Jan Carew: Rewind & Last Hurrah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleasures and Misfirings of Myth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Up From The Canefields

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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