N.D.Williams’ Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

  Mahadai Das (1954 – 2003)
 Since her death in 2003 the poetry of Mahadai Das has been embraced in some quarters with as much fervor & sadness as the poetry of Martin Carter. Not far behind the glowing tributes are many references to her personal life. You could develop any number of profiles from intimate details made public about her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 innerworldly 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 Yor

 

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 masks of benign passivity, 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 monotalk.

 

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 raw life to engage any writer’s ingenuity.

 

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, 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)

 

Near the end of Part I of Edgar Mittelholzer’s Sylvia (1953), the central character, Sylvia Russell, barely 14-years old, still a student at Bishops High School, experiences a moment of blinding self-discovery. She is standing naked in a hotel room in New Amsterdam, looking at herself in the mirror as if newly born. She is worried about letters she has found in her father’s jacket, letters from his mistress; and snapshots of the woman posing naked on the Seawall; confirming what people had been whispering, that her father was “a rake”.

Sylvia is a mixed-race girl. She has begun to wonder what life holds in store for her in Guiana of the 1930s. She idolizes her white father. Conversations with him have always informed her developing sense of being. And at that moment, curious about her pubescent sexuality, his words give her “a sense of consolidation“.

“Ignore the vapourings of people. People suffer from fear. People are ineffectual escapists. People strive always to side-step reality, because reality baffles them, or is more often than not ugly or terrifying. Reality generally carries with it the threat of death - or discomfort. So people try to run away from reality into the pretty bubble-lands of religion. Only you are real. Only you have significance.” (p. 108)

It might seem a bit of a stretch, allowing such thoughts to surface through the mind of a 14-year-old, but in this stroke of startling illumination Mittelholzer shares something in common with the American writer Ayn Rand who through conversations between characters would insert the philosophical principles that underpinned their decisions and behavior. (Think of Roark’s arguments in the Fountainhead, 1943.)

Wilson Harris takes this literary device to upper-sphere levels of often impenetrable discourse, his characters becoming mouthpieces for counterpointing ‘visions’ and interlinked identities across rivers and continents. But Mittelholzer - always the grounded realist, the least abstract of Guyanese writers - would rivet the sensibilities of his characters in events, in the secular reverberations of the individual’s time & chosen place.

This is British Guiana in the 1930s. Georgetown like some multi-tentacled beast is slowly emerging from the mudflats and swamps of plantation politics. A mishmash of estranged souls struggles to establish a society, setting up boundaries defined clearly by job, profession, race, residence, religion, money, property, skin complexion, hair texture, other pedigrees of separation. Within this turmoil of colonial differentiation, Mittelholzer reminds us, men and women must find mates, sort out the baggage of love, consider marriage.

At age 14 mixed-race Sylvia seems less concerned about the large umbrella issue of ethnic identity. Uppermost in her mind are familiar adolescent anxieties: with whom could she fall in love? what was it like to have sex?

And whom would she eventually marry? The Portuguese boy she really likes (he goes to St Stanislaus College, but he’s not from “the coloured middle-class”, the group her father considers right for her)? Or Jerry, the young man with “good hair” she meets one day, his handshake “powerful and masculine“, but his manner and accent a little on the crude side?

The conflict between desire and restricted choices, her terrifying reality, could resonate just as powerfully with 14-year olds of mixed or unmixed blood at B.H.S. today - girls more secure, one hears, in their ethnic identity; bombarded by the “vaporings” of newspaper sophists, but facing the same bewildering pattern of denied possibilities and stifled desires. And daughters unlikely to hold intellectual conversations with their worried, race-conscious fathers.

Sylvia was published in 1953, years after Ayn Rand’s most popular fiction (The Fountainhead), but their concerns would seem to be similar: the individual’s struggle for dignity & independent thought, the refusal to sacrifice oneself (in the colonial context, the emancipated self) to fashionable ideals, the importance of scepticism & reason when faced with populist rhetoric or (in the global context) fundamentalist hatreds.

