N.D.Williams’ Books

There’s the story about a NY magazine editor who has to wade through piles of typescripts, solicited and unsolicited, on his desk. His method is harsh but simple: when he comes across a sentence that is badly constructed or one that doesn’t appeal to him, he stops reading and sends the typescript to the reject bin.

 Reading recent Guyanese fiction – and newspaper columns, letters – one is tempted to react like that editor: some (non)literary strivings belong in the try-again bin. You sense in the writer too little concern for craftsmanship.  A book arrives at your door like a call girl sent by a publisher or pimp. Within early pages you know this is not what you want to spend precious time or money on: too pretentiously dressed, or shabbily thought-through; the writer naively self-important, writing with no other purpose than to strike postures (triumphal or resentful), peddle stale ideas for same-old problems.

 In Remembrance of Her (2004) by Denise Harris is a novel about a human mystery. There is the ghostly presence of a caul girl (“I was born with a caul over my eyes.”) who through diary entries – from “an old diary from the top drawer of an old chest of drawers” – bears witness to the central concern of the book: the mysterious murder of a young boy by an old magistrate. When you get to page 15 you come across this sentence: “The maid surged across the street, her body going zig-zag, zig-zag, zig-zag, her hands lashing out at the curtain of rain and wind as if grappling with unseen forces running alongside her – zig-zag, zig-zag, zig-zag – as if caught up in a drunken brawl.”  

Those tackily embroidered “as ifs”! You’re tempted to stop reading right there: this maid is amateurishly dressed; these forced-ripe sentences are not for you.

 But, you think: the publisher must believe there are readers out there for a book like this. Out of curiosity you read on, searching now for the (Guyanese) reader the publisher had in mind when he sent this book out on the streets.

 The main focus of In Remembrance of Her, if you try undressing all its hyperbolic prose, is the conduct and character of a Guyanese Judge, born in 1915, “one of the few black men to win a scholarship to study in England”; a man of extraordinary, familiar ambition, “I’ll make the underdog into a real man. I’ll be the moulder of his destiny. After all I’m a black man, once the underdog, made to walk up the backsteps because of the colour of my skin.”  How responsible was he for the murder of his son? What really happened?
 
A character testifies: “I ran up to Babyboy’s room followin’ the sound of mi name and there I saw the judge on his knees with a knife in his hand and Babyboy stretch out on the floor. I remember standing’ at the door like I was frozen in time. Uh…Uh…Uh. That’s all I kept saying’. Just like that, believe mi. Uh…Uh …Uh”.  Just when you think you’ve stumbled on the thread of a simple layered story the author throws you into a word stack, into piles of irritating, chatty sentences. “What were you feeling at the time Blanche?” “Me? Well…as I just tell you….”

 To bear witness another character comes back through dreams from ‘a flower grave’. (“What you doin’ here child? I say to him. “You dead.  A car lick you out the way. Lick you out this life over here, sendin’ you way beyond over there.”). Nursery rhymes are printed in entirety (“Mary had a little lamb”). The caul girl’s diary with an entry dated 1939 tells a dream of “a ship at sea making a cross over…mangled shadows bawling out, “How in God’s name?”  There are chapters of courtroom testimony from dramatis personae with names like “Late Lamented Eyes” and “Private Eye”; the obligatory mixed-race family with its cache of “family secrets”; and many stream of consciousness pages from back in the days of “stream of consciousness“.

 All this swirling talk from all these witnesses is intended to unravel the mystery of this poor lady’ boy child and his magistrate father.

 To add metaphysical gloss to the mysterious goings on there are echoes of Wilson Harris’ prose in the book. A distressed character, Blanche Steadman, is returning home from a shop: “I was jus about to turn the corner when a car flashed pass mi, an arrow of light goin’ at breakneck speed. The arrow swept round the corner in a half-circle like it was comin’ right back at mi, aimin’ for mi, piercin’ mi very soul.” (p.62)  It’s like that: picking one’s way through an allusive word stack, listening as oblique testifying voices go on and on.

