari as a transferable faith rippling down the Eastern C/bean islands. Surface aspects – the drumming & redemptive promises, the breakaway language constantly at war with local evil-doers and Babylon’s materialism – might appeal to groups languishing on the margins. But old ways and habits like seedbeds sometimes need raking up before new faith could take root.

Message and island might be viewed as incompatible. In his island home, for instance, the historical imbalance between colonizer and colonized had stabilized into a feel-safe working pact between tourist & islander, proprietor & resident. It was a pact for which there was unspoken consensus and measurable economic progress. To return to that context with messages of a radical reordering of lives, with calls to re-examine the collective well-being of former slaves, would raise anxiety levels. Barriers of resistance would go up.

In Jamaica tiny ironies caught your attention. Though “the masses” listened to the pro-active message in Bob Marley’s Get up, Stand up, and wept when they remembered Zion, their hearts – believing deliverance would come from above, not from abroad – felt comforted singing along to the bouncy hope of Max Romeo’s Let the power fall on I.

Our student minds turned often to issues of island sexuality. How to explain the nexus of unreflecting, carnal males, those luscious women, the batty-bwoy obsession? There were readily available theories linking behaviours to ‘persistent poverty’, ignorance, unemployable rude energies, the groiny power of the powerless (or the island’s peculiar legacy from the plantation – its testosterone blessings & curse.)

Whatever the cause, practices and norms could be changed, communities rehabilitated. Ikael was confident change would begin when islanders looked to Africa and embraced the transforming values & majesty of the Ras.

I followed his return through news and internet reports. I didn’t think he would complete his postgraduate studies. I imagined him remaining in Jamaica, hirsute beyond recognition, and missing a few teeth; having resolved to exchange the (material) trappings of one island for the (spiritual) wrappings of another

A newspaper interview in 2002 sounded ominous. In it he felt compelled to affirm (for aspersions were being cast) his blackness and black roots. (“My Creator has already decided by my mother’s line that I am black.”) He cited a Marcus Garvey’s definition of blackness in ardent defence. I had a flashback to colonial Guyana, and a half-white vagrant (named Walker) who defended himself when anyone looked at him hard. He’d screamed that he was “British”; children sometimes threw stones and called him, “Walker the nigger!”

In 2003 I heard of the launching of his book Rastafari in Transition: Politics of Cultural Confrontation in Africa and the Caribbean (1966-1988) Volume 1. He talked about the unfinished nature of “his work”; the dry interest shown by an old-thinking UWI academy. He issued apocalyptic warnings (“We are in the last hour of time. Look at Daniel 1, read from verse 36.”)

I read of his appointment in 2004 as Director of the Commission for Pan African Affairs – “I have waited a long time in my life for the opportunity to make this contribution.” – and the trust placed in him by the Barbadian Govt. The appointment was met with disquiet even in Rastafarian circles. Angry messages questioned whether a white Barbadian face was “truly representative” of Pan African affairs. (In 2008 it was reported he’d been “fired” from the position.)

As for death and its incalculability Ikael spoke back then with the coolness of indestructible youth, as if the lining of his lion heart could hold off the encroachment of mundane infections. (Statins and cholesterol were not yet a conspicuous part of the vocabulary of physical wellbeing.) Belief in the power of Jah, in the moral universe of the Ras would form a natural mystic firewall, unbreachable by the diseases of Babylon.

It is tempting to consider his state of mind in his last hours on earth. From all accounts he had gone to T/dad to deliver a lecture on African Liberation. At some point he complained of feeling unwell and returned to his hotel bed. Later he was discovered unconscious, and pronounced dead at the hospital (apparently of heart attack.) Difficult, then, to imagine the conversation with himself as he waited for that gathered cardiac storm to pass; as he slipped from “consciousness” into that silent zone (or Zion) of hereafter.

An extraordinary individual in a time of extraordinary events, he dared as student to leap into realities outside theory & textbook, mastering the knowledge he found there. He seemed determined to redirect the narrative of his life, to construct a new persona fusing elements from the African continent and his dismantled island psyche.

Those who joined his conversations will remember the way he showed up after days of island trod, looking loose, street-weathered, the blue eyes ablaze with new I-World “visions”; his metamorphosis in fevered progress. Sceptical as some of us remained, the conversations helped adjust our thinking about the world. His evolving faith-based sureness of self threw light on roads not taken, the labours of One Love now lost.

It was good and pleasant to know him. In those seminal student years he was Lion of the void. Yes, I.

(W.W.)

Colonial Triumph & Pain

2008-08-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

In June 1954 a group of Guianese schoolgirls left the island of Wakenaam, crossed the Essequibo river and traveled the coast to Suddie. Accompanied by a chaperon they assembled at the Suddie primary school for the purpose of taking the Guiana Scholarship exam. The test lasted one day and consisted of Arithmetic (mental and written), English (comprehension and Essay) and an Intelligence test.

The results were broadcast on the radio in dramatic tones. Among the scholarship winners from the Essequibo County was Mona Williams, the author of Bishops: My Turbulent Colonial Youth (1995). She was awarded one of 63 free places, and in Sept 1954 she was among 500 students beginning or continuing their education at Bishops High school.

The school, Ms Williams reminds her readers, was founded by English clergy for the daughters of English church members who had come out to the colony. By the time Ms Williams had won her scholarship there had been a guardedly slight darkening of student hue. Muslim and Hindu students “were dotted about in good measure”, but for the most part BHS was home to “the crème de la crème of the nation, in wealth, birth, brains and beauty.” It didn’t take her long to notice the degree of preferential treatment granted to white-skin students.

In the school’s main foyer, she explains, “there was something overwhelming about the framed Turners, Constables, Gainsboroughs and Michelangelo reproductions.” Imported English teachers “spoke their Oxbridge-accented Properly to me.” These stark polarities (in a colony agitating for self-govt.) – English Properly vs. Guianese Creole; “Lord, dismiss us with thy blessing” vs. “Zeg, zeg, zeg, Mama, zeg if yuh zegging”; Raleigh bicycles & Yardley’s Lavender talc vs. “our daily life in sweltering, equatorial, sea-level British Guiana” – are the main tracks on which the book’s narrative runs.

Bishops is a record of two adjoined worlds occupied by a poor black “country girl” who enters one of the elite education institutions in colonial Georgetown. Gradually she would be transformed into a student “girl warrior” (albeit a passive-aggressive warrior) doing battle with the representatives and designs of the Empire.

In the 50s the school’s colonial curriculum – which included “Treasure Island”, “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”, the early Middle Eastern Empires, Scottish dances, selected Overtures and Arias played to the entire assembled school – faced challenges from student interest in a burgeoning West Indian literature, their upstart curiosity stimulated by the voices being heard on the BBC – Henry Swanzy, Andrew Salkey, George Lamming, Sam Selvon.

To her questioning attitude the BHS “girl warrior” received stern, mannered responses. Her teachers would point to the unavailability of WI texts, their unsuitability. (Ms Williams suggests she might have been the only classroom challenger, her Guianese alter student working against the grain while deflecting teacher sarcasms.) In time, she says, she began to feel “as invisible as our absent artists”.

The political consciousness of that student generation – which in many notable cases resulted decades later in party-political activity – was slowly raised by events at home and overseas. It was a period in history not easily ignored.

Ghana’s Independence in 1957, Ms Williams recalls, had enormous impact on the black population in Guyana. After suspending Guyana’s constitution in 1953 the British authorities arrested members of the Jagan Govt. and locked them up in Sibley Hall. This last “event” forms the basis of an amazing piece of melodrama in Bishops.

Ms Williams describes a situation on Wakenaam where an unwary white tourist, strolling down the dusty road outside her school, is invited in by the Headmaster, escorted to the school stage and “seated with dignity”. The assembled students are led into singing “a nationalist song” (“Born in the land of the mighty Roraima”). The visitor is then subjected to an impromptu speech condemning the suspension of the constitution and demanding self-government for British Guiana.

He is thanked for listening, led off the stage, offered refreshment (coconut water and jelly) then waved on his way. Ms Williams records the event (and the Headmaster’s speech, word for word!) as if after all these years the sudden storm of it still blows in her memory.

Bishops was written during Ms Williams’ fellowship as “1993 Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.” This distant new residence, and generous new audience, might explain a noticeable embellishment of material pulled up from memory.

One can sense the author’s prose straining when, for instance, she writes of “the unfailingly bath-warm, mineral-dyed-brown, dangerous Demerara [river]”. Or when, upon hearing she had won the scholarship, she “[performs] an ancient, tribal, African-ritual victory dance.” Or the reference to “the women of my father’s ancestral Black village of Buxton [who] stood on the trainline and stopped the Governor’s carriage.” Guyanese readers will know what she’s talking about. They might wonder at the author’s host-indulging tone, and the exotic turn of phrase here and there.

Her triumph over adversity was grounded in the support she received from her (extended) family. With her father absent (he’d left for England when she was three) she gets shuttled around to “board with” various Aunts in Demerara. Her mother, a lowly-paid teacher working on Wakenaam, was determined to afford her the 1st class education promised by BHS. Her Granny Adrianna (brought over as a child from Barbados in the 1880s) was a rock of religious sustenance, nurturing her grandchild’s need to succeed with constant reminders of the family’s high expectations.

As Ms Williams looks back her book reveals moments of mistreatment & hurt the “country girl” received and felt keenly. After all these years they’ve proven difficult to erase. With just a trace of bitterness Ms Williams names names.

Like the headmaster at her Wakenaam school, Mr. McGowan (presenter of that fiery anti-colonialist speech to the unsuspecting white tourist) whose learning code of work & punishment (“Mummy, Mr. McGowan beat me till the blouse shred up.”) played a role in her scholarship success. He is acknowledged but hardly forgiven. Ms Williams observes that her “gratitude [to him] for my success was always overpowered by the smell of blood and the memory of pain”

And she mentions the cruelty of fellow students at Bishops who contrived to make her feel ashamed of her poverty background. (Yo, Cicely Rodway, if you’re out there: remember that day in 1956, walking down Brickdam to school? reminding Mona Williams she came from “a broken home”? and “feeling sorry for her”?)

As it shuttles between cultural modes (school and home) Bishops succeeds in conveying that Derek Walcott-like tension between the Englishness the author was taught to embrace and her upsurging creole intelligence. It also illustrates how, through self-conscious efforts in and outside the classroom, a process was set in motion to tweeze apart the interweave of personal and colonial narratives

At the same time it traces the parallel development of Ms Williams’ student talents – public speaking, singing (soprano), debating, storytelling. And most importantly dance.

For the latter she pays tribute to Guiana’s famed dance innovator Helen Taitt who opened the first School of Guiana Ballet. Not sure how she would pay for classes when her application was accepted, Ms Williams, with the kindness and encouragement of Ms Taitt, nevertheless joined the school. It would be the start of a life-long interest in the possibilities of blending Guianese and European dance forms. (Ms Williams was undeterred by fears the Guianese public might be loathe to accept the first “dying black swan” on the stage.)

What will strike readers is the author’s candid appraisal of her interior struggles. She arrived at BHS in 1954, she says, “rich in self-confidence and self-love”. After five (O-level) years and fairly respectable exam results the experience leaves bruises on her ego. At age sixteen the “country girl” admits to a temperament “full of [personal] conflicts… and a good deal of self-loathing.”

Ms Williams doesn’t pause long enough for explanation (there’s a hint at adolescent anxiety about physical attractiveness.) The narrative at this point is in its closing pages, rushing toward triumph at the end. She would return with calmer resolve for her senior (A-level) years and the rest, she would prefer to say, is history.

Ms Williams continued on to Stanford University, USA as a Fulbright Scholar; and to successful careers in dance, storytelling and writing children’s books. She is now a New Zealand citizen and (at the time of the book’s publication) a lecturer in English at a college of Education in her adopted homeland.

More than anyone Ms Williams is keenly aware that the tutelage of the 50s with its programs & “oppressions”, its actors & over^seers has passed on. (Shopkeeper minds might be tempted to make fodder of the loss/gain conundrums now that BHS is free at last from those European controlling narratives and rituals).

Her depiction of half-happy days growing up shoeless in Wakenaam and at Christianburg is engaging. The writing is enriched in places, with intermittent attempts at novelized prose and some lush creole talk; but Demerara in the 50s is reanimated with the same intensity in which it was lived.

A first of its kind, Bishops testifies to the courage & unflagging self-belief of a once-transcendent, now near-twilight generation: those students catalyzed in the 50s and 60s at (what sometimes is described disparagingly as) our “elitist” colonial institutions; the many fine young men and women schooled in an era of standards & discipline (the names of paradigmatic achievers like Walter Rodney and Rupert Roopnarine spring to mind); for whom the tertiary institutions abroad were the next frontier in personal fulfillment and emancipatory ideals.

Like Olympians they took off determined to clear any imperial hurdles placed in their way. Like Ms Williams many prevailed, then looked back (some came back) with a nod to their formative Guiana school years.

One thinks, for instance, of the internationally acclaimed Guianese pianist Ray Luck. Yo, Ray, if you’re out there: just for the record, how about a book describing your (maybe not so turbulent) student years at Queens College? back in the 50s? and the years after?

Book Reviewed: Bishops: My Turbulent Colonial Youth: Mona Williams: Mallinson Rendel Publishers Ltd, Wellington, New Zealand: 162 pages: 1995

“Part of an Age, or All Of Each Day”?

2008-07-02T07:45:00.000-07:00

“Part of an Age, or All

of each Day”?

Poet Brian Chan offers this crystal of existential choice to the Guyanese reader who during the (post)colonial period was stuck with the (pre)determinisms of Comrades Burnham & Jagan; and who with outward bound options shrinking these days might feel still fettered inside our national narrative of assiduously going nowhere.

Of course, the past still lingers, and History continues to undress itself for the scrutiny of hoary academic over^seers. But Chan has had his fill of “the past” and its recent restorations:

So the legacy of Englishness

and its weapon of the left-unsaid:

colonies abandoned to a mess

of incestuous whispers and stammered

tributes to indifferent ghosts by numb

men pretending hard (from Compensation)

It is never flattering to discover that, years after Independence, habits of truth-concealment, of bathing the memory of the dead, persist in our nation. It seems harder still for the Guyanese citizen to step past so much distress & dysfunction of our own making; tough to correct & manage that facing-forward backward nation-drift.

But given the patterns of frantic migration over the years, just who is the Guyanese citizen? and where does his soul reside?

These issues are at the heart of a new collection of poems The Gift of Screws (2008) which, after years in private circulation, has finally been released by its Peepal Tree publisher in England.

They are strange, hard-to-reach poems. They seem at first reading to be striving for a self-obscuring complexity. They owe a little to the colourful, nation-mapping explorations of Seymour, Carter, Harris and McDonald; they’re modernist in sensibility and cerebral in that hyperspatial Palace of the Peacock way.