Sylvia is often referred to as a novel about race & tropical sex (“She violated the taboos“) and one can see why. Sylvia’s father came from England to build a bridge over a river in the Interior. He stayed on and meets Sylvia’s mother “dark of skin and dark of eyes and hair“, and part Amerindian. When Sylvia was conceived out of wedlock - with features “European, though her cheekbones were high [like her mother's]” - he could have walked away or returned home. Instead he first makes a promise to support the child, then he decides to marry her mother.

For this breakaway act of autonomy he loses English friends & privilege but finds a tenuous place and purpose in the colony. Mittelholzer’s roots his main character’s dilemma in her father’s individualist temperament. He’s not a (BG) bhagee-loving family man. He soon grows weary of his wife’s shallow mindedness and resumes his skirt-chasing ways (at “Scandal Point” near the Seawall with the naked girl in the photo); but to Sylvia he offers his philosophies of free will & survival in a constricted colonial world.

At the end of Part I as we prepare to follow Sylvia’s emotional and physical growth Mittelholzer sets the reader up firmly on a plateau of anticipations. We wonder: will she stay faithful to the values & truths she has discovered at age 14?

Conventional thinking in 1930s Georgetown would have doomed her chances. Sylvia had to “grow up” and face colonial reality. The social forces at large would eventually overwhelm her. She would fall victim to the “fear” so many people discover and try to sidestep. Her inbred ambivalence could take her down paths to illusions of “arrival” until, desperate to be loved & protected, she suffers the fate of the “tragic mulatto”.

But the novel takes a strange lurch into colonial melodrama. Before experiencing her own growth pains Sylvia bears witness to the struggles of older women. She brings their experiences back to her father for explanation. He offers psychological constructs, “sado-masochism” for what Naomi, Sylvia’s mentor, is going through with her man. And the “Oedipus complex” for the strange attachment Sylvia has to her dad.

Human relations at that time, as reflected in the novel, seem sorely in need of “development”. Men see women and turn into post-plantation predators. Sex is engaged without fairness or affection. (Typical of male cruelty is when Naomi’s husband locks her out the house, leaving her to spend the night naked on the back steps in drizzling rain.)  ”All women are masochists,” Sylvia’s father tells her, giving little thought to his own sadisms. In the scramble for status in Georgetown, attitudes are as half-formed as the society the colonials inhabit.

In a sense Sylvia’s father performs the role Mittelholzer might have invented for himself, the writer (privileged with education) as father of an unruly, pubescent nation. Foresightfully offering truths to live by, and levels of introspection on which to build a human knowledge base that helps define the national character.

The turning point of the novel comes when Sylvia’s father dies. His badly mutilated body (and that of his ‘outside’ woman) is found in a car. Someone resentful of his “rakish” ways must have fixed him good with a cutlass, no one seemed sure. His departure unhinges Sylvia. Bereft of his ability to frame her life choices, to instill guiding precepts in her still developing mind (“Live in your own world and do as you feel you ought to.“) Sylvia’s world spins this way and that into moodiness, a deepening vulnerability and the moment she “sinks away sweetly“.

That Mittelholzer takes out the European father figure in his novel is significant.  Sylvia’s degeneration is in some way linked that other person left out of the family equation: her shabbily treated mother, the indigenous source of the narrative, despised by Sylvia - “her dark Negro-Indian face stupid and weak” - seduced with promises, plundered then ignored by her expatriate husband.

Mittelholzer’s novels are praised routinely these days by scholars for the pioneering depiction of colonial Guyana. His name has been taken over by groups not fully acquainted with his body of work. Sylvia is out of print but its insights would seem highly relevant today when you consider the still-evolving mess that grips our nation. Reissued and in the hands of Georgetown’s young people it could energize the challenge to find a new readership for our literature, an enduring place for that literature in our culture.

