N.D.Williams’ Books

THE CONFLICTED VOYAGER:  DESIRE AND RAGMENTATION  OF SELF IN TWO RECENT WORKS OF N.D.WILLIAMS.- Loknath Persaud

Born in Guyana, N. D. Williams, a graduate of the University of the West Indies, has spent many years teaching and living in various islands, before moving to New York City where he continues to teach.  After publishing a prize-winning short story, he published a novel, Ikael Torass, which won a Casa de las Americas prize in 1976.  This novel, drawing on the Rodney experience, was groundbreaking in the fact that the central character, unlike Naipaul’s, for example, did not leave home for England, but for another Caribbean island, Jamaica.  There the protagonist is willing to take risks, go the unconventional route and discover possibilities outside the university.  Later came a book of short stories, two novellas, and a novel titled The Silence of Islands.   Here, too, the protagonist, like Ikael, would like to do something radical with her life.  She leaves the island to discover possibilities of self-growth outside the narrow island limits and tries to  shape an identity that is free of family, religion , ethnicity.   Again the novel offers no safe or comfortable conclusion.  More recently he has published two lengthy works of fiction: the first, Ah Mikhail, Oh Fidel  is set in New York City;  the other entitled Julie Mango is a collection of short stories set, for the most part, in the West Indies.(1)

 Ah Mikhail, Oh Fidel is a novel of many levels.  It deals with the turbulent first year of the protagonist Michael Radix as he comes to grips with both the chaos of life in New York Cityand the adjustments required to survive teaching in an inner city school. Through Radix, not yet thirty, Williams delineates a broad cross-section of the teachers, both native and immigrant, in the suggestively named,John Wayne Cotter High School.

 He portrays their attitudes , conflicts,  struggles and frustrations and, while they are not just mouthpieces, they embody various ideological points of view. The situation is made more critical by the announcement that there will be some restructuring with the resultant loss of jobs.  We learn about the Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the machinations, petty maneuverings or insouciance of some administrators.  Many of the questions that challenge educators in American public schools today, such as the censorship entailed by political correctness, better communication between faculty of a different class or race and inner city students are dealt with.  Should faculty live in the same area?  Should curricula be adapted to suit students of a different race or class?  How far should self-esteem and a positive environment be fostered even when inadequate performance may result?  In a way the school can be viewed as a metaphor of the America of the future, if not as a melting pot, as a  multivocal mosaic.  

While the principal can suggest in her speech to the incoming freshman that each family should plant flowers “to lift the spirits of a borough, so unfairly stigmatized in the public imagination”(410), the prevalent metaphor for the school in the conversation of the teachers is a depersonalized one.  The school is not viewed as a “cathedral of learning” but  as a “warehouse,” “jungle”, “prison” or “assembly line” and the students seen as  “inventory.”  A few pride themselves on doing a good job, and try to understand and accommodate the sometimes convoluted lives of students.  Others carry their personal conflicts into the profession or settle for the more limited enjoyments of power, and view the students with unyielding hostility.  One can be so cynical that he can accept a proposal of sex for grade. The negativity of Mary Jane Cyphers, a teacher of English, summarizes the frustration of many:

 But when you come right down to it, we come into this building ready to teach…There are students who come here with no readiness to learn You’ve got to almost spoon feed them, serve it up like Gerber baby food  before they get it…And when you think they’ve got it, they walk through   the door and…poof…all gone…turned into vapor…” (245)

 Nor is the depiction of life in the Bronx, with its urban decay and vacant lots, more promising.  Throughout his year, Radix’ nerves are overtaxed and he lurches from crisis to crisis.  He is irritated by the jobless hanging around by the “bodega”, by their drinking and wasteful jocularity.  They are “blinded by anger,” and by their “don’t give a shit nihilism,” and they don’t respect other people’s space.  Their language is aggressive and foul.  Throughout the year,  Radix’ sense of balance is assaulted by traffic jams, accidents, and violence.   Students knife each other in school; Xavier, another student, is killed by an unknown gunman.  In his neighborhood, two people die and when he visits his wife at Christmas, he leaves his home with a dead man in a car parked in front.  Small wonder that at the end of the novel he recuperates in a hospital from an accident brought about by a fleeing gunman.  This occurred when he was returning to school after he attended the funeral ceremony of Xavier, himself, a victim of violence.