 Slowly, mind-wearyingly, the novel (a straightforward murder mystery dressed up in gothic-sounding prose) turns into a showcase for authorial techniques. Its 28 jerky chapters have little of importance to say about Guyana’s human dilemmas – yesterday, today or tomorrow. (Some books, you start thinking, should try their luck: hang about the street corners of academia and hope to be picked up.)

 Back in the 1970s when In Remembrance of Her is set the reader might have found the patience to forge on through its pages. In these post-Matrix times, as mass entertainment continues to lure readers away (with sex ,violence, fireballs of dying) you keep hoping for literature that breaks new ground; writing that respectfully moves away from Guyana’s prose masters (Mittelholzer, Carew, Roy Heath, Wilson Harris) whose books, you want to believe, our new writers have read: sweeping us up with an expansive vision; offering fresh insights into, for instance, what is mysterious or goes unnoticed about our contemporary folk lives.

 In Remembrance of Herstrives to be innovative, to be something resembling a Guyanese Gothic: with its multiple voices and angles of allusion, its horror images from the past; bits of poetry braided with newspaper clippings and pretty page fonts; its filters from Wilson Harris. Regrettably for all its creative labour the book comes on too breathless with desire for complex reading and ends up a metemgee of wearisome chatty narration.

 Books like this, ineptly executed, often take the reader into dark alleys of memory, literary cul de sacs; they leave you there, tied up and screwed to high heaven with stylistic devices; cut off from real-world life and death issues.

 The slackness we accept as normal in our city streets and offices, the coarseness that has seeped into public discourse degrade the quality of our lives. These days with recognizable exceptions many of our resident and non-resident writers (of newspaper columns or fiction) without a care for precision in language, without a thought for our critical intelligence seem quite content to preach or preen; and absentee editors in faraway publishing places with one paternal eye on our underdeveloped talents are quite content to hype and pimp.

Book Reviewed:

In Remembrance of Her: Denise Harris: Peepal Tree Press, England (2004)  

                                                                                                                                   W.W. 

Small Private Worlds :A Review of Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Godmother and Other stories

Posted September 18th. 2003 in www.guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com

By Wyck Williams

The stories in this brand new collection, The Godmother and Other stories, are designed to cover four decades in the lives of Guyanese at home, in the UK or Canada. At a fast reading clip you could race through all 112 pages in about forty minutes and probably set some sort of record in the process. There are nine stories divided into three sections, but the division only highlights the skimpiness of the book. One reason for this is that the author, Jan Lowe Shinebourne, would prefer if you turned your back on the turbulent physical world, and shack up instead in the closed space of her characters’ head. Once there you’re invited to lie back and listen as her characters ruminate.

There’s much memory-inspired talk and hazy atmosphere. In a way it resembles the purple-haze inner world atmosphere of the 60s. Readers of the 90s or the newborn 00s, hoping for a fresh ambience - expecting, say, servings of sex and the cell phone intensity that reflect their time now on the world stage - will probably turn away from this book and go reading elsewhere.

Shinebourne is a writer who fled ‘Burnham’s Guyana’ and took up residence in England, much the way you imagine émigré writers once fled Pinochet’s Chile or Castro’s Cuba and took up residence anywhere. The scale of ‘oppression’ and ‘flight’, you might argue, is not exactly the same but it sounds significant when you’re told on the book’s jacket that a character, Sylvia Rivers, “is one of the many thousands who fled the political repression, corruption and social collapse of Guyana in the 70s and 80s” (The stories of the many thousands might make for more sensational revelations; Shinebourne’s writing talent on the other hand wants to offer something more refined, more layered with meaning.)

Listening, for instance, to her story as told through Sylvia Rivers in Hopscotch, you’re touched by how much she misses Guyana; and how England so cold; how stimulating her friendships were in Georgetown; and how painful it was to be driven away by Burnham from the land of her birth. And that’s about it. Nostalgia, regret and private anguish artfully served in the coffee shop of the character’s head.