Guyanese readers would have to give up so much that might be considered essential to survival today – give up old ethnic antagonisms that see evil & its minions in the other race; give up dead hero worship, though as Chan says “WE LIVING are only as bold as we entertain our ghosts”; give up the sex for favours exchange, narco-business runnings, street and public service modes of disregard.

Give up “words”, too, (“anything said can mean anything else/ and nothing can mean anything at all.”) for they only provoke the vapours of the barely-literate; or the blandishments of those Heritage gatekeepers who feed you a porridge of sad “memory” and separate “pride” but keep you locked in.

Martin Carter (b. 1927) once faced a similar dilemma. As living in Guyana became insupportable back in the socialist-experiment days he wrote of “the bafflement of speech”, the poet’s state of being confounded by the prescriptive thunder of political discourse. (He would have been silenced again and forever by the snarl & cold verdict of guns in the hands of those east coast/wild west phantom bandits). Carter eventually gave up and sank into gloom, shaping then publishing elegant lines out of misery.

Brian Chan (b. 1949) does a kind of inner retreat, slipping off into a world he has built around him. You could call it his dream space, his alternate reality. His poems suggest you could do the same with tools of the imagination – construct your own ark of salvation; or share his dream space if you like.

You’d be hard put to recognize his world the way Ian McDonald identifies places on the Essequibo coast as sources of self-transcendence. And it might be uncharitable to locate it floating in fine mists somewhere over the rainbow; or up past those epiphanic rapids of Mariella in Wilson Harris’ hinterland where, as they used to say in the 60s, ‘every thing is everythiinng’.

Chan strips away any tangible “local” or “landscape” identifiers. There’s an abstract anywhereness in his trimmed-down lines. Poems are filled with generic “fences”, “caves” “deserts”, “leaves”, “wind” and “ghosts”, so resolutely has the poet chosen to turn away from what is culturally discordant or ideologically confining outside his gate.

“Fences” and “caves” become metaphors for secretive habits, hidden biases and fears – colonial residue swimming like hookworm in the nation’s culture.

And yet, paradoxically, the image Chan chooses to define his existence is “the mud crab”, which makes him a sideways-moving creature or creation of Guyana. Not so much loving our mudland for its mud as accepting its reality. Since we did not inherit the mixed blessings of pristine-white, tourist-attracting beaches, he might be saying, we have only our hands, our imagination and our abundant green land.

For a mudcrab poet this could be a solitary, unpretty existence, “a loneliness of focus”; but that identity (with its “freedom from fetters”) once compelled him to get on with his task (“my real work of breathing”) as a citizen of a nation still slip-sliding on mudflats of coastal vanities.

At the same time Chan reveals a lofty but inclusive Guyanese way of “seeing”:

“in your eyes, other of myself, you who would dodge

the self that contains all,

all on different stages of the fiction of the flesh,

the flags of flesh we wave to one another, bridg-

ing chasms between spills

of identity, tags of separateness” (from In a Crowd)

Here again, as in a previous collection, Fabula Rasa, Chan brings to the nation the hope of coalescing our multiculturally-sliced, rancorous inheritance. He senses a subterranean longing in the lives of Guyanese to break out of ethnic enclavement, to toss aside the “fictions” and “flags”, the “tags” and “masks”. He sees a people worn down by the armor of tribal loyalty (“the weight of our mud and junk and dust”); wanting only freedom & newness, a productive lightness of being.

Chan lived through the fearful grandiosity that ushered in and celebrated our Independence in the 60s and 70s; and as a result he invites us to pay attention to “the sheer everydayness of our miracles”; how we survived the social & economic malaise that followed (and continues); forging through the insistent leveling of socialism, our resilience of spirit (or memory) intact even when Guyanese relocate to Richmond Hill or Brooklyn, NY.

His poems are hewn out of a self-effacing temperament. Even the titles eschew the grand entrance. They prefer like flowers of conversation simply to open up: “NO GHOST, like the ghost of what might have been/ for it is a lonely monster.”

If you start wondering with feminist concern whether there’s space in this poet’s world for women, some poems are dedicated to women; and, interestingly, the poem, To My Wife of Twenty Five Years in a rare burst of feeling honours the one who has been “my one elbower and hand-holder; compass and carriage.”

Chan shows his appreciation for their island of love “at whose midnight door I’m but the rapping wind/ while its oven, bed, roof and raft you remain/ under all clouds.” [Which might seem a lot to ask of any woman these days, to be “oven, bed, roof and raft”; plus “compass and carriage.” But in any event]

The Gift of Screws is stuffed with many terse poems which might be considered words sprinkled like water on nothing of consequence; and some squirrel-wary poems, the lines dovetailing neatly after a twitchy peek at the world. Most seem written with furrowed brow, allowing little humour, too serious to be simply enjoyed. Some read like anti-poems with omitted punctuation and with word-spacing and lines that run preternaturally free of literary expectations.

The shortest poem contains seven words. It’s a quickie of a poem artfully laid out on the page for reading then catching your breath: “AFTERWARDS As before: sated emptied waiting to begin.”

So how does this all add up? Is Chan an idealist who turned in and moved away, lifting his art & his vision above the rise and rule of mediocrity? A solipsist always in retreat, too far, too long removed from home to matter? Is he – like B. Wordsworth in VSNaipaul’s Miguel Street – searching through postcolonial rubble for “the poem that will sing to all [

Guyana

] humanity”?

In this new collection Chan’s talent continues to unsettle and poke at those ethnic-safe habits of looking at ourselves. It is not the slighted talent of an immigrant poet drumming for respect on sidewalks in “multicultural” Canada. The Gift of Screws is Chan’s third book of poems. Volume for volume he is the most noncompliant poet to emerge from Guyana’s shores in recent decades.

If you put aside for a moment the sterling poetic claims of Wilson Harris the Obscure; if poetry in Guyana (the written, not the perishable, word) somehow survives the seasonal flood waters, the gangsterous forces bursting through our doors and piling up our ravaged souls, Chan will probably stand out as a bold, innovative voice. His poetry, clearing up the ethnic cloudiness in our vision, would help us see with unsquinting eyes again.

The Gift of Screws is an émigré’s gift to Guyana’s new “developed” age, that next step in human advancement when we decide – shedding generations of colonial mistrust – to resist the drag down of transatlantic memories, those observances that now would ship us back to separate faraway times; when instead we embrace our common bonds; dare to inhabit our worlds as new men and women.

Chan’s word to the powerholders: can’t fly on one wing, yo!

Book Reviewed Gift of Screws: Brian Chan: Peepal Tree Press, England, England: 99 pgs. 2008

Desperate Lives: Gyals & Gyurls in NYC

2008-06-02T10:23:00.000-07:00

Calabash Parkway (2005) is the second novel by Guyanese author Brenda Chester DoHarris. Many readers might have heard of her first novel, The Coloured Girl in the Ring. Ms DoHarris has been its proud promoter and defender. That first book has been described as a coming of age novel set in Guyana of the 50s and 60s. The new book leaps forward to the 70s and 80s and could be described as a coming to America novel set in NYC.

Brenda Chester DoHarris is a professor of English at Bowie State University, Maryland, and a graduate of Columbia and Howard universities, receiving a PhD degree in English. Writing novels is a side profession she pursues with enormous conviction and hope.

Calabash Parkway is a labour-intense novel with a serious purpose and a studied appeal for feminist appreciation. It aims to pay tribute to Guyanese women; hardworking, still young, husband-looking women; with low wage-earning skills; “for whom love and romance were luxuries poor women could not afford”.

Back home they dream of escaping to America and later sending for their children. They meet men in New York city who understand these dreams, who make promises, but eventually betray them. Always ripe for disappointment & exploitation, they work illegally as housekeepers and store clerks, and link their love decisions to future US residency.

Throughout all the betrayal (the men in this novel are all shifty-hearted philanderers with few redeeming features) the women – raised in the 50s, you have to think, and taught the propriety of self-restraint – do not respond with palpable gestures of outrage (like, for instance, pouring cups of sorrel on the man’s good, good dress shirts).

The single act of retaliation is carried out by a black woman “with an uptown New York accent”, who shoots the Guyanese father of her child when it seems he’s getting ready to leave her.

Usually the women experience “nausea” and retreat to the bathroom to retch; but they carry inside them like a DNA code a quality that author DoHarris admires: “dogged insistence”; a silent-suffering, survivalist ethic.

The narrator is a graduate student pursuing studies at Columbia University. There she learnt to distance herself from “people trapped in the disposition of always framing the world in terms of the Western metropole.” In Calabash Parkway her mission is to work the opposite way, framing the world of her characters in memory-based, authentic Guyanese terms.

There are references, like markers of time passing, to Kitchener (singing “Drink a Rum an’ a Punch-a-Crème” at Christmas) and Johnny Braff (singing “It Burns Inside”); to Walter Rodney “the Guyanese scholar-politician”; the Belvedere hotel and “The Tides of Susanburg”; and “the soothing tropical breezes rustling through Le Repentir’s giant sentinel palms”. (This last, an example of Ms DoHarris’ lethargic word painting, offers some relief from her tendency to strait-jacket the behavior of her characters.)

There is, too, the familiar joke of foreigners who confuse Guyana with Guinea and Ghana; creole sayings like lacy embroidery stitching in and out the prose; and vivid descriptions of habits, places & rituals. All of which, aided by a glossary of 153 Guyanese colloquial terms, often give the narratives a paragraph-padded feel.

Even the female sensibility is recast in local imagery. A character, contemplating the law-breaking measures she must take to enter the United States illegally sees the situation as “a series of river rapids that she would be required to negotiate as she paddled her canoe upstream.” And DoHarris is very careful with ethnic vernacular. The East Indian women in her novel say, “Ow, gyal”; the Creole women say, “Hurry up, gyurl?”

There are touches of old century suggestiveness in DoHarris’ prose that fits neatly into her characters’ disposition. At high points of uncertainty her women are often “seized by a strong desire to”. Sexual intimacy is given a romantic old world (or soap opera new world) treatment: “That night in their nakedness, they discovered the delight of each other’s secret places…in the searing heat of their passion.”

A woman comes home to tell the husband she left in Guyana she’s found another man. He had found another woman while she was away. Some enchanted evening they exchange these bruising revelations, sitting on the seawall, “in the light of the full moon that hung over Demerara”.

The novel’s main character is an old friend of the narrator, not as educated, from Kitty village back in the 60s. When their paths cross again in 1979 on a subway train – “in the gritty, rumbling underbelly of metropolitan New York”; the professor/author slips often into passé sentences like that – the narrator is struck by “the destiny that drew us together again”. So much so, she discovers a new imperative: borrowing the tools of fiction she would document the sadness in the unsettled lives of “undocumented” women in New York city.

As with the novels of another writer/professor, David Dabydeen, readers must be patient with the author/narrator expositions on the characters’ culture, their roots, the socio-economic background – the framing of their idiosyncratic world, so that uninformed readers can get the big, widescreen picture.

As it moves along Calabash Parkway turns into a text that wants to be studied (through the lens of gender & culture), rather than a novel written for subway reader diversion. Among the Glossary notes, like a calling card to graduate students, DoHarris inserts an annotation about an East Indian character, Drupattie, and “the significance of Drupaudie in Hindu mythological lore”.

Ipod-toting younger readers swimming lazily through this DoHarris novel need to brace themselves for this kind of contextual undertow.

Against their wish, you suspect, her women are asked to lug a lot of extra baggage, for page after page, from village to city. They’re helped along by the narrator’s earnest voice-over, for Professor DoHarris feels a lot of “explaining” is necessary about their choices, their constantly victimized state. In a tough, masculinized world the narratives of struggling Guyanese women, their longing for security & family wholeness, are after all very serious business.

Contact with other ethnics in Calabash Parkway is marginal – such is the tunnel vision & urgency of Ms. DoHarris’ immigrant lives – but vitally important. When they do appear ethnics tend to show their cleavage: like the elderly Jewish couple, survivors of the Holocaust, kind and compassionate to Evadne, their Guyanese housekeeper; or the white middle-aged officer in Georgetown interviewing visa applicants with suspicious, “steely grey” eyes.

Near the end of the novel there’s a brief report – a remnant dropped in as if half-remembered – on the fate of the East Indian woman, Druppatie, who’s unlucky in cross-cultural love.

What happens to migrant women dreaming and working illegally in America will continue to stir interest among academics and novelists. Ms. DoHarris falls somewhere in between professions, leaning heavily – perhaps with little choice – on memory and second-hand reportage. Calabash Parkway offers little by way of new insights, new meanings, so grim are the narratives of what the author would have us imagine as the unrelentingly grim, romance-drenched lives of her chosen women.

Still – and despite the sentimental untidiness of its closing pages – Calabash Parkway should find a sisterhood of supportive readers. Its implanted pedagogical “themes” make a strong case for the respect and commitment its characters crave. (On the other hand, under the weight of its own affirmative goals, it might have sunk already into that ocean of the all too familiar, the nothing new.)

To all the love-scarred Guyanese women adrift out there – Agatha, Gwennie Brathwaite, Eunice, Doreen, Evadne, Evadne’s Nennen, Jennifer, Samantha, Drupattie – if you can find time to read it, this book’s for you, too.

Book Reviewed: Calabash Parkway: Brenda Chester DoHarris: Tantaria Press: Maryland, USA: 2005: 158 pages.

For the Old Guys, Old Ghosts

2008-05-03T06:20:00.000-07:00

“We are never where we are, but somewhere else”

- Derek Walcott, “In Italy”

In Haiti these days, according to a recent report in the NYTimes, there is growing nostalgia for “the old ghosts”, Papa Doc and his son Jean-Claude Duvalier. This wish to return to the good old days is in response to mounting social problems which have turned the country into one of the poorest places in the world. In the old days there was a stronger economy, security (of a kind), lower food prices and, for the privileged, scholarships to study abroad.

It was also a time of pitiless oppression; but for those who miss “the old ghosts” there’s a convenient amnesia about that; and the torture of political prisoners in those prisons near the presidential palace.

This longing for harsh but quieter times, the column suggests, is fuelled by a “nostalgia for the strong hand”. A “voodoo master” hougan, it’s also reported, has returned from the US to restore the supplementary powers of the old religion. Peace at any cost would seem preferable to the disorder and despair that’s rife across the land.

“Looking back” for many Guyanese can assume bitter, uncompromising forms. Something about the way newspaper columns routinely demonise the years of “the strong hand” (Burnham) or pine for the integrity of “the good heart” (Jagan) reveals how deeply unforgiving and irreparable the fault lines of thinking (about colonial politics) still run.