In some ways it’s a schmaltzy soap opera of a novel, with a serialised structure and patches of ‘True Romance’ writing. And some surprisingly erudite dialogue as when one character in an attempt to make himself “interesting” to Sylvia (now a nubile 18yrs) opines, “Speaking in this year 1941, there’s only one poet of any substance in this colony - perhaps in the whole Caribbean area - A.J. Seymour.” But Sylvia succeeds in chronicling the disarray of men and women scattered along the coast in the 1930s and grappling with large, new social questions: how do we break old habits of mistrust & self-distancing? at what points of shared interests do we merge and function as a nation?   

The novel has its fair share of Guianese opinionists who on several pages argue the merits of capitalism and communism as if to raise colonial consciousness. And events overseas filter through (Mussolini in Ethiopia, Hitler annexing Poland) giving the colonials a vicarious sense of being connected to the world. But the streets and landscape are eruptive with people and their entangled anxieties about the future, and Mittelholzer spreads out like a map his main concerns: the native forces giving birth to our nation - absconding fathers, our willful daughters, those tumescent fields plowed over and over, women of hope and renewal.

Book Reviewed:  Sylvia: Edgar Mittelholzer: Dell Publishing Company Inc. New York, 1953, 383 pgs (w.w)

The central character in Tessa McWatt’s novel This Body (2004) has left Guyana for Toronto and later London; she wants the reader to believe her problem is “the great sexuality of memory“. Unlike other migrants with more mundane, hardbitten complaints this would seem to be a great personal affliction, requiring neither help nor empathy; just someone to listen as she explains.

 

Considering the title of the novel her complaint might not be as pretentious as it sounds. On the epigraph page there’s a quote from a poem to help you focus (“I love this body/made to weather the storm/in the brain”). And the opening pages find the central character seated on a bench across the road from the Royal Albert Hall “adjust[ing] her right buttock with a flick of her fingers” while she “looks directly up at the loins” of a princely statue outside the building.

 

“The storm in the brain” sounds like an exaggerated phrase for the mental anguish some migrants might experience in lonely cities once diminished expectations and job (or jobless) pressures raise blood & ire. But how, you wonder, does ‘the body’ help ease this anguish? Imagine nights of basement-huddling sex with kind strangers under warm blankets in cold rooms in frozen cities and you might think you’ve found the answer; but you’d be way off the mark with this novel.

 

For after the opening pages raise you to a state of high erotic alert, This Body slips off into chatty narcissism. Quite flatly, you will feel let down.

 

There is not much sex to shout about; what passes for memory are irritating flashbacks; and the central character’s mouth becomes a distracted narrative device. It takes over from her body and for chapter after chapter it talks up a storm about sexagenarian life anxieties in England once the body’s youthful fires have diminished.

 

If you’re back in Georgetown waiting and waiting inside the US Embassy (silently cursing your luck, self-maximizing governance, the Garbage City) and praying to “get through” with those US Visa officials, you could pass the time with this novel in your hands. Tessa Mc Watt once lived in Guyana and now splits residential time between Canada and the UK. She has written two previous novels.

 

This Body was not intended to uplift new migrant aspirations. In fact, one isn’t sure what readership, home or abroad, McWatt had in mind. The central character starts off meditating on sex, and ends up bemoaning lost love & lost home. Your worldwide reader looking for substance and enlightenment might have to resort to groping the plot. Essentially what you find is this:

 

Victoria, the central character, grew up in Kitty and attended Bishops’ High School (she would have preferred the Ursuline Convent but her father’s “indiscretions” ruled it out). Her father, surprisingly “tall for a Chinese man“, wears a “patchy, long bristled goatee“. Problem is, he has a voracious appetite for women. Not just any woman. Guyanese to the bone he fancied “women who’d moved to town from the country:  Amerindian women, fine-boned Indian women, and thick tar-skinned women.”

