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.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Outsider Poet in Residence
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Cry Tough: Alton Ellis (1938 – 2008)
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.
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.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
1823: Blood, Sex & Angst
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Divergent Fates: Ikael Tafari
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.)
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.)
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Colonial Triumph & Pain
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
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
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
“Part of an Age, or All Of Each Day”?
“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
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
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
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
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 Guyana
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 Guyana
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!
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