You get the impression, too, that once they relocate to England some characters seem to be having the time of their lives never mind the anguish. London and New York is an account of trips made to these cities. Wherever the author goes a longing for happier pre-Burnham times gnaws in her stomach; she turns then to food. The Canton in London’s Soho “reminds me of my grandmother’s cooking in old British Guiana”. She finds a restaurant in London (after twenty-five years) that reminds her of her mother’s cooking menu which “included fufu, metagee, peas and rice, plantains, yams, cassavas, eddoes, tanya, breadfruit, pepperpot made with fermented casareep”. In New York’s Chinatown she goes shopping for “red bean cake” the way her mother made it. (She finds it eventually in a Guyanese restaurant in Brooklyn.) If you think there must be a subtext of large scholarly issues somewhere beneath all this traveling and food-searching - from someone who fled Burnham’s Guyana - then place an order for this book without delay.

Readers nurtured on Naipaul’s short stories with their strong memorable characters, and Sam Selvon’s funny-sad evocations of the arse-catching time he fled the (pre-Burnham) Caribbean might feel somehow let down by this collection. Perhaps it’s unfair these days to ask short fiction to offer a story, give us fugitive souls still battling rootlessness, some humor maybe, unignorable sexual desire; a sense of place; some exposure of the nest of mixed motives for leaving home; the new forces shaping our daily lives. All this might be too much to ask of Shinebourne’s stories. She’s simply not the extrovert kind of writer.

What you get are itsy-bitsy juxtaposed scenes - a collage of moods, she would say - fragments of conversation and letters, some locally flavoured descriptiveness, all assembled under titles (Harold, Jacob, Chuni, Vera)that are as spare as the stories themselves. There are multiple space breaks, like silences during coffee conversation, during which you’re supposed to reflect on what you just sipped. Sometimes the story stops jus’ so and you wonder: what was that all about?

For the multicultural reader there’s a report, in The Berbice Marriage Match, on an arranged marriage among Chinese-Guyanese (not the many thousand who fled, just this one family). For the political reader, Harold is a very short account of a Cheddi Jagan victory motorcade through the Courentyne. It’s described with newspaper straightforwardness: “His car began to drown in the rising tide of bodies. They raised their fists, shook hands, blew kisses, waved hats and handkerchiefs…In their desperation to get closer, some jumped off the crowded bridge into the canal and swam to the other side.” The Harold main character in a hiccup of irony discovers his personal life is not as powerful and progressive as the political party he supports. The story is over almost as soon as it starts and leaves you wondering again: is this all there is?

Shinebourne is anything but a prose maximalist. Bodiless paragraphs, string bean sentences are served tastefully, if somewhat dryly, on her pages. Don’t expect a steaming plate of national character insights. There is much to sip and complain about; plenty pages of homesick food preparation, mind you, but little of substance for the general reader to stuff and digest. At times tired sentences sulk and refuse to work anymore for the author: “Did I expect the ghosts would rise like Lazarus from the dead? Round and round the table goes the conversation. Guyana was now the second poorest country in the world after Haiti and malaria returned; it was no longer the ‘bread basket’ of the Caribbean; no longer had the highest literacy rate in the region; our political culture was in ruins; we could not return home.”

Maybe the short story is not the appropriate form for capturing anguished flight from Burnham’s Guyana. Poetry with post-Martin Carter meditations, his crisp sour lines of disillusionment could possibly fill the breach. One suspects the rumshop is still the best place to listen to what is on people’s minds and hearts after the flight from political repression in Guyana. A thousand backtrack stories, full of adventure, surprise and horror, delivered with the raconteur skills of a Marc Matthews or Ken Corsbie would probably stir the souls of many thousands of angst-ridden Guyanese.

Be that as it may, the author of The Godmother has stories of her own to tell.(Jan Lowe Shinebourne, you should know, was born in Guyana. In 1970 she moved to London where she still lives. In addition to her work as an author she has also worked as an editor for several journals, as a political and cultural activist and as a college and university lecturer. ) Criticize all you want, she would probably insist on her freedom to write her stories her way. So wherever you now live if you like coffee shop ambience and don’t mind earnestly sketched self-portraits, a long-memoried sensibility, plus origamically folded pages of nostalgia and anguish, The Godmother is the place to go. Its author will charm you, blow a good seawall breeze on you, fill you with worried longing for home away from home
The Godmother and Other Stories by Jan Lowe Shinebourne
Published by Peepal  Press