 

Unwilling or unable to control his plundering urges this unbelievable Chinese man fathers countless illegitimate children in Georgetown. Their mothers would walk past his house with the children in tow scowling at Victoria, his legitimate daughter. At some point Victoria decides she’s had enough. “The only lifelong dream [she] had was to leave the glaring eyes of her father’s mistresses and their bastards in Kitty.”  Which was as a good reason as any for leaving Guyana back in the days.

 

Mysteriously Victoria starts on a mini sexual odyssey of her own. First time her body partially surrenders is on a beach during a stopover in Barbados. Then in Canada she gives in to a taxi driver, Harry, “with whom she got drunk“. (This impulsive act had unintended consequences that required ‘a simple surgical procedure‘.) Then Victoria meets a Kikuyu from Kenya named Kola. She stays with him for six years (careful not to get pregnant again) until one day he too takes off.

 

At this point the Victoria’s head takes over: “She read each of the more than two hundred books he’d brought to her tiny flat, searching for some clue that would tell her where he had gone.” 200 books! This is an astonishing feat. Which Guyanese woman you know, schooled at Bishops High School today, would read even two books “searching” for her man?

 

You might start wondering: what on earth is wrong with this Chinese family?

The novel provides few answers. The story is not really about this Chinese family. The bulk of the narrative unfolds in England. By then Victoria’s body has reached the globally ravished but stoutly settled age of sixty one (though she looks much younger.)

 

On occasion she contemplates surrendering again to the old, heart-pumping desire, with a befriended Englishman, “to keep the juices flowing“. There is, in fact, one last flare up of consummated passion which is described with the patience and watchful anxiety that mirrors the act. But for the most part Victoria’s life in England is resigned to cooking & catering, to pining for the lost Kikuyu, and raising a boy child. Not her boy. Her sister, Gwen, died in a car crash back in Guyana, and her son is in England staying by Victoria.

 

These revelations, about her rampaging father and her always accepting body, are contained in flashbacks that snag you like so much annoying plimpla in the narrative flow. (Imagine! You there going along reading quiet, quiet, then all of a sudden you get jook by a “body” part!)

 

What really gets your goat, though, is McWatt’s somewhat carifestive way of developing character, using cultural brushstrokes. Kola, the Kenyan Kikuyu she lived with, is drawn in bright African references. He enchants Victoria with his knowledge of Ethiopian spices, Nigerian palm wine, East African stew, African lullabies, traditions & aphorisms. Given Victoria’s body yearnings you might well ask what kept their intimacy alive all those years.

 

Victoria never reveals her secret though she admits this much: “He said he’d noticed the fine line of her back in the market and felt he’d known her before, in Africa.” Yes, it takes your breath away. What a man, what a line! What a union of immigrant souls!

 

Then there is Derek, the boy Victoria is raising. At first he’s nurtured on stories of Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur. In an abrupt cultural switch he’s told the myth of Kanaima in the Guyana forests. This improves Derek’s image in the classroom, but in the schoolyard he’s tagged as Kanaima boy. To add anguish to the plot lines Derek, as he grows older, develops a need to discover the identity of his biological father. He gives up surfing Camelot sites and uses the computer’s search engines to locate him.

 

Sex, memory, escape from seed-scattering father, love’s labour vanished, identity search - and next Mc Watt throws (sudden) death into her salad bowl of themes and preoccupations. We find out late in the novel that Kola has died. His African wife contacts Victoria with the news after finding her letters to him. Seems he was deported from Canada and imprisoned by a Kenyan Government fearful of his revolutionary ideas. He was “confined to dirty six-foot cell…like a caged animal“; and there he died.

 

As if to complete the circle of the wanderlust Guyanese soul Victoria decides to return home. Just to visit. The prose of these homecoming chapters is awash in (re)migrant apprehension, sentimental encounters with once familiar people & places, and much contrived creole dialogue. They serve as a reminder of how the passage of time can sometimes play evaporative games with the memory of ambitious authors overseas.