Through the mind’s back windows (where we gaze and wonder what the future holds) many Guyanese – young, worried or ambitious – still prefer “looking out”; still dream of moving away, using metaphysical sea ports if necessary. Migration from our shores – with its feverish planning, its promise of “freedom” from those phantoms of terror at night, and the precariousness of wage-earning each day – has been described as “one of the healthiest” per capita in the world.

Once overseas – huddled for security, and content with “looking on” from the margins – there’s the compelling wish with the passing of years to “give back” to the old country. Gifts and sentiments are packed tight in barrels or remittances, poetry or social commentary. Recent fiction by some of our overseas-based authors could be read as “give back” memory-based narratives, intended for “those whom we first [knew and] loved”.

Godfrey Chin is not a literary man. His book, Nostalgias (2007), a sentiment-loosening compilation, is written with infectious enthusiasm mainly for Guyanese old-timers, settled or adrift in unfamiliar spaces; in Canada and the USA, or the UK.

The book is chock full of tiny descriptions, most of it familiar stuff; and it’s fizzy with name dropping – names of people, names of places, names of nicknames, of foods, rituals, discos, songs, cultural totems, social events, street characters, sports personalities.

There’s so much naming, what some might recall as the coastal-choked, youth-wasted days – trapped in “an infinity of endeavour”, as Derek Walcott might say – are sorted and wrapped like confectionery for the reader. If, by chance, you grew up outside Georgetown – across wide rivers in places with no electricity – you might, with some justification, feel marginalized and faceless.

Housing the nation’s historical memories has always been a thorny issue. Decades of indifference and neglect had resulted in crumbling and serious loss at the old Archives. An article recently In Stabroek News questioned the seriousness and intent of the resource managers in the shiny new building on Homestretch Avenue. It wondered quite rightly if they were up to the task, or mere occupants of another grand illusion.

It expressed the hope that facilities for a sound archive there would be used to capture “for posterity” the voices of our past leaders, their pronouncements at important milestones in the nation’s history.

Sound archives might also preserve the days when radio funneled the world into our lives. Beside the radio voices making history, one could hear again the voices of ordinary folk talking about their lives, the radio programs and the music they listened to. Chin’s Nostalgias reminds us how bare our sound archive shelves might be when it comes to music.

Unlike, say, Jamaica where one reggae song could link emotions & lives to specific decades of homegrown creativity, our music reservoirs for the most part were filled from dawn to midnight with imported sound: Mohammed Rafi (syrupy but ethnic-soothing) at sunrise; through an assortment of island or (US) pop, or Country & Western, and dreary servings of Euro-Sunday sounds; to Jim Reeves (deep-voiced and syrupy) at sunset.

Beside the sound archive, one imagines a gallery of visuals. A call has gone out for Guyanese to send home photo memorabilia of the old days which could be studied for clues to how people coped every day with colonial life. In Chin’s Nostalgias, among the pics of family and city life, there are two photos worth a thousand and one words.

One of the Botanic Gardens in the 50s, back when it was proudly maintained, when its Edenic, ordered beauty was a powerful attraction for Guianese on Sundays, a place for the spirit to getaway from the dusty yard and “the smell of history”. And a photo of the old Queens College assembly hall, with orderly rows of students, reminding one of the disciplined learning & distinctions that once defined that institution. (The Latin teacher who’d quote Epictetus, “Only the educated are free.”)

Chin’s Nostalgias is a generous-hearted effort at “preserving golden memories”. He knows the date and the hour when the paradise that was his Guiana fell to ruin. On February 16, 1962, he writes, during the anti-Jagan Govt riots, “Around three p.m., the police at Brickdam went on strike, refusing to patrol the streets without firearms, and in that instant law and order broke down, and, in my opinion, “Choke and Rob” entered the pages of Guyana’s history.”

“In the next 25-30 years,” he continues confidently, “300,000 would flee their homeland.”

Chin can be forgiven his flyover views. “Carpe diem!” he says, had been his guiding motto in those colonial years. True to his word, Nostalgias is a stirring metemgee of day-seasoning, with humour and spice and all things nice. Nothing too “deep” or too disturbing to spoil reader pleasure. (There’s a moving tribute to Dr. Walter Chin – “a devoted patriot…a legend in his time” – which might set some readers off in search of at least a passing reference to Dr. Walter Rodney).

Nor is it too probing. An observation of the “right-angled streets” in Georgetown could have prompted some thoughtful reference to the grid-like road system designed & laid down by the Dutch. And while as a boy or young man growing up in the colony Chin might have been unaware of the imperial “strong hand” arranging (or moulding) Guiana’s choices from overseas, as an old man “looking back” that sliver of forgetfulness might strike some readers as a little odd.

Memory – the opiate of the transplanted masses, you could say; or their educated reps – remains the most swollen part of our nation’s intelligence. With our future still in the hands of international funding forces, you could enter, through columns in G/town’s press, retro rooms that encourage readers of Stabroek News, for instance, to think about the travel observations of Schomburgk, explorer of Guiana’s interior; or those anniversary messages in the Guyana Chronicle that feed the faithful by, for instance, hailing Dr. Cheddi Jagan as more virtuous and heroic than anyone before and after Independence.

You could follow along as some pot-stirring writer takes you back to his favorite cauldron of upheaval & loss – the slave rebellions, the anti-colonial 50s, the Burnham 80s. Either way, while the truth & its complexity stays submerged for now, argument and counter-argument about victories & villains in Guyana’s past will not leave you feeling like a fatherless child.

Given Chin’s sunny disposition it would be mean-spirited to rain on his Nostalgias – unedited and snippety as they look on the page. Like 45 or 78 rpm vinyls his old days collection seems very important and precious to him. They provide the only clues to how Chin himself is doing these days, so many years & miles away.

All told, Nostalgias offers a cozy, cheerful message to older Guyanese in the diaspora (their reading habits intact), who never quite severed ties; who on snowbound days might welcome the company of ghosts; or conversations in any form that brings them full circle to their halcyon growing-up years.

The message is this: the rootless life is not your fate; you can go home again. Climb out that basement, dust off the old identity. As it grows late in your remaining afternoons, you can reconnect your beginnings and end. No “give back” patriotism required. In this book you could skip pages, and still enjoy the flight.

Yes, comrades, through the mulch of time, gather ye rosebuds.

Book Reviewed: Nostalgias: Godfrey Chin: CKP Publishing: Florida, USA: 2007, 259 pages.

Poem by Brian Chan

2008-04-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

To A Trapped Lioness

Even in his sleep beside you,

your mate you can hear pacing his

rage-carpeted cage of snoring

vanity whose bars and sharp blades

of light stabbing through them are all

equally his own mind trying

to erase, and not, its tyranny

over his every breath and stamp.

Beware of feeding him your blood

and milk of your still-flowing breast.

Such food both pacifies and fills

him with despair as it keeps him

every day waking to become

his fear that his cage will, and not,

fade. Let pride to its need of love learn

to kneel, or gnaw itself to death.

From Gift of Screws © Brian Chan

Anatomy of a Marriage (1920s Georgetown)

2008-03-31T05:10:00.000-07:00

A newspaper columnist in British Guiana writing a Sunday column (February 1922) makes the following statement: “Georgetonians are of two kinds: those who live in Queenstown and their unfortunate neighbours who inhabit the remaining part of our garden city.” That newspaper columnist is a fictional character and the statement sets the stage for Roy Heath’s first novel From the Heat of the Day (1979).

The Queenstown part of the city was apparently not fully developed at the time. From a home on Anira Street you could hear the “incessant roaring of the waves at floodtide” coming all the way from the seawall. Heath describes the area as “the unblemished district with its tall houses and blossoms on year end, and painted palings like flattened spears embracing yards darkened by thick branches of fruit trees.”

Residents hired gardeners to tend all those blossoms. New Garden Street was remarkable for its fine houses with large gardens in front of them, “in which flourished roses and dahlias, their stalks maintained by a staff to which they were tied.” A pipeline sewage system was set up in the early twenties foreseeing dignity and plumbing for the fortunate (and the end to posies under the bed). Who could resist the dream of moving to Queenstown upon hearing of this?

The aesthetic order of the city has crumbled over decades; parcels of dilapidation and vacant grassy lots remain. New fire-proof structures tower over old eyesores, and new residents moving in have established a kind of equal opportunity ethos. On Peter Rose Street jostling with once elegant homes there’s an Auto business, cars or vans packed tightly in a paved yard, with streamers flapping in the wind across the road. Of interest, too, is a mosque and a house turned into an office for taxi service; and a fruit vendor’s shack set up at the entrance of an Oronoque Street home.

You could argue these are buoyant signs of post-Independence development in the city; a messy kind of free for all residential zoning that disdains old vestiges of colonial respectability, even as a new moneyed and political class finds greener pastures elsewhere, with finer prospects of manicured grass on which to build.

Today minivans take short cuts through Queenstown’s narrow, quiet streets, honking in anticipation at evening strollers. And Bastiani (“the undertaker” in Heath’s novel) has long gone, as is the smell of horse manure from the shed housing his funeral carriages; his Forshaw Street business has been replaced by a more upbeat entrepreneur selling bridal accessories.

But colonial Queenstown was where Roy Heath moved his 1920s characters, Armstrong & his wife Gladys, in From the Heat of the Day; the old Queenstown with alleyways well-maintained by “men spraying the gutter-water with cisterns of oil”. Heath examines what happens when their marriage falls apart in the Forshaw Street property they occupy.

The flush of romance in the marriage wears off after two years and two children. As early as page 20, an inexplicable “rift” develops. Gladys Armstrong, a woman of healthy appetite, faithful and pledged “to breed and obey”, cannot understand what she’s doing wrong. Suddenly she must cope with “a wave of irritability that seemed to have no cause” sweeping over her husband.

Armstrong is doing very well; he gains promotion to Post Master at a Georgetown post office; but he wraps himself in uncompromising “silences” and her attempts at conversation are cut short by reminders, for instance, that he is “reading”. A third child on the way brings some respite, but the child doesn’t survive and the marriage continues to falter.

Beneath the first emotional awkwardness that blossomed into love, Heath suggests their marital union was seasoned in sexual desire. Gladys Armstrong recalls “the sweetness of copulation which became for her the heart of their marriage”. What she finds unbearable is the coldness of her bed at night.

Heath offers her no religious faith as solace; she doesn’t consider returning to her father’s home; she chooses the long-suffering wait for her husband’s isolation to end, absorbing his “outbursts” and deflecting his irritability.

Armstrong is himself somewhat mystified at the downturn of his marriage. He considers procuring a mistress, but Heath gives him a “conscience” that reproaches him for contemplating this move. He blames his wife’s “passivity”; he notices “her thighs becoming thick, and her breasts flabby”. He is sufficiently intelligent to reflect on what’s taking place, but libidinal priorities overwhelm his thinking. Most nights he stumbles home sullen and inebriated, sometimes slipping into the servant’s room; the barely literate girl is too powerless to fend him off.

He turns to houses of prostitution, pouring out his soul to a young woman (being careful to gloss over details); her response is so “insensitive” he leaves the room. A good friend with similar marriage woes offers sympathy and conversation. Key to his stimulus plan for his faltering Georgetown marriage is a younger woman “kept” miles away in the village of Plaisance. (He visits her every Sunday, defying social conventions, always fearful he might lose his job if the arrangement is found out.).

Armstrong’s conversations with himself stir a hive of self-pity and class anxiety. He had plucked Gladys from a well-to-do, genteel household respected for its piano playing, embroidery and sketching. He could have done a lot worse; he could have settled for a woman from his village in Agricola, “one of them big-batty women with powerful build who kian’ tell a piano from a violin.”

A dramatic layer is added to the novel through inquisitive visits paid by Armstrong’s sister in law. Armstrong’s own sister distracts him with argument over family inheritance after their father dies. These developments deepen Armstrong’s introspection. He begins to think he might have married above his station; he suspects he’s being constantly “judged” by his wife’s family, viewed as “an intruder”, a man lacking in adequate “background”.

To compound his dilemma, the colony is plunged into economic turmoil. The collapse of the sugar market starts the spread of fear among workers. There’s talk of “retrenchment” (a word as frightening then as “recession” today) among Civil Service employees, and though Armstrong hangs on his job security eventually falls victim to budget cuts.

Gladys responds with determined, belt-tightening courage; the servant girl is let go. Gladys holds fast to her vows of love and till-death, cutting back on personal nutrition, hoping her sacrifices would jolt Armstrong out of self-absorption.

Just when you wonder how much longer she can sustain her struggle with the inexplicable, she fades away. Heath’s prose seizes the moment to go maudlin & manipulative; paragraphs depict scenes of the husband’s grieving disbelief: “Armstrong drew up a chair and sat by the door of the room in which his wife lay.” Suddenly, thinking she might still be alive, he rushes off to find a doctor to confirm again her death. Images of remorse pile up: “the tears trickled through his fingers, down his chin to fall on to his shirt.” And after the funeral, “desolation in his heart”.

Heath is not a stern moralist, but the school-teacher side of him sometimes nudges the storyteller to dispense “lessons”, like first steps to mature thinking; or set up characters for reader sympathy or reproach. Some hearts will ache with Gladys’; Armstrong’s behavior might repulse or dismay.

Still, with subtle tracking and shading of his characters’ emotional shifts, Heath hints at encouraging news inside this extraordinary marriage. Stoically coping but privately wailing, Gladys’ commitment to her vows strikes the reader as fierce but not entirely thoughtless. And Armstrong comes across as a selfish though not callously uncaring individual, a notch or two above other men in the colony who cease quickly to care.

Heath suggests that marital relations in those constricted days were often no more than self-serving arrangements that followed a pattern of fated & faithless expectations. As Gladys mused: “Things were just so. There was a sky and an earth; there was the wind and the sun; and there was marriage.”

A comforting context could be found in the old assertion that the marriage vow in 20s Guiana – a fragile thing celebrated in logies and villages in an expense of ritual & spirits – did not always sublimate the pain & rage (and sense of fleeting mortality) left over from harsh colonial regimens. In the circumstances women dared to dream of happiness; men bared swords and plundered; the libido ruled. Children like molasses from sweet cane were often the byproducts of unbridled passion – and lucky souls if cherished in extended-family folk ways.

The modern reader might wish for deeper psychological insights. Heath prefers simply to present (what we can take as) the conventional 1920s understanding of how marriages unravelled: irritability, silence, drinking, outbursts; starved goodness, the cold bed; long-suffering female bewilderment, the male impulse to roam outside the roost.

From the Heat of the Day is the first in a trilogy of novels. Old Georgetown neighborhoods are fully realized in Heath’s not electrifying but affectionately accurate prose. Readers can follow the tribulations of the Armstrong children and their guilt-troubled father in One Generation and Genetha. (The last paragraph sees Armstrong – “overcome by great calm” – all set to make a remarkable recovery from family misery, and promising the reader some family continuity.)