Run Toward The Falling Trees

By Wyck Williams

“I have repeatedly argued that our capital city was built
in the wrong place, on the narrow strip of coastland
where all our commercial activity is based, and not in the
interior where all the possibilities of future development lie.”
- Matthew French Young

Sometime back in the old ideological years (1960s-80s) while the Burnham/Hoyte administrations were busy digging up Demerara and planting socialism, Matthew French Young was building or maintaining roads in the Potaro and Madhia districts. At the same time no one, it seems, at our elite schools (Queens College, Bishops, St. Roses, St. Stanislaus) thought of organizing field trips outside of Georgetown. Student aspirations were directed overseas: GCE exams, university places, the economic chance to slip away to streets of opportunity in the metropoles.

Looking back, a trip across the muddy Demerara, or a boat-train ride down to sleepy Charity, even that tedious journey to Bartica might have done wonders for youth psyche. If the logistics for such a trip proved forbidding, this book by Matthew French Young, Guyana: the Lost Eldorado (1998) would have fired imaginations in city classrooms.

Of course, he was at the time living the experience he would later write about, but think of the jolt to sixth form imaginations if, say, the author had been invited to speak on Speech Day, and if in his speech he had made the case for rebuilding our capital city in the Interior. (Oh, the challenge to the nation! the mammoth task of moving people, constructing new permanent habitats! How transformed our lives might have been!)

As he explains in the book’s introduction: “I encountered [in my journeys into the interior] the contemporary pursuers of the myth of Eldorado …what I came to see was that it was not the gold which should be the true subject of the search …but what was incidental to the original myth: the lakes and waters they contained. Here, for the Guyana of the future, lies a source of power and of vast acres of irrigated and fertile farming lands.”

Or imagine the appeal to sixth-form idealism if he had ended his presentation this way: “The jungle gives a bushman a different outlook. You know things will constantly go wrong that you have no control over. You don’t give in, but accept the fact that you have to work around things to come to terms with the land. Living this way involves a full commitment to getting right down to basics. You have to rely on yourself, not on other people, so you develop a very honest relationship with yourself.” (p.31)

(To this day many students from campuses of the University of the West Indies recall with excitement the grand “National Cooperative Road Project” to open the Interior, that inspired brainchild of the Burnham administration. In July 1970 a Cubana aircraft flew hundreds of volunteers to Georgetown, then they were airlifted to Madhia where for several weeks they wielded machetes, clearing bush and chopping open the roadway. Young was the man behind the setting up of the camps, the superb organization that made the project a success. He writes about this with pride and affection)

Guyana: The Lost Eldorado really begins in 1925 and continues right through to 1978 (with Young’s impressions of the Jonestown calamity) until his departure for retirement in Canada in 1980; so there are observations of Guyana going through its several upheavals and transitions. (He spent 39 of those years without once taking a vacation, and when he did he used the time off to turn out oil paintings of Guyana’s heartland.)

Comparisons are bound to be made with that other intrepid explorer Philip Roth (who was recently hailed as “an adopted son” of Guyana and whose published volumes were “launched” in Georgetown). Both men were scions of famous settler/explorer fathers. Young was born in the North West District in 1905, educated at an English public school and like Roth followed in his father’s footsteps. He was not the administrator/builder Philip Roth turned out to be. More of a freelance manager/adventurer he charted his own path, “as diamond prospector, gold-panner, surveyor of uncharted bush, hunter and builder of roads”.

Rooted in landscape and memory his book offers surprisingly entertaining reading as explorer memoirs go, and this may be due to the uncluttered flow of his prose. He filed reports to officials in Georgetown but Guyana: The Lost Eldorado is a rippling memory stream, not a book assembled from arduous note-taking. Places and people are written about less as phenomena to be scrutinized and documented. You don’t feel locked into a chronological sequence of reportage; and the book somehow manages to avoid the tedium of repeated observations that blemish the Roth volumes.