 

“The taxi driver blows his horn and shouts “damn fool” as a minibus with Bombay schmaltz blasting out its windows overtakes them…  St George’s Cathedral, lofty wood and cracking paint, still stands as a testament to her Christian name… Booker-McConnell’s department store, with its imports and delicacies, is humming with shoppers…” This author, you sense, has been abroad so long she has to scrape the memory barrel for verisimilar, back-home details. Instead of a strong sense of place readers must make do with ‘researched’ or tourist video images.

 

McWatt’s previous book was a Finalist for The Governor General’s Award in Canada. They seem fond of migrant/multicultural poetry & fiction over there. The book didn’t win, but Mc Watt need not lose faith. Next time around, to please those quirky Canadian judges, a sequel to this novel, shorn of schmaltzy sentences & situations, providing deeply-felt, penetrative insights might just do the trick.

 

And those Guyanese lucky to “get through” with the US Embassy need not lose faith either. They can take away these life lessons hidden in This Body: once in the big city, Toronto or London, put down roots and memories fast before they fade away. As for ‘that body’ travelling with you, be wary of the hazards it creates, the surprises it springs.

 

Because listen, you taking a big chance with your own backtracking genes. The Spirit of Kanaima will not answer your prayers. And watch out for that dark stranger smiling and staring at you on the underground train, who swear he know you from some place.

 

Book Reviewed: This Body:  Tessa Mc Watt: Harper Perennial, Canada: 2004, 328 pgs. (w.w.)

After all where is it written that only the underprivileged make more compassionate authors, or even more compelling subjects for authors?

 

Derek Walcott in his latest work The Prodigal considers himself lucky to be writing “from the privilege of all your wits about you in your old age”. Much of his poetry is filled with painterly metaphors for his world citizenship, and in particular for his native
St Lucia, its sea salted folk, their kweyol interlaced lives. You sense always the investment of the poet’s entire life in his poetry and paintings, life & art wrapped like a monumental gift for his island people: “you whom I loved first”.

 

David Dabydeen’s writings reflect a very different kind of privilege, that of metropolitan residence, university education, scholarship & research skills, plus the cornucopia of words that could build up from academic discourse. His subjects have been The Old Empire, the transatlantic journeys of indentured souls, the truths that lie hidden in famous paintings or submerged in historical records.

 

But in this reissued first novel The Intended (2005) the subject is really himself, his personal journey to England after 12 early years in Guyana, and his success at replantation and self-renewal overseas.

 

The Intended won the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2002. A Guyanese reader might be overly impressed by the prose flow (‘The boy could write.’) the way back in the days people in the market square were overly impressed by the oratory of lawyer-politicians trained in England (‘If you hear the man speak!’) Like Walcott he reveals a penchant for painterly description; there is much first-book energy deserving of notice, and a good deal of EngLit insights to raise approving eyebrows.

 

You come away thinking that despite its Guyana origins the novel seems pronouncedly British in its concerns and accomplishment. Not that there’s anything shape-shifty about that.

 Semi-autobiographical first novels are often an announcement of pubescent writerly talent. The Intended is really a showcase of literary talent which Dabydeen has already developed to produce highly praised books of poetry and fiction. In the reader’s mind back home there should be little doubt: The man could write! 

His central character, a Guyanese Indian, comes to England to get an education. Quite suddenly he finds himself down on his luck and dependent on British social services and security cheques. His days are spent just getting by on the margins though you’d never know it if he didn’t remind you. Compared to the rough-and-tumble migrancy of Sam Selvon’s London fellas or George Lamming’s boat migrants, his day-to-day street hardships seem trifling; they’re eased considerably by the fellowship of two friends, Shaz of Pakistan and Joseph, a homeless Rastafari youth.

 

On occasion the plot ushers in two white girls from privileged homes (Monica and Janet) to focus our attention on the young men’s heterosexual growth; but for the most part the three lads drift a lot and ‘ol talk a lot.