Heath’s 1920s Guiana is in essence an imagined world but, like the still standing structures from the old Queenstown, many of the issues explored in From the Heat of the Day resonate today if you pay attention to distress signals that sometimes breach marriage walls; or listen to male talk about copulation.

Book Reviewed: From the Heat of the Day (“The Armstrong Trilogy”): Persea Books, New York, 1994, 150 pgs.

Useful Retro Specs

2008-03-04T04:42:00.000-08:00

Shadows Round the Moon (1990) the last book released by Guyanese author Roy Heath is described perhaps for marketing purposes as his “Caribbean Memoirs”. In fact, its range is limited to Guyana, and what Heath delivers in his gently reflective prose are fond recollections of 24 years growing up into manhood. Readers hoping for insights into how his writing career began may be disappointed (unless a sequel, subtitled “London Memoirs”, is in preparation).

Heath takes his time scaffolding these memoirs (at page 70 he’s not yet 10 years old). “Whilst still a small child” he writes, “ I always felt that I belonged to a group larger than the family…This feeling of belonging, the notion of the larger family, was very strong and, as I know now, a source of confidence in case of destitution.”

His great grandfather came from the island of St Martins in the 1850s. His foreparents, the de Weevers, settled and struggled on the coast, not on the plantations. His father died when he was 2yrs old. Raised by a proud, controlling mother he experienced a sort of internal migration, residing (then changing houses) in Agricola village, Bagotstown, Queenstown.

There were August holiday visits to relatives in Essequibo (it’s as close as Heath gets to Wilson Harris country, to encounters with “men in quest of diamonds… [and] in pursuit of their souls”) and forays into Berbice and the sugar plantations. He comes close to VSNaipaul territory during a stint as a clerk at the Crosbie Court, a special court held on Wednesdays for Indian immigrants and their descendants. There he heard the disputes and disclosures of testifying family members, and gained insight into issues and problems (domestic & psychological) that dwell unarticulated behind community veils.

You could create a profile of Heath as a man of mixed-race origins, bred and nurtured in Demerara, who somehow remained unaffected by colonial or plantation depredations. In fact, so circumscribed was his living environment readers will barely notice the overarching management role of the imperial power in these memoirs.

There is reference to the pervasive American presence at the airbase during World War II, and the social aftermath when the war ended. The riots at Enmore were happening round about the time Heath was getting ready to depart. He recalls “meetings of the People’s Progressive Party under the lamplight at street corners”; but what stands out in his memory at that time is “a reduction of daily funeral processions” which he links to a sustained DDT campaign to rid the colony of malaria.

Heath’s fiction conveys none of that anguish of being transplanted and culturally denuded. His feeling of “belonging”, he says, extended no further back than his maternal grandparents. The major life hazards were more indigenous and persistent – disease, poverty and destitution. As Heath looks back, the reader discerns the importance of Georgetown and its ordered environs in shaping his sensibility. It was in the city that an apprehension of self “as separate from his family” would later develop.

Shadows revisits his growth to young manhood and the swarming influence of family and relatives in those early years. Pivotal to his growth were a multi-talented uncle, a G/town school friend, several self-made men he encountered who took pride in their knowledge. Plus the streets he walked, the neighborhoods he lived in and the ethnic-varied behaviors he observed outside the city.

An intriguing revelation is his young man’s transgressive interest in city brothels and the forbidden pleasures of Tiger Bay. There is, too, a lingering description of an affair – one of those “landmarks in my awareness” – with the unhappy wife of a Forest Ranger too often away on duty in the bush. These were probably the earliest indications of Heath’s restless, independent will in a time of fluid, if puritanical proprieties.

The book ends with his departure for England. His reasons for leaving are familiar ones: intense frustration, the futureless environment of his civil service job, “the stifling rule of parochial norms”. When he gets to England unknown potentials would emerge transforming his colonial origins into what he has become: a multi-faceted individual who carried inside him not just “dreams”, but embryonic talents that must have been quietly evolving.

He recalls the friendly advice of a Clerk at the Crosbie Courts (a Mr. U) who said to him one day “Once we find a solution to our material wants we will have penetrated the forest only to be faced with the desert”. There’s a modesty (at least that resistant colonial strain of modesty) and a complacent tone about the Roy Heath narrative that suggests this: for all his achievements (novelist, teacher, poet, fluent in French and German, barrister-at-law) he may have decided to pitch his tent in a clearing closer to the forest; choosing difficult but reachable goals over trailblazing aspirations; and settling as a writer for an elegantly dressed prose more likely to engage ordinary readers than attract the vocabulary of scholarship.

But in his pursuit of migrant success how, you might still wonder, did the possibility of a writer’s vocation emerge? How did he, a man from the colonies, fire up those engines, sustain the focus to produce eight respectfully received works of fiction?

His first novel was published in 1974, almost 20 years after he arrived in England. This discovery of creative purpose is barely touched on in his memoirs, and there’s little evidence of its genesis in Guyana. In the 1930s, he says, English was the subject that attracted all the unqualified teachers. Books were not part of his gregarious youth; school rituals he found boring; and though he lived on the fringe of that tradition of public story telling among the creoles, he would make a self-conscious effort later – in his 20s “amidst a growing torment about my place [in the world]” – to acquire “an adequate fund of words” with which to set off for fresh start possibilities in England.

His novels, he points out, were inspired by the exceptional circumstances of his personal life. His fiction characters are grounded in genuine observations of his colonial neighbourhoods and in the reading habits he acquired in England. Heath worked within himself, it seems, maintaining a low visibility among other (Caribbean) writers as if writing was not a profession to which he naturally “belonged”; and showing little interest in academic patronage.

Shadows Round The Moon offers spare glimpses of Guyana’s social history back in the days. There are references to authoritarian fathers (“those embodiments of terror”); the 1930s “public morality” that allowed the disciplining of children by concerned neighbors; the quiet hardships and indignity of colonial existence within which Guianese struggled day by day to eke out memoir-worthy lives.

In that simpler time when generalizations were admissible Heath notes, in reference to East Indians, “the powerful undertow behind their passive conduct and outward display of prayer flags”. And the village of Agricola, he says, was curiously divided: nearer the Public Road a class of strivers – school teachers, village council employees, policemen, dressmakers – but deep in the backland areas, smaller houses and subsistent plots, and “the sound of drums with a forbidden beat”, heard at night and feared by the children.

Georgetown then was a society of blossoming prejudice, race jostling with race but finding accommodation, where a mother from a family “with background” would guard her daughter against undesirables (“I don’t allow her to mix.”) But harsh material deprivation (brought on by a 30% unemployment among working people) “threw up characteristic relationships of dependency”. Heath suggests that the Guyanese generosity of spirit (often described as “Guyanese hospitality”) might serve to camouflage a vulnerability too easily exploited by more ruthless Guyanese. One whiff of that vulnerability could flare the nostrils of the brute.

Shadows Round the Moon brings pleasing closure to the unspectacular yet very productive writing career of author Roy Heath. As a model of personal development his coming-of-age-and-leaving-home narrative might inspire new “searching” generations. They could look into his memories and discover residues of colonial fractures and behaviours still active in our nation’s culture; traces of the old fears (disease & destitution), the old response to tribal violence (platitudes & a pity that quickly hardens to posture); the old ambivalence about “belonging”; and – when the spirit senses prison or desert in the air – recourse to flight & reinvention.

As our troubled nation unwittingly rolls back its future to the colonial years when a one-eyed, intransigent directorate had to face up to incendiary and sometimes unspeakable acts of challenge, one hopes Shadows Round the Moon remains available on Georgetown bookshelves and on internet websites, alongside the CDs, the videos and the wishy produce of folk nostalgia now selling like hotcakes and boil channa.

Book Reviewed: Shadows Round The Moon: Roy Heath: Flamingo: London, 1990, 254 pages.

The Hangmaiden’s Tale

2008-02-15T03:18:00.000-08:00

Yet another plantation novel has come among us. David Dabydeen’s indentured labourers in The Counting House (2005) must make room for Karen King-Aribisala’s emancipated slaves in The Hangman’s Game (2007) in what would seem to be an academic penchant – delving into libraries, researching our history and reanimating incidents and people through fiction.

King-Aribisala (“All my writings are dedicated to God.”) was born in Guyana and is now an English Professor at the University of Lagos.

The journey motif is integral to this kind of novel. This time in place of the middle passage or the kali-pani or the overcrowded barracoons, an airline flight takes the central character from Guyana to Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos. Her mission is simple: “I want to find myself”. More persuasively, she wants “to understand the reasons behind ancestral slavery”.

In this day and age you’d think there’d be abundant literature in libraries to satisfy this wanting. Unhappily Guyana at that point in its development seemed lacking in secondary sources. The central character had read a Guyanese-published history of the Reverend John Smith and the Demerara slaves (“That had made me mad. It was so unjust.”) A study grant took her to England but uncovered little of significance. A trans-Atlantic journey to the source nation seemed the only solution.

The moment in history that fascinates the narrator is the last slave insurrection in Demerara in 1823. “Whites were murdered in their beds and as they walked. Slaves were executed. Blood ran. The militia was brought in to restore order and a curfew imposed on the colony. But it was the last slave revolt. The emancipation of slaves became a reality. I am that reality.” So much action packed into one historical moment was apparently too rich for the narrator’s blood. And (post-Burnham) Georgetown as a defining context was doing little to expand her reality.

To make the central character more interesting King-Aribisala converts her into a writer. In the writer’s head there’s a cast of characters; her subject is the 1823 slave revolt; a title, “Three Blind Mice”, is set. But the narrator/writer can’t get the book started. The trip to Nigeria, she hopes, would unblock energies, inject lofty aim in the narrative and release the characters.

After hurried pre-ambling pages The Hangman’s Game takes off and elevates itself to higher ambition: it will be “a drama of Nigeria/ Demerara histories”. Characters from the Guyana past – a Governor Murrain, a runaway named Quamina, a fat slave woman named Auntie Lou, a Captain Mc Turkeyen, assorted “buckras” – take to the stage in 1823, even as our narrator/writer gets acquainted with Nigeria (by pure coincidence going through a “brutal” military coup) in the 1990s.

The narratives are told in alternating chapters. At some point they’re expected to merge into one sulphurous glow of a long traveled for “fusion”. But King-Aribisala’s prose has a first-time earnest grind about it. David Dabydeen working in similar plantation territory revitalized his Indian labourers in orhnis of mellifluous sentences. King-Aribisala displays neither his poetic gifts, nor his flair for designing scenes that shimmer within enriched contextual commentary.

In The Hangman’s Game Quamina (“He had been a good husband. Unlike so many he did not sleep with other women. His real woman was the desire for freedom.”) runs away for the second time only to be captured in this overwrought line: “Quamina gasped at the length-stretchedness of the land, the openness of the sky.” You imagine him swearing and waving his machete in fury at the author for ensnaring him that way.

He is rewarded later with sentences of clean, cinematic slave action: “He turned around just in time to see a white youth drawing a sword. He threw his machete aiming at the man’s chest and the youth fell with the blade still in him. He cried for mercy and Quamina extracted his weapon and stood watching the blood spread over the man’s shirt.”

Other characters on the Demerara side struggle to intrigue us anew. You hear them speak a kind of functional playhouse talk; you see them in hitherto unrecorded positions (Governor Murrain, assisted by the fat slave woman, Auntie Lou, strips and relieves himself in a posy – “a chamber pot made of fine white porcelain” – before going to bed). King-Aribisala has evidently done her research and you turn the page thinking, yeah, she’s probably got that right; colonizer and colonized probably said this or did that to each other.

Contemporary Nigeria suffers from the author’s peripheral insight & experience. Characters and situations seem developed from a sojourner’s notebook. There’s scene at a graveside where a friend (“a traitor to the Republic”) is buried under the menacing eye of a Nigerian soldier. And several scenes in a hospital where the narrator is having a baby and holds “searching”, sometimes irritable conversations with a Nigerian nurse.

At one point, amazingly for new arrivals, the narrator’s husband garners an invitation to a dinner party at Nigeria’s Presidential mansion (“I must do my hair and nails and my make-up,” the pregnant-housewife narrator says. “I haven’t anything to wear except my one and only going-out dress, black and voluminous. I shall look like a huge black tome.”)

Midway through the novel spasms of disarray, which could easily be mistaken for “complexity”, threaten to undermine its structure. Errant musings, fragments, sketchy scenes & conversations, one white page with seven words (“Turn the page. / I turn the page.”) and a smug evangelic lyricism creep into the narratives. Not sure where to turn in a Nigeria her characters don’t fully inhabit King-Aribisala throws a spotlight on political tensions in the city.

Her narrator is invited again to a President Mansion dinner; there she listens to a speech and squirms in moral discomfort. Her husband who is involved in a Christian Outreach program is approached by Nigerian coup plotters. There are roadblocks and rifle-poking soldiers and crowds converging on Tafewa Balewa Square. Edgy but safe on the outskirts, and attentive to news reports, the narrator/author struggles to stay focused on her fictive project as players from the Demerara drama begin to insinuate themselves into the Nigeria theatre.

There may be some extractable meaning in all this – that intended “fusion of histories”, like a bridge over troubled nations – but King-Aribisala’s prose, trodding hoof by pained hoof, squishes too much knowable sentiment out of all the upturned humanity. Holding on to frayed narrative ends (or wondering what eventually happens to our fortunate travelers) could tax the patience of some readers.

For the Guyanese reader enchanted with fictions of cultural separation & spiritual hungers, or just wanting to escape a Demerara of untouchable new governors and anarchic roadways, A Hangman’s Game might serve well their getaway needs. (On the back cover author George Lamming considers this novel “a superb work of fiction kept alive page after page by this writer’s subtle and sophisticated historical imagination”.)

Ms Karen King-Aribisala, it appears, has written a second book, mixing poetry and prose, in which she “transposes” Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” to modern-day Nigeria. Not many Demerara readers may have heard of it. Her fascination with great authors and great moments in history seems far and away, beyond any residual interest she might have in Guyana. And that’s freedom for you, comrades.

Gather ye rosebuds.

Book Reviewed: The Hangman’s Game: Karen King-Aribisala: Peepal Tree Press: England, 2007, 191 pages. (w.w.)

Figments of His Memory

2007-11-21T09:34:00.000-08:00

The Canadian-Guyanese Cyril Dabydeen’s latest work of fiction, a novel with a cute ethnic-sounding title, Drums of My Flesh, is not an attempt to present us with “an accurate view of the world” (to borrow the Naipaul credo). It is in fact a prize-catching embellishment of Dabydeen’s private world & celebrity image. The author has had a long string of published fiction, poetry, reviews and essays. There is a sense in some quarters that he has arrived. In this novel he seems preoccupied with autobiography disguised as new fiction.

