Talent Rising
First published August 08, 2003 at GuyanaCaribbeanpolitics.com
Such was our hunger for new writing, for something contemporary in C/bean fiction, that when Buxton Spice was published in 1998 its author was embraced and showered with superlatives (rich superb hypnotic dialogue). Her second novel faced the unenviable task of living up to all that high praise. Now that the book is out, is Oonya Kempadoo still a writer to watch? Is hers still an extraordinary talent? In many ways, yes and yes.
The rush to embrace her has led to somewhat hasty comparisons with other women writers, Jamaica Kincaid, for instance, when her first book Lucy (1991) was published. My hasty comparison was with a young, aspiring Vidia Naipaul who gave us rich and superb first books of fiction (Mystic Masseur, 1957, Miguel Street, 1959) before his burgeoning talent produced his masterpiece A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). So, is there a masterpiece percolating inside Oonya Kempadoo? On the strength of her second coming, Tide Running, one must wait and see.
Two things set her apart from the old masters. First, she writes about sex almost as if it never existed until her talent discovered it. Secondly, her remarkably unselfconscious way with our language. Kempadoo has placed her signature on our nation language without getting too polemical about it. Mix up her paragraphs in a bag of paragraphs by C/bean authors and you can identify the Kempadoo style: When my bumsey bump on the sand I feel it stirring gainst my skin. Squingy totee rolling and lolloping like a lumpa sea sponge. Lower down, water shorten me two legs, they snaking. p. 189
You could say, too, that the Kempadoo bumsey is her fictional trademark. It was everywhere in Buxton Spice which dealt with sexual awakening among pre-adolescents in a village in Guyana. It allowed her prose to introduce to world readers exotic-sounding terms for men and women doing it. In Tide Running she takes it a step forward, describing sexual attraction between an adolescent in Trinidad and a married woman. One suspects the bumsey will be central to her masterpiece when shes prose-ready to deliver it.
Tide Running is also a development on Buxton Spice in terms of character and plot. In her first novel nothing much happened; it was a collage of people, atmosphere and heated intercourse set against a backdrop of menacing politics in Guyana. As sketchy in portraiture as, say, Miguel Street, though the sharp insight that makes Naipauls characters distinct and memorable wasnt there.
Tide Running moves into new areas of sexual tension: on the beach between American tourists and renk gigolo fellas; in the luxury home between the unfaithful wife and the central character. The narrators voice has grown up from pre-adolescence to characters wanting to be representative of Trinidads young people. One is tempted to declare, as the book jacket does, that this novel portrays the predicament of young society looking to America for its fantasies and its heroes. Or that it explores issues of culture, race and class in Trinidad. But Tide Running is still too reed-slender to carry such heft.
What happens in the book can be summed up swiftly. Two young men (Cliff and Ossie) are growing up in a bad place in Tobago called Plymuth (mosta the time me and Ossie spends riding them two small bikes Mudda did give us for Christmas p. 22); they like liming, sexing plenty girls and they seem to lack any ambition. They meet a liberal-minded couple Bella and Peter (a Dominican woman and an Englishman) who live in a flim-style luxury villa. The couple invites Cliff into their home; he becomes a regular visitor, hanging out with them, sliding deeper into their intimate lives; at some point Cliff suspects the Englishman is slyly allowing his wife the space and opportunity to sleep with him. (Enter the bumsey.) This entanglement of marital love and extramarital desire, plus the erosion of trust as money goes missing lead to complications that may or may not be believable.
A substantial improvement on her first book, you might say. Kempadoos strength remains her descriptive power, her poets eye for sharp C/bean detail: White take she complexion too, she dark and smooth skin. Botha them slim and she tall too . You cant tell how old she is, the way how she walk kang-a-lang flapping she big foot so, or running race with the lil boy on the jetty. Neither the mister, but he is a oldie-youngie. Looks young-young sometimes, and old other times. He have a big gluga-pipe sticking out on he neck and a big biscuit chest, for such a slim fella. p. 19). You could swim in that pool of words all day and feel at home.
In a way that might seem modern Kempadoo relaxes control and lets her characters talk their talk on page after page, hoping theyd convey a sense of everyday life on the streets, in the court room. Contemporary references are plentiful to Nike, Oprah Winfrey, Bold and Beautiful, Michael Jordan, Eddy Grant, Stellas groove but these are for the most part time markers with little irony or satire intended. There may not be sufficient density of text for (post-colonial) theorists to sink their meanings into; but to describe Tide Running as a microcosm of contemporary West Indian life is perhaps spreading adulation too thickly and gratuitously.
One hears so often the lament that reading habits in our region have given way to passive viewing habits, that reading a good book has been replaced by studying the TV guide. Caribbean classics like Biswas and Palace of The Peacock have achieved their right of place as material for exams questions in secondary classrooms, as texts for deconstruction at tertiary institutions. A new generation of public readers might well be encouraged to whet reading appetites on the novels of Oonya Kempadoo.
That longing for guidance in matters of marriage, morals and sex has always been with us. Back in the days readers young and old poured furtively through the pages of Lady Chatterleys Lover (from England) and Peyton Place (from America); or fell back on grubby yellow-edged paperbacks, and the advice columns of Ann Landers. Todays readers need look no further than Kempadoos novels for experiences relevant to their day to day concerns.
The temptation for our highly decorated author (Premio Casa de las Americas, 2002, Orange Prize for Fiction Nominee, 2003.) is to succumb to the gush of critical acclaim; to believe the worshipful words of well-wishers who welcome her as a woman author, or an Indo-Caribbean author; to take on those nah-nahsayers who push her talent aside with the sniffy observation that the Kempadoo novel is little more than a skinny, fast-tempo bumsey ride. She may be all that and none of the above. I for one can hardly wait for her third book. One can sense the Kempadoo masterpiece not far behind.
Book Reviewed:
Tide Running: Oonya Kempadoo: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001, 2003