 

They talk about “O” Level & “A” Level exams, about sex, about Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness”, Milton’s “Lycidas”, Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”. They find summer jobs, lose touch for awhile. The Rasta youth gets arrested, then becomes a fugitive from the law. But always they find each other again, and a sense of shared responsibility & caring develops among them.

 

Self-absorption (that deepens into voluble self-awareness, though not quite angst) fairly well sums up the predicament of the Guyanese narrator. Even after he befriends the other characters, something keeps him psychic yards away from England’s cultural mixing. From this detached point he offers insights into uncertain citizenships in British society, the problems of adaptation for brown and black newcomers, the attitudes of English people, those money-grubbing Pakistanis, those shiftless dancehall Jamaicans; and how hard it is for everyone to get along.

 His close friend Shaz was born in England, his parents from Pakistan. This would make their kinship as “Asian” brothers an easy congruence; but Shaz exudes a native-born confidence that extends to women and sexual adventuring. The narrator makes fumbling attempts to keep up with Shaz, but is reminded each time of his fresh-from-the-canefield greenness in matters of erotic fun. To compensate for failure he stays focused on his migrant ambition, on his desire to become “somebody”; and he lives self-consciously distanced from Shaz, though sex is constantly on his mind. Then there’s Joseph, the black youth who lives in a Boy’s Home run by the Social Services. He plays the guitar and becomes intrigued with the narrator’s opinions of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. At some point he puts down the guitar and picks up a camera and has crazy ideas for making films. Inevitably cultural “difference” sets them apart. The narrator grows weary of Joseph’s dreamy vagrancy & his anti-social urges, and on one visit he recoils: “When he raised his head, he looked like a gollywog, his wooly locks spread out in spikes.”  Pages later, as the narrator sits in the Oxford University Library, Joseph creeps into his thoughts, “reminding me of my dark shadow, drawing me back to my dark self.” His sense of separateness deepens, and in a spasm of self-disclosure that would warm the hearts of concerned family & neighbours back home in Berbice the narrator explains his West Indianness this way: “I’m different really. I come from their place, I’m dark-skinned like them, but I’m different, and I hope the whites can see that and separate me from that lot. I’m an Indian really, deep down I’m decent and quietly spoken and hard-working and I respect good manners, books, art, philosophy. I’m like the whites, we both have civilization.” (p. 127) He experiences the occasional flashback to childhood days in Guyana, but he’s far from being a homesick soul. These sections, filled with village incident and a small cast of village folk, are lovingly written; you notice the author’s attention to exact local detail. They provide sociological colour and context that explain the character’s unsureness in England.  Like snapshots of a life “back there” they impinge on the narrator’s behavior in England only when he’s poised to do something untried & unfamiliar. 

On the last page as the narrator gets ready for Oxford – “I watch the clouds being rinsed in their original colour and the darkness slowly unpeeling from the sky. I wait under the street lamp, wanting to be visible, but the light flames upon my head, flames upon my skin and I have to step back into the shade” – there’s a hint of muted triumph and self-congratulation as the novel sweeps to its lyrical finish. You’d think the poor fellow had suffered nightmarish hard times along the way but managed somehow to survive, keeping his wits about him and his ambition pristinely intact.

 

The Intended is an earnest first novel about commingling identities, making it perhaps essential reading for outward-bound Guyanese, but not a casual read for bus or subway riders. A Courantyne reader might be struck by a few graphic scenes of, for instance, two country donkeys mating, described in way that makes you think this observed act could only happen in Guyana. Student hopefuls heading to England might be drawn to Dabydeen’s cultural insights and personal revelations, and the central character’s chin-up determination should inspire.