Biography and memories, stories from the plantation days, have become the preferred barrel of choice sent home by a greying generation of Guyanese writers living abroad. With the change of political fortunes in the 1990s and a fresh sense of group ascendancy, Guyanese Indians have continued the “reclaiming of our heritage”, a process of unearthing and dusting off buried names and hitherto unheralded accomplishments.

Drums of My Flesh (2007) fits neatly into this ascendancy. (Back in the 80s and 90s The British Peepal Tree Press was eager to encourage ethnicity-based Guyanese authorship. Its published fiction was “new” and ground-shifting, the quality in general uneven.)

Drums of My Flesh has been gossiped as a novel that “enriches” the Guyanese canon, that tiny harbour of accomplishment that is home to the literary works of Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittelholzer, Jan Carew, Roy Heath (plus David Dabydeen and the not fully stretched talents of Oonya Kempadoo and Rooplall Monar). The evidence suggests, however, that it owes little to these writers and their superlative creativity.

There is instead a disconnect from “the canon”. Individual vision has given way to group representation. Author focus is steadfastly on tribal memory, not the nation’s human psyche.

Our earlier writers were gifted with powers of observation, an adventurous life experience and a delight in discovering Guyana’s landscape and peoples. A post Independence generation, only half as talented but with writerly yearnings, seems content to scrape memory barrels or examine navels in search of something to write about.

The concerns and lessons of history are valuable, but a persistent turning in or blindness to troubling deformities in present-day Guyana might result in fresh amnesias, lost testimony. There are stories to be told, truths wrapped in silence inside closed or broken communities, whether in Buxton or in public institutions or in those “refugee” enclaves overseas. Absurdities and disorders within the lives of our elected or ordinary folk cry out for the satirical intelligence of a VSNaipaul, or Mittelholzer’s keenly observed realism.

Drums of My Flesh comes from over seas but chooses not to address urgent human issues at home.

It opens with a Guyanese man strolling with his daughter, Catriona, near the Rideau River in Canada. Her Irish mother, we learn, is at home “reading about Ireland’s landscape.” The little girl is three years old, and still glowing with “Look, Daddy, a raccoon!” innocence. Near the river there’s a park frequented by “people from the embassies and high commissions all around.”

To make her a viable character for his novel, author Dabydeen drains her of credible life then, implanting archetypal tissue, re-presents her with a growing “consciousness”. She’s suddenly old enough to “contemplate”. Her personality “seems to be forming before my eyes”. When she asks 3yr old questions he senses her spirit’s “incessant stirrings”. At one point her 3yr old curiosity moves her to ask her father: “why do you keep talking to yourself?” (If she was thirteen, not three years old, holding a cellphone not his hand, it might have been a different story.)

The problem for the old man is: how can his storaged memories of Guyana be wired to the consciousness of his daughter? Should he even try one day to make her aware of her connection to his past – his father, his mother & grandmother, brothers & sisters; Hindu deities, those eccentric village folk; the sugar estates, “agitation over British rule”, racial riots & the Coldstream Guards; and a young man cycling home along a winding public road? (Curiously, contact with other ethnic groups in Guyana goes unregistered in these memories,)

The reader can sense quickly the fictional challenges some authors in the diaspora invent for themselves. You start thinking, if Dabydeen could pull this off, Drums of My Flesh would be a praiseworthy literary feat. But Cyril Dabydeen is not Wilson Harris who can lure the reader into a shower of metaphors, linking time zones and communities of experience sometimes with dazzling reimagined effects.

Here and there in Drums of my Flesh Dabydeen lets slip allusions to several weighty authors – V.S Naipaul, Michel Foucault, Indian Proverb, John Keay, Joseph Brodsky, Carl Jung. You get the feeling, though, that his writer’s bag of devices is filled with fluffed up straw; his talent strains to infuse complexity in the novel.

The prose rarely rises above H/Bollywood cinematic means. Here for instance is what happens as a newly wed couple gets ready to consummate their marriage

“Tassa beat louder. Wind wafted against the eiderdown of the night.
Curtains drawn.
The wedding guests chanted outside the window of a high house built on stilts. My father’s awkward coping with his deep-seated need, groping in the dark: he and my mother being adolescents merely. Legs, thighs bared....
Blood flowed, a haemorrhaging shame. My mother and father entangled or confused in their contrived romance…
The Atlantic waves lashed everywhere. The cattle kept lowing.”

Enriching the Guyanese canon? The prose “wafting” with the winds of Guyanese prose masters? Some readers might well think so.

As he walks with his daughter the father’s mind feverishly “conjures up images” and makes swift deliberative connections; so that looking at the waters of the winding Rideau River he “unconsciously draw[s] parallels with other rivers, creeks. Dark brown or chocolate-coloured waters too in the faraway Demerara, Essequibo, Berbice in Guyana, then the Orinoco and the Amazon. The Ganges and Yamuna rivers also. Again, origins. The Liffey in Ireland, as the Irish also come closer.”

That’s a lot of river water running with resonance around his head. This father reveals here a too easy talent for global connectivity. Still, the reader is invited to join his Canadian afternoon stroll, and share his emotions & musings about the Guyanese identity as sluiced through the memories of our migrant author (otherwise doing very well, thank you, only connect).

One device Dabydeen uses is to introduce, for instance, a jaguar, a creature the narrator’s father one day hunted, caught and caged. This caged jaguar pops up in subsequent pages where it morphs into things metaphoric: “Jaguar spots in my mind’s roving eye”; the jaguar in his father’s eyes; a Bengal tiger; the tiger “on that last ship which had brought my forefathers to these shores”; a jaguar “with a horse’s hind quarters” galloping and leaping over waves. There’s plenty stuff like this to get sharp academics going, with pencils and rulers all set for cross-cultural diagramming and inert abstractions about identity.

The novel shifts from here (father & child) to back there (boy & village) in abbreviated sections, each ringing with conjured images of what really interests Dabydeen, his once tough, now exotic life growing up “on a sugar plantation…on the Guiana coast… on the edge of the world in South America”.

Juxtaposing the Courentyne past and his new Canadian residency the author asks readers to consider seriously the chasm between old vanished lives and a little girl’s tabula rasa possibilities. But after awhile the sentimental leaping back and forth grows wearisome; the bits and set pieces feel contrived and artificial. There is no question in the end, though, about the author’s ethnic rep credentials and his ethnic market appeal.

Our migrant communities, nursing anxieties as livid as skin rash, often find themselves longing for the salve of any ethnic “victory”; for occasions to gather in a park, pay tribute to heroes, dance traditional dance, share cricket stories. Drums of My Flesh is a novel for a displaced, conflicted (but fairly comfortable) generation backtracking home for “connections”. Its romance with the past might alleviate feelings of isolation and unwantedness in Guyanese diaspora enclaves; it offers cultural “representation” to the unrepresented living on the margins in disdainful cities.

The novel, it should be noted, was shortlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Prize (2007). It won the Guyana “Best Book of Fiction” Prize (2006). That might make you stop and wonder. Sometimes you can’t argue with awards or success, the way these things go.

Book Reviewed: Drums of My Flesh: Cyril Dabydeen: TSAR Publications, Toronto: 2005, 234 pgs.

TWO POEMS: by Brian Chan

2007-10-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

Glow
The lantern you carry
is your own body
of light and your beauty
is its constant glow
at which I dare not stare
for fear of being
shattered by its softness.

Instead you I glimpse
out the edge of my eye
where all miracles
remain as loose as clouds
and are not erased
by a collector’s itch
to own them to dust.

We Living

are only as bold as we entertain
our ghosts whose presence dares sharper
than any words they tried to bequeath us.
Yet their least song, half-remembered,
will revise itself as we continue

writing it with our every urge to sing
ourselves: there is no escaping
the shadow of their totem of silence
whose voice and stare, disinterested,
yet demand we sing on in the spirit

of brave flesh.

From “Gift of Screws” © Brian Chan

Jan Carew: Rewind & Last Hurrah

2007-09-05T04:15:00.000-07:00

Jan Carew grew up in a time and a country where old men felt safe and respected, and young men lacking employable skills did not consider their prospects as young thugs; and the nation’s gun-crime sector was still in its choke an’ rob infancy. Affordable travel abroad was maritime, and the educated could dream of travel overseas, study at universities, Art & Culture, bohemian or middle class self-indulgence; thoughts of revolution, student demonstrations and civil disobedience; Camus, Fanon & CLR James; the struggle for Independence; race & consciousness; jazz and exile in Paris.

These were some of the possibilities and destinations for the Guyanese wanderer, the title of the latest work of fiction by Jan Carew.

“Wandering” for the folk of Carew’s generation carried implications of privilege and golden opportunity far different from the blown about uprootedness of today’s backtrackers and getaways. Back then the world was a less imperiled place. These days Guyanese could feel like “aliens” closer to home, on the island of Barbados, for instance. Economic insecurity might preclude any thoughts of travel abroad for self-discovery and adventure.

Carew’s wanderings took him to several world capitals and to residencies in university towns in North America and Europe. In the process he acquired multiple identities (he has been described as a Guyanese-born Canadian of African ancestry) and fulfilled multiple roles (poet, playwright, educator, novelist, activist intellectual, philosopher and advisor to several nation states).

At one point in his development his creative instincts, eschewing bland middle-of-the-road poetics, channeled his mixed-race origins into a full-time academic interest in Black Studies. The result has been a truly impressive body of researched and achieved work.

The Guyanese Wanderer (2007) reads like a collection of career-concluding stories. It will be received in academia with the kind of reverence that at the same time pays tribute to the author’s odyssean productivity.

Characters in his early writings inhabited a world that seemed at first oddly removed from anything readers knew. Which was part of their fictional attraction, the wonder at their invented newness. The prose swept you away to word-conjured regions. You returned to the real world with a new luminous way of seeing, through filters of the imagination, how our peoples lived their lives, scattered on the wild coast or in the interior.

In this collection Carew appears to be pouring familiar characters into the old mould. Or dipping the same old calabash into familiar streams. There’s an account of student & cultural dissonance in Paris, porknockers and their women up the Potaro, and a Brer Anancy tale. A stubborn, lonely West Indian Londoner “living in a room with faded wallpaper and with a radiogram” talks about the old days of hostility to WI immigrants; and a young man on his way to UWI, St Augustine talks about family secrets with Couvade, a preacher-woman.

The writing process this time, as before, could be described as collaborative – Carew the writer listening to suggestions from Carew the sociologist, the painter, the poet. “The moon nudged its way above canopies of coconut palms and moonlight and smoke from Roberts’ pipe drove away the mosquitoes singing around his grizzled head. Navy blue shadows squatted under the trees like tethered beasts. The old man, with his shotgun across his knees, listened to rainfrogs crying out to the moon and who-you birds conversing with ghosts.”

Considering that by and large newspaper horror and opinion is all the thinking readers on the coast may have time for, it might be instructive to get reacquainted with (or, more importantly, read for the first time) a Guyanese prose master.

There’s an old school formality and density in the prose, an attention to detail that will require reader patience. The characters might seem overdrawn, the descriptions and canvas texture a bit lush after all these years. Sometimes character conversation has a flow that might sound high-toned & theatrical to iPod millennium ears, as when one character pleads: “Caesar, Caesar, why don’t we escape from these foreign-rass places? We took a journey to an expectation that turned bitterer than aloes. We’re trapped in these blasted old cities where cold stones are sucking our lives into them.”

One has to remember that Carew, like Edgar Mittelholzer and Wilson Harris, was among our first pioneer writers giving life & dignity to our colonial peoples, describing and naming our hinterland, the raw beauty of our coastline:

“On a clear day, he could make out the hills above the Tumatumari rapids and the neat, luminous green terraces that migrant farmers from the Caribbean had created. Beyond Tumatumari, there was an occasional hole in the canopy of flowering treetops, where some lone individual was pitting his energies against a continent of forests.”

The most enjoyable story, “Chantal”, is set in a bar in the diamond fields of Guiana with the spirit, Kanaima and the river mists and gold diggers everywhere. The prose again feels overwritten, but its pivot is a woman on the brink of an important insight, a tingling prelude to personal liberation:

“The five years that she and Chantal had been man and wife had tied them in a web of habits and hidden animosities, and she had, somehow, always been the one to give in, to compromise. But tonight, she told herself, ah feel like some kindah pocomania’s taken me over, and this powder-puff of a man from the city who I don’t really give a damn about, is the one triggering it.” Sliding into creole rhythms that way, author and character work together to guide the story from its indigenous source to an engaging modern parable.

Carew’s early novels – 50 yrs old and brimming with Guianese folk myth, character and situation – now float in bookspace, little read because unavailable. Much like the rarely heard because no longer played music these days of, for instance, Louis Armstrong.

This should come as no surprise. The world stage is still under reconstruction; new global players strut their stuff and thunder their inclusivity from power bases as diverse as Venezuela and China. Higher decibel levels, lower intelligence quotients, answering machines & cell phone transmission mediate human conversation. The days when prose fiction influenced the way many readers envisioned their lives may be passing quietly into history.

So how important or enduring, you might wonder, is Carew’s fiction outside of academia and student assignment? Can anyone spare the change to travel back to a time when Guyanese saw futures of independence worth staying home for?

To weary generations the dance in our party politics between the “pussycats” and “wolves” picks up or slows but rarely stops for breath; and deepening investment in our drug transit sector tears away at the nation’s moral fibre. These might be tempting though riskier times to wander off somewhere, to cross seas in boats or planes wanting only to begin again on some distant shore. The Guyanese Wanderer offers a little respite, some dry land of creative success & example.

It is a slender but solid reprise of (post)colonial writing at its best, displaying the native materials Carew worked with to set in motion his career. His powers of observation, his deep affection for the Guiana of his boyhood and young manhood are all in evidence.

Though paved with achievement, his travel & development path from colonial to internationalist might be difficult to emulate these days; but the courage of his imagination, as the arrowhead of nation-building, art or business enterprise, could be the missing key to our continuing crisis: one-eyed governance, that temper of sullen self-interest among disaffected citizens.

Author Carew (b.1920, in Agricola village) has been a beacon of inspiration to many Guyanese familiar with his work, much like Edgar Mittelholzer and Wilson Harris; ‘lone individuals pitting their energies against a continent of books’, you could say.

With the volume of digital chatter & transaction rising worldwide, his wanderings and writings might end up out of fashion and underappreciated – catalogued and stacked on library shelves; waiting to be opened & studied again; the ideas and discoveries still at war with injustice & inequality around the world.

Book Reviewed: The Guyanese Wanderer: Stories: Jan Carew: Sarabande Books: Louisville, Kentucky: 2007, 105 pgs.