In fact, moving around the city requires heroism.  The narrator describes thus the activities of Travis Willowsong, a teacher  who constantly dreamed of being followed by a “falcon circling in a widening gyre.” He is an “Odysseus of the spirit” who, “like that Greek voyager,  survived each day the monsters and the tempests, the howling train noise, the hands and eyes that prey on hapless souls in those graffiti-marked tunnels of death.” (452)  Undoubtedly the image of the voyager underlines not only the alienating environment but also the constant movement and transitoriness of relationships.   Even in the park, where the individual goes to check his “pilot light inside the furnace” in the words of Pharaoh Stiles, who lost his only son, one’s sense of aloneness endures.  As the narrator says in a more poetic fashion:  

 No doubt about it, this life was a terrible, incongruous fragmented thing; frothy rapids through which they all navigated, staying closer tothis bank  or that bank for safety; isolated souls meeting and sharing distress on the  sidewalk, then off again paddling and steering through rapids.(505)

 How do islanders fare in this world of instability and isolation?  As the narrator observes, even under different conditions, the results can be unpredictable;  islanders leave home with all the pluck and wanderlust of Columbus and end up in a place they hadn’t intended: for example, married to an Australian whom they met at a party in the Bahamas.  Talking about his own marriage, Radix adds: “you get what you end up with.” (97) 

 Radix perceives a lack of self-realization, an insufficiency in each of the relations of the islanders with whom he comes into contact.  Relations between white males and colored women are tenuous and do not go beyond “closeted lust.”  Nigel, an Englishman to whom Aschelle, the sister-in-law of Radix was about to be married, disappears inexplicably.  Similarly Theresa Wamp, the half-Filipino principal, unintentionally terminates a relationship consisting of occasional weekend trysts by asking her lover Crystel Lefevre to accompany him on one of his European trips. Blackwelder, Radix’ landlord, at first elicits Radix’s admiration.   How could this former fisherman from the islands accumulate the capital to purchase this building?  Like himself, solitary and “a solitary  man without a country”, how has he been able to achieve the American dream and live free of nostalgia?  Radix finds that this man, preoccupied with restoring the interior of buildings, lacks an interior life and  “is free of that habit of constantly analyzing the ways of the world.” (328)  He fails to turn up at a  get-together for the New Year that he had agreed on.  He appears to be a mimic man.  His reputation is maintained by a display of the stereotypical accoutrements of success: driving a Cadillac Seville and having a blonde, a mortician’s daughter, who lauds him for his “endowment” below the waist.

 His wife’s sister, Aschelle, and brother-in-law, Sammy D., have created a successful business in jerk pork and other Jamaican foods and have bought a luxurious Volvo and a spacious house away from the city.   It boasts cathedral ceilings and a jacuzzi with a skylight and has acquired a coat-of-arms.  Sammy D. now has a new rags-to-riches story and humorously refers to it as from “Reggaemuffin to Reggaenomics.”  Their vulgar display, pomposity,  and the retouching by Sammy D. of his story irritate Radix; so, too, does the condescension of Aschelle . They, also, lack a sense of inwardness and depth. They do not see the irony now in their accusing Jamaicans of being the least dependable workers.

 But Radix himself is not unproblematic. One may sympathize with his judgments and sympathies, but not with his actions even though external pressures on him are immense.  At the beginning Radix is preoccupied with Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost; soon his relationship with his wife disintegrates, his sense of belongingness vanishes when he is told that he is a “man without a country,” and finally his job is threatened.  Midway through the novel he is already so alienated that after passing drab buildings and squeezing into the graffiti-filled train, he concludes :”This is not my city.” (298)  Yet he is probably too rigid and oversensitive both on the job and at home.  He looks on as the relationship with his wife worsens.  She complains about the ugliness and danger of the Bronx.  Soon she finds excuses for not having sex, and spends hours talking to friends on the phone, because he cannot bear small talk.  Finally, she moves to stay with her sister , at first at her request and then for a longer time.  There, on his Christmas visit , she tries to suggest having sex with him by walking around semi-naked, but he is incensed because he felt that she was implying that these surroundings were more appropriate for such an activity, not their home in the Bronx.  All through this separation, Radix becomes nostalgic for the time spent with Simone, but at no point talks to his wife directly, nor does he consider that the Bronx can be dangerous and her desire to move legitimate.      

