Anatomy of a Marriage (1920s Georgetown)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.