Citizens of Anywhere & Yesterday

2007-06-27T01:16:00.000-07:00

Digital publishing may have come at just the right time for Guyanese living in metropolitan cities. It offers one solution to the problem of what to do with all those stored-up village memories, those blissful “growing up” years in rural deprivation. Self-publishing allows migrants to cherish (or unburden) much psychic baggage as they put down roots elsewhere. The stuff of nostalgia could turn quickly into writer’s fodder.

So far the few digital books to appear seem products of leisure, rather than creative, activity. While other migrants – nose to the grindstone, the due date – are busy adapting old habits to new hardships, the writers appear conflicted about “home” but sufficiently solvent to “look back” across oceans.

They respond to surges of grey, diasporic sentiment, and an “alien” unease with new residency. “Journey” works as an appealing metaphor. The books they produce do not ask to be bundled with that body of work developed by overseas authors long ago, Naipaul & Lamming, or Mittelholzer & Wilson Harris, authors for whom writing became a vocation, and who by “looking back” gave us transformative ideas about the structures and behaviours they observed.

It takes craft, endurance & luck to hammer out a work of fiction, get it to publishers, get it past the publisher’s preferences, past editorial scrutiny. Self-published authors go around that filtration system. They worry less about style, “the reader” or issues outside self centres. You’ll find their digital products not on bookshelves, but by searching the worldwide web.

One example your search engine might unearth is A Journey of Promise (2006). The central character’s “journey” starts in a rural village called Promise; then moves on to “the rural suburbs of Guyana to urban city life in Georgetown, and thereon to London.” Born in London, author Holly Nurse “spent much of her childhood in Guyana”, and graduated with a degree in English from the University of Surrey

The curious thing about A Journey of Promise is the bright confidence with which the author fabricates character and place. Part memory, part invention, with bloglike scraps tossed in, the book contains few real traces, or identifiable features of Guyana.

Earlier migrant authors burdened with issues of colonialism and identity could not escape the imperative to name places, to identify on the world map new landscapes beyond the canefields – places fertile with images, people and a language of significant human survival.

A Journey of Promise responds to different imperatives. With a click of the mouse, and using digital software that won’t question purpose or motive, Holly Nurse, who writes like a really nice person, creates an illusory world in which unpleasant issues in the past are erased.

In her imagination Guyana is the subject of sparkling rehabilitation. There is Promise, “a sleepy rural village” about 100 kilometres from the city, the All Seasons Church run by the Reverend Bruce, an annual Summer Fair, the High Dam Hospital; and a big white house with big iron gates and fierce Dobermans, where the country’s eligible bachelor, Troy Richman, lives.

The story is set in the 70s, but there’s just one reference to that decade’s hard times when the central character, Gillian Honey, visits the Coop Shop in the city. She observes fatigue on the faces of a crowd that has waited three hours for the delivery truck. But Gillian Honey’s family knows the Shop supervisor; they manage to secure sacks of rice without fatigue.

Gillian Honey, it should be mentioned, is a child of privilege and cross-cultural circumstance. “My dad was an English soldier…Mother was a hybrid, Caucasian, African and Native American.” These outsider origins leave Honey more concerned with departure requirements than “arrival” rituals; with personal, not group, development. “At age 17 years”, she tells us, “I learnt to ignore society’s polarized opinions.”

You start wondering: were there ever such extraordinary folk? did anyone really learn to ignore those bipolar years of disorder? ignore “Burnham”, the social misery of socialism, the deep ethnic wounds? What coastal village sheltered such self-absorbed lives?

The book depicts no scenes of identity worry or tormented relationships. Far from the Sargasso seas of creole existence elsewhere, there is only the plainness of life along Guyana’s coast. The story line is slender and unfolds at a “sleepy rural village” pace. Young narrator starts journey from her village, receives a “proper” education, survives a few romantic entanglements; goes to London, finds an English friend, trains as a nurse; then comes home to a reception reserved for achieving returnees. There is a happy ending – the narrator gets married and drives off with the groom in a Bentley to their new home on Mansion Hill.

In Guyana Gillian Honey displays an interest in our flora and fauna, in magpies and rhododendrons but not much else. In England she can’t help but notice how differently the English observe the Easter and Christmas seasons. Otherwise, she goes about her business, each day getting up, off to work, coming home. No disturbing street encounters, few pleasures (no sex, no thinking about sex); just this earmuffed, self-contained ordinariness of being.

Content to glide like this, Gillian Honey gives away very little of her inner life. Her personality may have sprung from what some regard as quintessential to the Guyanese persona: the active concealment or evasion of dark truths; a capacity for mythical thinking.

But, you might ask, why fuss over fiction of the flimsiest imagining, whose author makes no claim to literary seriousness? Completing her “journey” might be this author’s effort to cleanse her memory of harmful plaque, removing whatever threatens her equilibrium with the past. Readers may not recognize the Guyana Holly Nurse shares through publication; but a (self-published) book like A Journey of Promise could be enough to keep any diasporic resident “going” these days in cold, immigrant-hostile cities, trains to catch, old scratchy lives to remaster.

Self-publishing offers possibilities & rewards beyond that sense of accomplishment, doing things “my way”. Near the end of this narrative you might pause to consider, if only this digital writer had looked harder at the world around (and worked harder on sentences like, “Tiny lumps of clouds sailed over the silvery globe, escaping into oblivion.”) A Journey of Promise might have been a more thoughtful, engaging book.

In other words, had Holly Nurse, with a layer of irony, placed trust in the value of a weightless “not-belonging”, her character’s journey might have opened up deeper interiors of innocence and ravaged souls, providing bifocal insights & understanding for the folk who lived through Guyana of the 70s, beaten and embittered as never before; fearing so much back then, wanting to belong there so bad.

Book Reviewed: A Journey of Promise: Holly Nurse: iUniverse Inc. New York, 2006, 107 pgs.

Guyana Prize Winners: 98 & 02

2007-05-06T06:48:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1930s when he was 27 or 28 yrs old, the world must have seemed a bleak place for a man of literary ambition; and Edgar Mittelholzer, then “totally unknown”, must have chosen to deal with that bleakness by putting aside his ambitions; perishing the thought of ever getting published, and writing just for the hell of it. After all, who would be interested in his characters – barefoot colonial labourers toiling in mud and rice fields on the Corentyne?

How could he make their narratives compelling to world readers? to local book lovers wedded to imported fiction? in a colony of botanical gardens but no bookstores? and no cultural group to award him a prize for trying?

Fast forward to 2003; walk into the Church Street bookstore, and there on the book shelves is Ariadne & Other Stories: Winner: Guyana Prize for Literature 2002, Best First Book of Fiction. Progress, if you need reminding, is as unstoppable as the May-June rains.

You might search the same bookshelves in vain for copies of Mittelholzer’s novels. They are out of print; hard to find; gone the way of the weatherbeaten logies at Diamond.

Mittelholzer, too, had hoped his first book would be a prize winner. The literature scholar Louis James, in his introduction to the Heinemann edition, tells us he had entered “the first thirty thousand words of Corentyne Thunder…in a publisher’s competition overseas.” Must have wrapped, sealed and mailed off it at the post office in New Amsterdam around 1936. Got it back – assuming they were generous enough to send it back – along with his 16th letter of rejection.

Ruel Johnson’s Ariadne was submitted in 2002, a year when the Prize committee announced that locally-based authors would be permitted to submit work in manuscript form. In other words, you could have stapled together your most inspired poems scribbled on napkins at the Palm Court Bar, they would have been given serious consideration. What charitable times we lived in then!

For readers still unfamiliar with the Mittelholzer prose flow & precision, here are sentences from Corentyne Thunder (1941) you could consider exemplary: “On the northern side of the road the wide canal of muddy water was waved like the back of an alligator, and one could smell the Corentyne rankness of it, the odour of fish and sherriga crabs, of mud and dead wild plants.” (p. 37)

Or take, for instance, this portrait of plantation worker intimacy done in Mittelholzer’s unadorned prose rhythms: “When they had slept and awakened he spoke to her in a quiet voice, his eyes looking into hers. He stroked her arm and kissed her and caressed her body everywhere. The day was without wind and the savannah a-tremble in the heat far away, and she felt very happy lying with him in the cool shadow of the mudhouse.”

And here, straining for stylistic heft, are sentences from young Johnson’s Ariadne (2002): “Silently, he cursed that sygian limboland between dreaming and waking; the inevitable, colourless river of unconsciousness that washed away the memory of dream-pain and dream-pleasure alike.” (p. 83) Like markers of cleverness & profundity, intended to catch the eye of any “dream-reader” or Prize juror, Johnson’s sentences sit on the page bloated with required reading.

Characters in Ariadne spend most of their time hanging about in Georgetown, talking and brooding. You get the sense they’re there as day labourers on the Johnson literary plantation. At night getting ready to make love, a character discovers his woman under sentences like this: “She purred another deep, guttural emission, as he entered her.” Even in bed the fellas can’t get away from the young author’s overseeing ego.

Here and there in the book, like portraits hung on the walls of his personal library, you come across references to authors Johnson considers inspiring: Derek Walcott, Gerald Manley Hopkins, W. Somerset Maugham, Martin Carter, Siegfried Sassoon, Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer prize-winning American poet; and someone named Gordon Lightfoot.

On an Acknowledgement page Johnson complains about the Caribbean’s “far-flung and fragmented geography, small population and increasing apathy towards literature.” (Mittelholzer, you imagine, might have had similar thoughts in his day, but didn’t see the need to beat that bony cow of truth on a blank page.) Since winning the Prize in 2002, not much has been heard or seen of Johnson’s “distinctive voice” outside of newspaper columns.

These points of comparison might feel like unkind jooks; in a fractured nation drained of modernizing skills young talent should be “encouraged”; but some truths are inescapable. Johnson’s prize-winning book is a 92 page booklet. It has been hyped as a local, not a diasporic, production (Printed Courtesy of Courts, Georgetown). The author is known for his pride in local residency. There are supportive blurbs from notable residents praising his “intelligence”, his “best young” potential.

Allowing for its first-book pretentiousness, Ariadne succeeds in showcasing its author as he tries out his prose tools and searches for a personal style. It is a compilation of notes, sketches, works in progress, comic book cartoons and poetry. 92 pages of itsy-bitsyness; fragments of unfinished business, the author too busy serving notice of great things to come. And it’s there on the shelves of the bookstore on Church Street. (Mittelholzer would have loved the bookstore.)

Back in 1998 the judges thought Gokarran Sukhdeo’s The Silver Lining also deserving of the award. In post-Prize statements he explained his book was written when he was 16 yrs, but put away; then sent off to the Prize committee when he was 38 yrs old. He shares this much with the once “totally unknown” Mittelholzer – the waiting, the flare-ups of doubt about the manuscript’s win ability.
Since his 1998 Prize, nothing has emerged from Sukhdeo apart from social commentary in newspaper columns. The Prize, it seems, offers no guarantee of long-term creative output. In a country of corroded institutions, where serious art like daily living often demands deep reserves of endurance and altered mental states, the modus operandi for success in writing would seem straightforward: gather your slim resources, take your Prize shot; then, with your toolkit escape elsewhere.

The Silver Lining at 184 pgs is a more substantial effort, certainly worthy of any committee’s consideration. Rearing to tell his story, Sukhdeo opens with a synopsis; then an inspirational Introduction for readers still hesitant. Once inside, however, you discover this is yet another book about “growing up” outside Georgetown back in the days; this time in the village of Patentia, “a little hamlet in the Wales Sugar Plantation” on the West Bank.

It is labelled a novel, but it’s more a documentary of what the author has witnessed or experienced as a young man: his village school days, the village “characters” (wise Uncle Panchi, cruel Fatboy, the Police Station Corporal); a village romance, family struggle, as when a mother who married at age 15 joins a weeding gang on the sugar plantation after her husband disappears; camping out in the bush with school buddies, and eating amazing meals: “That night they ate a hearty dinner of boiled as well as barbecued fish with guava soup and wild fruits for desserts, using the lotus leaves for plates and wooded spoons fashioned out of bamboo.” (p. 75)

The bonds and antipathies that develop in Sukhdeo’s small world are not so much “crafted” as explained. He wants you to read and be “informed”. There is information, in case you need it one day, on drainage systems and a West Bank road project; and how Canals Polder got its name. It is possible his village material offered much to remember fondly, but little else for the imagination to work with.

The writing grows urgent & didactic when the author (using “character” discussion or debate that would otherwise sound implausible) gives us his thoughts on issues that bothered him as a former resident: such as labour relations with the old Booker, Connell & Co., the importance of culture and family responsibility (Hindu), the pitfalls of capitalism & socialism, the National Service idea (terrible).

This village theme & territory, once considered “underrepresented” in our literature, has been explored more imaginatively by others with a mature grasp of the tools of fiction. Certainly, in Mittelholzer’s ground-breaking Corentyne Thunder. A sense of deja-written must have crossed the judges’ mind. It is tempting, therefore, to conclude that softhearted, enabling thoughts might have weighed in their decision-making. If that’s the case, then like debt forgiveness it casts a long shadow, obscuring inner deficits and fostering the illusion of achievement. And that might not be “good news” for Guyanese fiction.

The judges for the Prize, it should be pointed out, have been at times high-profile, high achievers from our university and from the diaspora, among them previous Prize winners like celebrities invited back. This has given rise to tension and unhappiness among local underachievers, as well as some race-based questioning of the fairness of the judging. To suggest there might be a lowering of the bar in years when Prize submissions are substandard, or just plain awful, would infuriate already disgruntled locals.

Be that as it may, like our shiny new (World Cup) Hotel & Stadium, the Guyana Prize for Literature is here to stay and will be open for business to awardees and judges, local and overseas, for years to come. Standards might be lowered, but they’re not entirely lost. For any plucky fresh talent, less worried these days about rejection, but wondering what to do, where to go with that first typescript, the paths to fame or shortlist glory in Guyana seem well lit, now that the worst have passed.

Books Reviewed:
Ariadne & Other Stories: Ruel Johnson: Self-published: Georgetown, Guyana: 2003: 92 pgs.
The Silver Lining: Gokarran Sukhdeo: Self-published: New York, 1998: 184 pgs.

August 03, 1834: Kill the Pigs!

2007-03-25T07:28:00.000-07:00

Recognised everywhere in the Caribbean as the day the Abolition Act was passed in England freeing the slaves, August 01, 1834 comes back to life in this book by Hugh “Tommy” Payne. Slave labour was about to become a thing of the past but in British Guiana, as elsewhere, it didn’t happen quite so fast. As our former National Archivist reminds us, the slaves woke up next morning ready to celebrate freedom only to discover fresh obstacles and gauntlets.

Ten Days in August 1834 suggests that like most things in this world the situation was a little more complicated, the move to freedom stymied by plantocrat resistance, slave naive optimism and the unhurried loosening of controls in the Colonial Office. Payne has gone to great lengths examining documents & records to extract a narrative of events surrounding the exercise of power on the Essequibo Coast.