 The novel was first published in 1991, years before the new Islamism and a new wave of immigrants (from Eastern Europe) took root in England. This might propel it very fast toward a library shelf of dated books, though not before postcolonial scholars have had a feast of pickings off its characters & themes.  Still, once the dark clouds over Guyana have lifted, and the death grip of ethnic power politics finds lasting release, one can hope for a resurgence of a literary culture in our nation, and who knows? maybe the return of the coffee table to Georgetown living rooms. Then Arts lovers could point to The Intended with its stylish ‘arriviste’ prose and say with homeboy pride, “The man could write!”  

 

Book Reviewed: The Intended: David Dabydeen:  Peepal Tree Press, England, 2005, 176 pgs. (w.w.)

In the 1950s as Caribbean societies approached the granting of Independence and the long process of growing up, our first professional writers must have thought it convenient to explore the coming transition by writing  ‘coming of age’ fiction. Boy narrators were drafted and made to perform extraordinary tasks.

 

Consider, for instance, Trumper, 16, the narrator in George Lamming’s seminal In the Castle of My Skin (1953) who kick-starts the novel this way: “It was my ninth celebration of the gift of life, my ninth celebration of the consistent lack of an occasion for celebration. From a window where the spray had given the sill a little wet life I watched the water ride through the lanes and alleys that multiplied the barracks that neighboured our house.” For 280+ pages after those rumbling opening lines Trumper must sustain the rolling thunder we often hear in Lamming’s refined English prose.

 

The uninitiated reader was reminded by academics that Trumper’s voice was not really a child’s voice. Literary convention allowed authors the freedom to use the child’s perspective to make statements about the world around him. The child’s view was clear and unbiased as it recorded adult behavior in colonial society and helped us examined problems of race, class, identity and labour relations.

 

The 12 yr old boy narrator in Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando (1965) was asked to grow up fast and observe himself growing up. On the surface the novel explores what happens when the boy is sent by his mother to live for the first time in a big town. The novel was written from memory and like Lamming’s work was seized on by English depts. and hailed as a significant achievement.

 

Students of literature were advised that the phrase “the experiencing consciousness” might give focus their reading, weight to their writing. Far from being books simply about ‘growing up’ or ‘the loss of innocence’ these important novels spoke to us about “the fractured consciousness” in society (in the case of In the Castle of My Skin) and “the open state of consciousness” (in The Year in San Fernando.)

The boy in V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1959) did pretty much the same thing though to a less intellectually delighted reception in the region. He described what he saw and understood about the world around him. He made us laugh at the way we lived, and perhaps laughter, or his creator’s singular way of seeing the world, wasn’t the correct response to colonial comic-book behaviour.

 

A quieter reception apparently greeted Peter Kempadoo’s Guiana Boy (1960). That boy got hardly any notice at all the first time the book was published. The novel has been reissued by Peepal Tree Press and has been dubbed (somewhat arbitrarily) ‘a Caribbean Classic’.

 

Guyana Boy (2002) is not a literary novel. It takes us back to the good old days though with little wistful postcolonial regret that those days are gone. Kempadoo, it seems, had all these wonderful memories of family & friends growing up on a sugar estate, and he decided to put them down in novel form.

 

In a newspaper article he reportedly describes himself as a self-made, self-taught man, “an accidental writer”. Guyana Boy has the feel of a book unhurriedly written by a not too ambitious author who decided to follow the literary fashion of the times. It strolls along with a wise old man’s gait and a boyish excitement at reliving memories of a place the author once knew fondly as home.

 

Eschewing stylistic trimmings the narrative is arranged in neat chapters with homefelt titles (“My Uncle Tomby”, “Saturday Night”, “Rice Cutting”, “Pa’s Death”) which follow one after the other in train carriage sequence, though each sequence fades as quickly as you engage the immediacy of the next.

 

Scholarly minds might have been put off by the lack of empire-ending gravity in the prose; and the readership for this novel will probably be restricted to people of Kempadoo’s (more literate) generation, so faithful is the author to colonial detail. Today’s young readers would be perplexed by references to, for instance: lime swank, the school Royal Reader, “a squingy little boy hanging about the girls’ latrine waiting for his sister“, boys who shouted “Surrender” when play fighting, “lush paragrass and fresh donkey dung“, vaudeville shows at the Tajmahal; and brilliantine.