On and off the forest trails Young encounters a familiar cast of strangers who show him extraordinary kindness: the McTurks, Fiedkous and Melvilles, those forest-skilled, readily employable Amerindians (whose ‘knowledge’ proved indispensable to his ‘achievements’), the many generous local officials (the book is peppery with names). There are ample accounts of high drama and excitement. Round about 1942 Young hangs out with American flyers stationed at Atkinson Field. There are U boats lurking off Trinidad shores and he’s lucky to escape being torpedoed once. Somewhere in Brazil he’s pursued by a band of ignoble Amerindians hurling spears.

His relationship with the Burnham/Hoyte administrations was professional and unentangled. He’s contacted by a Govt. Minister with a request for his skills or expertise; he accepts an appointment, prepares for the job and takes off for the Interior. He experienced very little interference from the Party in power; in fact his services were highly valued and respected. He was a man consumed with task, performance and responsibility, and his book on occasion draws critical attention to Govt. waste of resources back then, “the millions poured down the drain”, for instance, when maintenance of equipment lapsed and expensive machinery was left to rust away in the bush for want of spare parts.

His working relationship with everyone was for the most part smooth and he acknowledges the generous support he received from Roman Catholic priests, Amerindian labourers and many officials. He seems only mildly surprised at the strange customs he encounters, the Amerindian cohabitation rituals, for instance. He doesn’t gloss over his involvement with women of all races who apparently threw themselves at this ‘red man’, oftentimes offering to keep his hammock warm.

It becomes fascinating to enter his world - so near to, so far away from the racial/ ideological fevers gripping Georgetown then - to share in Young’s enthusiasms: his experience of pontoons, dieseline drums, caterpillar bulldozers; the laterite quarry, the Bedford lorry, the Archimedes outboard motor; gas lamps, rainfall & mosquitoes, the Rest House; Stampa, Hosororo Hills, the Pakaraima mountains. Young’s bright descriptions illumine the Interior’s underworld nature: perai in the rivers cruising for swimmers’ toes, snakes curled up in your boots and set for good morning surprise; the massacuraman, ripper of hearts and livers; and in hard times the spirit of mashramani.

One leaves this book with the sense that to have lived all one’s life in Georgetown, to have known only that coastal strip with its seawall and colonial white houses, to have never crossed our rivers, to be not in the least curious back then about our forested regions - therein lies the true loss of Eldorado. Matthew French Young’s marvelously readable book shows and tells us there was once another life, once places pristine and ready for grand ideas.

There was, too, he reminds us, the sad destruction of life, much wastage of human resource in the bush. Chapter XXXV “The Stench of Death at Jonestown: 1978-79″ focuses on its aftermath, the grisly task of clearing the ground of strewn belongings and disposing of bloated bodies. (After a previous visit he’d recorded favourable impressions of what he saw: “I stood and looked around to witness what these people had accomplished in the four years they had been there. I was amazed and said to myself that this would be a good example for our own cooperatives to follow, dedicating themselves to make Guyana self-sufficient.” p. 278)

In Chapter XXXVI: Matthew’s Ridge: 1979-80: A Country in Collapse” there are revelations of the rippling effect of the economic convulsions experienced in Georgetown at the time. Compounding the wastage due to neglect of equipment there is acute fuel shortage, a drying up of funds in the pipeline, the crumbling of discipline among his workers. At times Young and ruling Party officials are at odds over what to do. There is a sense of burgeoning crisis everywhere and cracks in cohesive efforts to keep project operations running.

Despite its dark-clouds end chapters there is much to admire in Guyana: the Lost Eldorado: our indigenous adaptation to plant and animal life, the bushman’s pursuit of personal freedom and diamonds, the continued road building and mapping of once intractable regions. And much to learn and reflect on (one wonders what his thoughts were on mining operations at Omai). Matthew French Young, a model of self-sufficiency and restless courage, started his Guyana journeys in 1925; he died in 1996. His book contains valuable insights that could serve as a survival kit for young nations and culturally hobbled societies still learning to walk in the new millennium. He says, for instance: “If a tree is falling towards you, run to it, never turn your back, for the falling tree will bring down other trees and you will be liable to be killed or seriously injured”. (p. 287)

Book Reviewed: Guyana: The Lost Eldorado: My Fifty Years in the Guyanese Wilds: Matthew French Young: Peepal Tree Press, England: (1998)