On the day after the Abolition Law came into effect, slaves on the plantation La Belle Alliance believing they had been granted the day off did not report for work. Incensed by this behaviour Charles Bean, Attorney of La Belle Alliance, showed up with plantation overseers and reminded the labourers of their “obligations”.

The slaves were threatened and coerced. They remained defiant. A serious crisis developed. It was defused when the Reverend John Duke who occupied the Parish Manse nearby interceded and brokered a truce of sorts. Slaves were prepared to work if the planters agreed to adequate remuneration for the extra labour that day.

The following day, Sunday August 03, 1834, a determined Charles Bean returned with a military force. This time his armed men proceeded to slaughter pigs which were raised and valued by the slaves. Bean’s plan was to enrage the slaves and provoke the kind of protest that might encourage the Governor to declare a state of emergency and delay the abolition process.

Major Bean had been instrumental in putting down the Demerara Slave Insurrection years before in 1823. Then the slaves were under the impression that an Amelioration Act passed by the British House of Commons providing better conditions was intended to free them, and that their freedom was now being withheld. The rebellion was crushed. Bean hoped to follow the same procedure of provocation and harsh reprisal. His plan didn’t succeed because a slave leader named Damon showing great perspicacity stepped forward and advised the slaves to control the rage and fall back on a new strategy of passive resistance.

The following Monday (August 04, 1834) Damon staged a peaceful demonstration inside the Trinity Parish Churchyard, unfurling a flag and preparing to spend the entire day. He was joined by labourers from other plantations. They did not disperse until a face-to-face meeting was arranged with Governor Carmichael Smyth outside the church.

New lines of division emerged that led to strained relations among the colonists. Sympathetic to the cause of the restive labourers were the Governor Sir James Carmichael Smyth, recently appointed from the Bahamas, and held in high regard by the Secretary of State for the Colonies; and The Reverend John Duke whose church the slaves attended and who had interceded on their behalf.

On the other side representing plantation interests were an array of individuals. Among them, Major Charles Bean, the pig slaughtering Attorney; Josias Booker, Manager of an Estate who had arrived in Demerara “to seek his fortune”; William Hillhouse, who wrote a series of letters in the Royal Gazette of British Guiana critical of the Abolition proposals; and George Bagot, High Sheriff and First Fiscal of British Guiana, “a trusted confidant of the leading Planters.”

These quaint titles carried considerable weight back in the days. In a time of disrupted certainties, status and responsibility were carefully calibrated. Slaves had to pass through a process of identity reclassification before they were eventually freed. The Governor, for instance, was forced to send a memorandum to the appointed Slave Protector explaining the following: “I am quite aware that a Slave may be employed by his Master in any Work he may think proper. But as after 1st of August no Apprenticed Labourer can be employed as Praedial Labourer who is registered as a Non-Praedial”.

Payne is an earnest scholar-historian, but in this book he is less interested in casting one group against the other in an oft-referenced duel of colonial rights vs. wrongs. The Abolition Act shook the colony to its foundations, pitting settled, old power against a nascent labour movement, and intensifying fears and hatred. Events in England, as when the Secretary of State for the Colonies resigned, proved just as important to developments in the colony. Payne attempts to peel away public faces to show furrows of alarm and hardening will.

Narrow self-interest and rising anxieties about the colony’s fate struggle within the performance of duties. Reverend Duke for all his religious compassion urged the slaves in sermons to “practice obedience to the Higher Powers” in heaven and on earth. As a slave owner himself he worried about the adequacy of the compensation he would receive once they were freed. Josias Booker found an opportunity to move up from Estate manager to entrepreneur. He petitioned influential people in the Colonial Office and elsewhere in an effort to secure the rights to valuable Crown Land. His plan was to plant & profit from commercial crops.

Governor Carmichael Smyth, perceived by the planters as someone “who had come blundering in from the Bahamas”, eventually realized that Bean’s reports of incidents on the Essequibo coast were exaggerated and designed to force him to proclaim Martial Law. As Governor he refused to be outmaneuvered. He arrested and put on trial those who took part in that “outrageous” passive resistance exercise. In the aftermath he used his power to quash the sentences of 32 prisoners, but he allowed the hanging of the ringleader, Damon, to go forward on account of “a need to uphold respect for the law”.

For Payne the hanging of Damon would seem to be as significant for Guiana as the price paid by celebrated heroes like Cuffy and Kowsilla. Damon, he reminds readers, was hanged on October 13, 1834 “one day after the 342nd Anniversary of Columbus’ landing in what he erroneously but cunningly termed the New World’. This single local event and its repercussions, Payne suggests, is equal in weight to that well-documented global other.

He makes a similar claim of “significance” for the slaughter of the pigs which led to the passive resistance exercise in churchyard, pointing out that years later, in 1838, the new Governor of British Guiana, Sir Henry Light, in a proclamation to the Colony, “took cognizance of what had taken place in those Ten Days of August 1834”, and expressed the hope that it would serve as a model “for the freedom of millions of Slaves now held in bondage in other countries.”

Payne’s methodology has been to pour over correspondence, documents & reports kept by colonial administrators and preserved in the national Archives of Guyana. Based on these and speculative oral accounts, Payne makes “plausible deductions” of what took place in those 10 days. His aim is to provide “information and enjoyment” to the general reader (one wonders how much “enjoyment” readers will find in these grim accounts); but in his effort to reanimate events in the past Payne forgoes his scholar’s language and picks up unfamiliar prose tools.

Documents on the page alternate with explaining paragraphs, but Payne often slips into editorializing using exclamation points, underlining and bold type to make sure you get his point. Sometimes in flights of imagination, when for instance he attempts to put the reader in the middle of tense developments, the prose stiffens into ornate (1830-1930s) sentences, as in: “Bongggg! The last of twelve strokes from the clock in the hall of the ‘great House’ on Pln Richmond reverberated its way to final silence.” Or when he writes: “The position of the sun in the sky, as it moved on its exorable course to the western horizon, indicated that the hour of five o’clock had arrived.”

His preface sets you up with a summary of what’s to come, and a postscript includes a summary of what you have just read. Add to that Payne’s tendency to retrace the same incident from a different viewpoint, and the reader might feel frequently bowled over by a repetition of events. Oddly, for a work dealing with a critical juncture in our history, there are no photos of people or places. This results in a parched-savannah dryness in text and texture that might have been relieved by a few glossy illustrations.

Flaws aside, 10 Days in August 1834 is a fairly engaging work. It joins equally illuminating explorations of power & resistance dramas in our past by UWI Professors Alvin Thompson and Brian Moore. Payne’s canvas is broad, his narrative many-angled as he shifts the focus among colonial adversaries and probes what (he imagines) they were thinking. He has attempted a “linking of fragments” into a cohesive narrative that gives new shape to past knowledge.

When you think about it, events that later pushed Guyana from colonial status to Independence, with its cast of famous names and infamous betrayals, cry out for a similar path-breaking approach and analysis; for narratives that go beyond the perpetuation of ethnic demons. Greater distance from more recent transitions – ‘the Burnham dictatorship’, for instance, and the raw emotions it still evokes – will no doubt encourage a neutral & comprehensive appraisal of that period: the interplay of agendas, real-life issues & circumstance; the protagonists’ obsessions; the seeds of disintegration in the exercise of power.

Until then we remain at the mercy of newspaper people, that daily bombardment of pugnacious argument & naming; the news that hides the old, still-lingering dependence; and younger, cynical minds for whom our history would seem little more than a morass of ideological posture, victim bitterness and death anniversaries. Soft targets, blunt instruments.

Book Reviewed: Ten Days in August 1834: Hugh “Tommy” Payne: Caribbean Diaspora Press Inc. Brooklyn, New York, 2001: 287 pgs.

Poetess Abused, But Willing

2007-02-16T02:24:00.000-08:00

Mahadai Das (1954 – 2003)

Since her death in 2003 the poetry of Mahadai Das has been embraced in some quarters with as much fervor & sadness as the poetry of Martin Carter. Not far behind the glowing tributes are many references to her personal life. You could develop any number of profiles from intimate details made public about her.

Consider these for instance: “Delivered by midwife on October 22nd 1954”, with its hints at susceptibilities and risk. “The oldest of ten children”, upon whom great expectations were hoisted, and a fate beyond multiple childbearing. Her death after illness & “open heart surgery”, suggesting a child might have come into the world already marked for death.

Other details may or may not support the notion of a foreshadowed life: former beauty queen (Miss Diwali, 1971), standard bearer of beauty for her racial group; political activist, going against the current, aligning her hopes not with a race-based party. Answering instead a post-Independence call to nation building. “I Want to be a Poetess for My People.”

Gender and race might have been questions Das grappled with as she worked through tertiary institutions (Universities of Guyana, West Indies, Columbia/ NY, Chicago), and courses in Philosophy. In Bones (1988) you might anticipate the shelling of women “issues”, or a feminist rigour in the lines. There is, instead, delicate sentiment and a wistful self-probing. “Though I have reason/ to blow trumpets, I play/ an elegiac flute in silver hours/ of a misty morning, calling birds with songs.” (from “Resurrection”).

Bird images are plentiful in this collection; but then there’s so much one would wish to take flight from in Guyana – the cages of poverty & race, the cast nets of leftover ideologues. Das admits to being “Bird stricken. / Shrunken my globe, my joys, small circumference.” Birds like thoughts fly out of her head; sometimes their fate is the clipped wing, or like “a pigeon anklestrung/ homefed” the trapped availability of spirit.

Das has been gathered in the folds of ethnic heroism, her past mistakes forgiven. Her folly as an Indian woman (in the 70s) was to cross over into political territory controlled vindictively by black men. No doubt reviled for this act of infidelity, she was welcomed back in death by the heritage keepers (and others lost in blind sympathies) and embraced as victim of her own “naïve faith” and idealism – wanting to be a “poetess” of the wrong people. For she believed in a hairy concept of “national allegiance” being promulgated at the time by those hard black men.

What’s not so openly acknowledged is the first surge of bravery that pushed her craft out against race-based currents; that first-born, front running individuality that landed her eventually in the company of black men. (There were reports – and more recently the trashiness of newspaper comment – of sexual assault on Das while she did National Service in the 70s). Insular group thinking, not base impulses, was surely what worried Das most. And the irony cannot be missed of her life running out on a more accommodating island of black men (Barbados).

One wonders what if anything Das was “committed” to after her flight from Guyana. There is ample record of “travel” and “study”, but in Bones little evidence of all the harrowing or enlightening stuff she must have lived through as she moved among men and around the world. Poems set in North America (“Chicago Spring”) or drawn from her reading (“For Anna Karenina”) don’t display much more than transient insight and metaphor.

What Bones reveals, however, is the readiness of the Diwali beauty queen to be participant in parades of national achievement. Finding no nation, no worthwhile “people” achievement Das wraps herself up and ships away. “In your heart, I have not found a port/ but wide-open seas where I may dream.” In low, dark moments of limbo her lines wander away from her declared purpose into self-commiseration. “I mourn unflowered words, / unborn children inside me.” “Like a packcamel in desert terrain/ I will ride, the load of existence/ upon my camel’s hump”.

If the sentiments there sound a bit lush & long-suffering for a still young ‘poetess’, wallowing on the page in wet clichés, you could blame her welcome backers for ignoring her flaws, for shielding person & poetry, as it were, from gossip and unwanted assault.

There are poems in Bones about regret, isolation, yearning and death, but Das offers only thoughtful reflections on these themes – “Tomorrow, I rise/ between dead thighs of another day” – leaving an occasional puzzle at the end for reader homework. In one long poem (“For Maria de Borges”) Das conjures auras of vulnerability and circling doom with vivid if uninspired imagery: “Death rides, high black moon over all my dreams. /Secret rider across sky’s low fields.” The tremulousness of the estranged heart, rather than beauty and body beset on all sides, was the subject that really preoccupied her.

At age 40 to 49 life expectations, you suspect, begin to solidify. In Das there’s a sense of business unfinished, of something ambivalently poised & pained but not yet formed. The “bird” images again come to mind. Das seems constantly up there, lone sparrow in bruising winds; still beating against currents, but wanting some strong arm or rock to rest on; and unable to find rest (or laurels) in religious faith or ethnic solidarity or diasporic achievement.

For she might have considered becoming a niche poet (like Guyanese Grace Nichols) writing long-memoried, winning poems about her race and her uplifted womanhood. She could have sneaked into academia, funneling her roots & victim experience into Ethnic or Gender studies. There was certainly no lack of agreeable choices. Circumstances and her illness, it seems, cut options thin.

Still, you can’t help but admire her tireless wings, the tribe-challenging individuality that ignored fears & warnings and kept daring the unknown. The nerve of her, her uncommon will to work against the odds – “My bark of reeds/ is frail, light stems – insufficient. The current is fierce.” You sense sparks of bright courage & goodness, a (pre)disposition perhaps too openly trusting for road or sea (“Unlike Columbus/ I am neither helmsman nor sailor”).

You sense, too, in the lines an embryonic “consensual” Guyanese identity, the birth of which seemed precious & important to Das. It is for this reason her poetry merits our patience and attention.

In the end the serious reader returns to the first poem in Bones, “Sonnet to a Broom”. Trust this Guyanese poet to think a humble broom deserves a sonnet, though given the omnipresence of brooms in our rural culture you begin to understand. As imagined by Das its function is to “gain only a clean floor of truth”. When work is done it withdraws unremunerated and (like many a poet’s work) “unpublished” in attics.

The last lines of the poem read, “Yet unreproachful, you return to use/ efficient though abused, but willing.” Comes close, doesn’t it, to a portrait of that familiar ethnic stereotype, content to toil one arm behind her back. More likely you’re hearing the resilience of a CEO’s pretty secretary who keeps hidden in her drawer desire for creative self-expansion, a wish to be called up for higher responsibilities.

But as it seems there was so much still forming in Mahadai Das’s poetry; and in her life – as in the lives of “the people” she once wrote for – so many transitions incomplete. Though from all indications you’d have to think she was getting there.

Book Reviewed: Bones: Mahadai Das: Peepal Tree Press, England 1988: 53 pgs.

Pleasures and Misfirings of Myth

2007-01-17T05:35:00.000-08:00

Characters in Mittelholzer’s Shadows Move Among Them (1951) would have given considerable thought to any suggestion that ghosts, jumbies or shadows as experienced in a forest environment were little more than “electrical misfirings” of the brain. This viewpoint was put forward by scientists in a recent issue of the journal Nature. They claim that human agents by sending electrical messages to the brain could induce anyone to think “duppies” are real entities.