 

Kempadoo doesn’t ask his narrator to adopt a special voice for narration. The boy (Lilboy) is alert and intelligent, but he seems rarely troubled by events unfolding around him. Even the death of his father causes few ripples of sadness in his life. There is vivid description of the wake, the burial ceremony, his family distress. But the chapter ends: “I felt like crying real bad but remembered my Pa and what he had said to me; and didn’t.” And the following chapter begins: “The girl came up the punt-trench bridge from the other and she passed me, carrying a bucket on her head, and I knew she was Mary-Ann.” Which is the start of an account of Lilboy’s sexual awakening.

 

For the most part the boy lives sealed off from estate and world unpleasantness. There is no lack of warmth in his family circle. Rarely, however, does he experience a pivotal moment of self-discovery, some jolting misstep that would point him to eventual maturity. At the end he leaves the pastoral scruffiness of Berbice for Georgetown, the capital, where presumably he will experience the first real adventure of his life.

 

Still, the book is vibrant with descriptions of village good neighbourliness and colourful characters. (Sugar estate life in those days would have been intolerably dull, you imagine, without colourful characters.) On the page the village folk talk & live as intensely as they must have for years in the author’s head: the fearsome Head teacher Pollard, Lilboy’s sly lascivious uncle, characters like Big Willie, Jiggertoe, Alim (in Mohammedan pyjama-clothes), Pussyfoot and Bulbous Bessie (and she two-ton bubby).

 

With a clarity of prose that brings to mind the novels of Edgar Mittelholzer the author pays close attention to their eccentricities; and the creole dialogue, because it’s not too rich in village profanity, retains a freshness of time & place.

 

You wish, though, there was more tension in the writing, more wrinkles along the narrative thread, to deepen our involvement with those vanished lives. There’s a scene at the sugar estate, for instance, where Lilboy and his mother are attending a party thrown by the sugar estate manager. He wanders off with the daughter of the estate manager and they find themselves near a pond of fish:

 

        “This is my pond and those are my fish, “the girl said. “Want to see me call them up?”

        She took some pieces of bread from her pockets, gave me one, and we started to break them into small bits and throw them in a clearing in the pond in front of us.

        “See how the fish would come and eat from me,” she said. She called, “Fish, fish, fish.”

        Fish, fishes, I wondered. Why she doesn’t say fishes like Mr. Cort told us at my grammar lesson in school? Singular fish, plural fishes.

        There was movement in the water and a few hassars and houris and congo-fish came to the surface and ate pieces of bread. The girl held two hands together and stood up and was excited.

        “See my fish, my own fish,” she said.

       “I have never seen such big hassars, in all my born days, Miss Elizabeth,” I managed to say.

 

Scenes like that - resonant with issues of property, ownership and colonial assumptions - are far & few. The novel is content to chip along, chapter after chapter, at its own ‘accidental’ memory-inspired pace; striking no anticolonial notes along the way.

 

On a simple storytelling level Guyana Boy reminds us that boys will be boys, in our literature and in colonial times. There is little trace of ethnic pleading, though for many readers now greying in the diaspora (songs of unshared memory constantly playing in their heads) this novel will be viewed as especially comforting.

 

These days considering our high consciousness of race & politics, of frightening big guns and fire breathing gunmen in our coastal villages and new thoroughfares that bypass the old public roads, Guyana Boy with its placid, pleasant surfaces might encourage among young readers a refusal to believe that - “fractured” though the psyche might have been in Trumper’s Barbados - colonial life had its moments and rewards for boys on the Courantyne.

 

 

Book Reviewed: GUYANA BOY:  Peter Lauchmonen Kempadoo:  168 pgs.  Peepal Tree Press, England, 2002 (w.w)