The Sexuality of Memory
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.)