In Shadows Mittelholzer’s folk had their own theory about ghosts & spirits. When asked to explain bizarre behavior in the jungle, one character described it as “myth pleasure”. This, he says, is when people exercise their creative imagination and amuse themselves in accordance with a code of make believe. “We here create our myths and conventions day by day and discard them as easily as we create them”. Seen in such playful, rational terms and robbed of its ancient mystery and fears, life without spirit visitations could be managed with greater confidence even if futures remain indeterminable.

Myths and inner worldly behavior have been central to the fiction of Wilson Harris. An entire scholarship industry has built up around his books. The sequence of novels that comprise The Guyana Quartet was published between 1960 and1964. Harris has argued firmly & obscurely against “realism”, its “inadequacy” as a tool for exploring the complexity of Caribbean history and peoples. His aesthetic manifesto (in Tradition, the Writer and Society, 1967) hovered like a giant theory-filled airship over everyone in the region who taught literature, or considered writing fiction in the 70s.

The thorny metaphysics of his fiction, needing explication and explicators, might have eclipsed any burgeoning interest in Mittelholzer’s writings beyond those blandly informative historical overviews and the circumstances surrounding the author’s exile and demise in England.

Shadows was recognized in Time Magazine as one of the significant works of fiction published in 1951, a “hard to classify novel.” It could be read today as a comic parallel to those hyper-articulate folk taking off on metaphor-laden boat rides up the Canje river in The Guyana Quartet. The novel’s humour and inventiveness, the “mad slant” Mittelholzer brings to the Guyana landscape would appeal to many in the Caribbean not disposed to “brood”. Guyanese readers might find it particularly enjoyable on the level of comic fantasy.

Europeans as anthropologists, Governors, entrepreneurs have been drawn to Guyana with its explorable Interiors and underrepresented tribes. From Schomburgh to the Roths these very serious men have left us museums and maps and musty volumes of fadingly important information. In Shadows Mittelholzer uses three Europeans as central characters and it is tempting to view the novel as a satirical commentary on those explorers who came before.

Reverend Harmston, the central character, is unlike those early serious men. Educated at Oxford he brings his family to British Guiana in 1937 and takes them 100 miles up the Berbice River. There he adds to his vocation the responsibilities of coroner, registrar and protector of Amerindian rights. Once settled he starts thinking, maybe he could build his own cross-cultural civilization amidst the splendour of rivers & forest, “the gruff roar of baboons” and the Amerindians astonishingly in harmony with nature.

It’s an imperialist settler’s dream, after the search for Eldorado, and since he is miles away from official Georgetown scrutiny Harmston wastes no time establishing (what years later in 1960s North American argot would come to be known as) “a hippie commune”.

The location is an exotic sounding place called Berkelhoost, an old plantation once owned by an old Dutch family with an exotic name, the Schoonlusts. In 1763 there was that famous slave revolt. As the legend unfolds in this novel, the white family members were slaughtered, but strangely their 17 year old daughter, Mevrouw Adriana Schoonlust, did not object when threatened with sexual assault. Her life was spared and she became a servant of the slave leader, Cuffy, attending to his sexual needs (and doing secretarial chores since Cuffy couldn’t read or write.)

Mittelholzer sets his novel in a place memoried in blood, lust and ghosts in the plantation ruins, a place where the Devil “lurks in the shadow of every twig.” But the newly-arrived Harmston family is unfazed by its blood-soaked history. As if to neutralize the horror of what took place, Reverend Harmston encourages more ‘natural’ human relations, a kinder sexuality. Pleasure without foreboding, you could say.

No wine or alcoholic beverages are allowed at Berkelhoost (they’re against the health code.) But the ethos of “hard work, frank love and wholesome play” becomes the tricolor flag of the Harmston civilization. At the end of one of his Sunday sermons, for instance, Reverend Harmston switches roles and reads this community bulletin: “Our monthly consignment of goods is due by this Wednesday’s steamer…a fresh shipment of contraceptives and contraceptive appliances is expected by this same opportunity, and any of you who might find yourself running short can call whenever you like to replenish your supplies.”

The second European in the novel is Hendrick Buckmaster, resident scholar & historian, “a regular fun-stick” around the reservation. He has a cheerful explanation for his jungle disinhibitions: “I’ve got an oversexed Doppleganger, my boy. It does nothing but father illegitimate children…I’m king of sleep-walkers in this neighborhood – my Doppelganger, I mean. And as for sleep-acting – well you ask some of these Buck women and hear what they tell you.”

The Harmston model is a basically simple one: shared responsibilities, plus a blending of European enlightenment and the “local influences”. Structures, codes and “secret laws” would impose discipline on unruly inclinations and native behaviors. Conditions are spartan but life though regimented is far from beholden to the Ten Commandments. Harmston calls his an “elastic” religion, a pragmatic mix of “Thou shalt nots” and the leavened humanity of “spirit and fevered flesh”.

His forest-dwellers are not entirely free to run around half-naked in pursuit of pleasures and self-interests. Harmston sets up his education system. Lots of aesthetic stimulation, immersion in the Best of European Culture: Chopin, “Aida”, Shakespeare, “The Ride of the Valkyries” (whose chorus & trumpet overtures blasting through the forest would have lifted the heads of local birds and animals) and the US Time Magazine. Depending on aptitudes the children are separated into “squads”: the Book squad, Drama squad, Labour Squad.

Order at the forest settlement is maintained with balata whips. (Who said building a civilization would be painless?) Harmston’s daughters are slapped hard on the face if disobedient. Malefactors are generously granted three chances to mend their ways. A fourth offence would lead to their “elimination” as incurably bad folk. An Amerindian wrongdoer with a special fear of jumbies is manacled in a shed believed to be haunted by the ghosts of the slaughtered Dutch family. Throughout all this the Harmston authority is never challenged.

The European through whose interrogatory eyes we wander around the settlement is a tormented young man named Gregory. He arrives with a raft of personal “issues” that spring from crumpled nerves and marriage memories he can’t erase (Harmston considers him a refugee from an “over-civilized Europe”). Actually a psychiatrist had suggested a change of environment (the strangeness of Guyana) as a cure for his ills.

Slowly he is tugged into the oddness of the Harmston experiment and he begins to display odd, trancelike behaviours of his own. In time he becomes the love interest of the Harmston girls, a precocious 14 year old who sends him notes (“My Flat Chest Burns For You”) written in her blood; and 19 year old, sexed-up Mabel Harmston who wants to give up her free loving way with Amerindian boys and settle down. The big question for Gregory is his readiness to give up England (its night clubs, restaurants and banking system) and commit weeks, years of his life to a forestrial haven of corials, hairy spiders and those erotically charged Harmston girls.

Events in the novel are not outlandishly funny. Mittelholzer manages to keep a thread of 1930s colonial credibility running through the pages. At the same time the tone of controlled amusement permits the reader a varied response, now shaking with laughter, at other times lulled by the creepy visual and sound effects of the Guyana forest.

Lightning and thunder, torrential rains and the full moon intervene at hallucinatory moments of self-discovery, and though the benabs aren’t built with creaking doors things manage to go bump on the forest floor amidst all the insect and bird noise. His Europeans might come across as cartoony inventions, but the straight-faced depiction of the Berbice wilds is a measure of the author’s intimate knowledge of Guyana, from city to forest & savannah.

Outsiders must trust Mittelholzer when he writes: “The fire-flies flickered without sound in the darkness – several at a time, sporadic and unstable…The air was laden with the leafy scent of dew on decayed vegetation, and came to him in slow drifts as if borne on the waves of insect-shrilling….” (p. 46)

You might wonder, where are the Guyanese men and women in Shadows? Aside from the Amerindians who represent “the local influences” they are miles away in Georgetown. Keep in mind, this is the 1930s. The brightest local minds are probably preparing to set out for Oxford U., LSE and other hatcheries of radical thinking. Years later they would return and, like Reverend Harmston, begin their own cross-cultural experiments, be it “socialism” or “cooperative republicanism”; or the ethnic mesmerism that seeps through our segmented land.

Maybe Shadows, published in 1951, with its European settler themes and characters, was Mittelholzer’s cautionary tale for our unsettled nation. In the jungle, he might be saying, be wary of white elephants and European dream-builders, their seed bags bulging with capital and ‘big ideas’. They come to Guyana in many postures and disguises. Some may not even speak in European tongues. A few could well be shape-shifting Guyanese.

Grant them a wish, concessions, tracts of green, virgin land anywhere, you never know what they’ll do next; the grand schemes they’ll devise, the human cost and waste if these grand schemes misfire.

Book Reviewed: “Shadows Move Among Them”: Edgar Mittelholzer: J.B. Lippincott Company, New York, 1951, 334 pages.

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Up From The Canefields

2006-12-22T08:40:00.000-08:00

Coming after publications of poetry and a novel, High House and Radio (1991) is a collection of Rooplall Monar’s short stories. If the back cover is a reliable guide readers are invited to follow the lives of characters who once occupied cramped living quarters on a Sugar Estate, and who now live independently in their own individual houses. These issues of upmoving transition might not have been the author’s intention, and the stories don’t quite succeed that way.

The stories come draped in the satins of Guyanese Indianness, and on that level they might intrigue those pursuers of groups and constituencies, the pollsters and formula-ready academics who like framing what we think about the plight of our favourite collectives. But collectives (ethnic or religious) are ice cages for the human spirit. You expect our writers to chip away at them so that individual fates might be freed, and minds be made open again to multiple points of view.

Monar’s fiction has encouraged snappy comparisons with writers working a similar literary terrain, Sam Selvon (in Ways of Sunlight, 1957) or V. S Naipaul (in Miguel Street, 1959). Those older writers brought to bear incisive scrutiny and humour on a mosaic of desperate living. After his remarkable achievement with Janjhat (1989), Monar in this collection creates a world that showcases the Indianness of his Indians. The stories, which are delivered with a stage performer’s excitement, don’t probe deeper than that; nor do they expand our understanding much beyond surface perceptions.

His Indian folk occupy a self-contained village on the coast (Annandale). They no longer work for the sugar estate, but lack of education has severely handicapped their life prospects. The old estate worker solidarities have started to crumble; anxieties and divisions develop sharper edge. “Over me dead body, no Hindu blood in me family”, a Muslim father shouts at his daughter who’s thinking of getting married. “Greed and selfishness invade people spirit”, another character says in a bitter-jokey rum shop mood.

Monar has set his own limits for these stories – intense creole talk and amusing vignettes that release ripples of laughter and recognition. Characters often get drunk and feel emboldened to perform reckless acts. Village tricksters use their wits to survive. And humour is at the level of the unemployed man whose day to day problems are compounded at night by his unhelpful wife whose bulky body and thick thighs make bedroom intimacy strenuous if not completely satisfying work.

On occasion black creoles from an adjacent village (Buxton) cross boundary lines: a woman, unhappy with her black obeahman, searching for a Hindu spiritman. Then there are “thiefing black people” who raid backyards for poultry; and idle black youth whose crude sexual comments as Indian girls walk by raise tension & alarm.

Tension swells into aggression as when politically generated violence sweeps across the land. A few stories (“Election Fever”) look at the volatile situations especially during Election time when Indians became random targets. Though Monar doesn’t write with an activist’s eye for Indian victims, the stories shed light on an underlying predicament. People may feel securely entrenched in their village culture, but that communal self-sufficiency sometimes half-blinds them to the world around. Hiding true selves behind walls of old habits and beliefs, they are often naively surprised when violence bursts into their homes.

Monar’s prose – “And don’t talk, them coolie people beetee yapping while one-two coolie women beating they chest dab dab: ‘O Bhagwan, is real murderation.’” – lies like thick-thick paragrass on every page. A character in this collection, in an effort to motivate the author, must have whispered in his ear, “Man, write if yuh writing”; and Monar with great exuberance proceeded to do that. Sometimes he appears to be flaunting his easy way with creole words. At other moments the narrator’s voice wears you down with its revved-up mono-speak.

You sense the need for editorial trimming and control so that the language hews to the task of delineating character, providing insight. A worldwide Indian reader, drawn to the book’s Indianness, must slow down and tread gingerly through a word-field like this: “But gat luck, she nah gat none big brodda in the house, else he mighta fat-eye she, cause nowadays, you cyan trust some buddy an sissy never mind them come-out pon one mumma-belly.”

So much of any book’s success depends on the cast of invented characters. Monar has called up folk from his own village experience; but Danky, Mule, Bansi, Bungu, Naimoon & Shairool don’t stay on in the imagination after you’ve closed the book. They behave in hilariously recognizable ways, arguing & cussing, scheming & daring, beating tassa drums & cooking mutton curry; and on drunken occasions they dish out “one proper cut-rass” to their wives.

(Back in the days, if you remember, the women screamed “Murda, murda, O Gawd, dis man gon kill me”, and eavesdropping neighbors minding their own business often shrugged as if a village woman screaming “murda” was nothing to get excited about.)

Still, when you consider, for instance, the Naipaul inventions (in Miguel Street) – Hat, Titus Hoyt, Bhakcu and Eddoes – Monar’s village folk sound as if they’d walked straight off a punt trench dam onto the author’s page. Which is saying, there is more to the process of character creation and the short story form than just rushing narrative and creole intensity.

In the Booker sugar estate days of the 60s (where these stories are set) when folk creativity helped stoke anticolonial fires, fiction like this gave cause for awards and celebration (In this collection one story is dedicated to our pioneer folklorist Wordsworth Mac Andrew). Monar’s fiction may have emerged too late for Guyana Prize awards, though his work received a special Judges’ Prize in 1987. And Janjhat will be valued as his remarkable breakthrough Guyanese novel.

But new territory is already laid out and waiting for Monar’s attention. Up from the estate canefields more of his Indians have moved through the villages to new uneasy residence in the city, where they dispense political patronage and must “look outward”, share residential space and intermingle with non-Indian creoles and strangers. Life for many in the city (depending on the rains, the visa hunt) feels saturated with sullen & resentful arse-catching. Add to that political skullduggery, abrasive public manners and flourishing careers in banditry & river piracy and there’s enough material to engage the ingenuity of any writer.

Edgar Mittelholzer and Jan Carew once worked like porknockers in similar areas of human scramble & depredation. They’ve left us enduring literary models.
Too besides, screams of “Murda, murda” in the city and surrounding villages these days are like “Businessman Shot Dead” headlines, matters for our nation to be gravely concerned about.

Imagine, then, new literary forays into narco-crime fiction, or political-murder mysteries; or melodramas filled with the creole anguish of desperate G/town housewives. In this day and age, if serious literary fiction seems unwanted or must stay locked up overseas in institutions of higher reading, a second tier of well-crafted books could keep us pleasurably engaged. Writers with Monar’s storytelling talent would appear to have their work cut out for them.

Book Reviewed: High House and Radio: Rooplall Monar: Peepal Tree Press, England, 1991, 176 pgs. (w. w.)