 Indeed there are several indications that there are unresolved conflicts in his mind as to his choices.  He did not want to “be involved with Simone” but enjoyed both intellectual compatibility and a physical relationship with her.  She would like to cut the mediation by technology of the relationship of man and nature, and shield beautiful natural places from  wanton destruction.  In their physical relationship: he spent ” nights of the strangest intimacy, always gratifying and complete.”  Simone, however, has tried to live according to her ideals.  Among her other projects, she joined Greenpeace, and now writes him from Martiniqueenthusiastically endorsing Rastafarian ideas on conservation. It is not surprising that he had to postpone several times finishing the reading of her letter.

In the final dream of several in the novel, Radix dreams that he is running along a country road barefoot and suddenly the road  metamorphoses into one in New York City. He is running barefoot against the traffic in winter and bystanders look at him quizzically.  Soon without his being aware, his feet are embedded with shards of broken glass, bits of wood, and needles. He returns home and tries painfully to extract these objects  and bleeds profusely in the bathroom.  His father looks in and slams the door shut exclaiming: “I told you so!”  Amarelle, his estranged wife cleans and bandages him.  She waits for some expression of gratitude which he does not offer.  It is obvious that his father and wife embody two contrasting attitudes in his mind  to living in New York City.

While Ah Mikhail, Oh Fidel charts the uncertain course of the islander in the minefield of  New York City, the stories of  Julie Mango deal at greater depth both with the causes of emigration and the ambiguities of the West Indian. “Trinculo Walks the Dog” and “Your Slip is Showing, Comrade” treat of the stultifying and impoverished life in a new socialist republic.   In “Your Slip is Showing, Comrade”  criticism of the republic is more vitriolic. The narrator, daughter of a minister, writes: “In the republic of desperate dreaming, happiness is a pig wagging its tail in the mud.”(79)  At the end of the story one passenger asks the pilot to pass over the Prime Minister’s residence so that he can go to the toilet.  Fear, neglect, decay, and repression resulted in massive emigration.  In the other stories the islands are portrayed as narrow, dull and constricting  in which going abroad seems synonymous with self-discovery.   For example, in “Remember Who You Are,” Julienne says that there is not much to become fired up about “except Jehovah and His heaven and the bodily fires He unwittingly started among some of his worshippers on earth.” (194)

Nevertheless the attitude of the educated elite contributes clearly to the acceptance of the idea that one cannot find self-fulfillment in these islands. They are all portrayed as rigid and repressed perfectionists, hopelessly out of touch with their surrounding reality.  In “Trinculo Walks his Dog” the Chinese father of the narrator has a passion for good results and ostensibly goes abroad each year to keep up-to-date.  Yet he rigidly refuses to compromise with the policies of the new government and complains incessantly about the statue of Queen Victoria lying in the grass in front of the Law courts.  He retires in Canada.  The same applies to the father of the protagonist of “Monkey Wrenching Snaps”.  He is a magistrate who packs his bags and moves to London upon retirement. His good friend, the Latin teacher, Mr. Fostin, once wrote pieces under the pen name of Juvenal.  He was a man who was a stickler for order in class, inspiration of Professor Valcin, but now sits in stony silence. All he does is ask his wife to read the transcripts of the court proceedings of the rape of a young girl.

The progeny that resulted from this academic training are also unbalanced and repressed.  In “Trinculo and the Dog”, we find the reenacting of the Ariel and Caliban dichotomy: the concepts of repression, order, civility, planning for the future are contrasted with vitality, disorder, sensuality and enjoyment of the moment.  In this well-constructed story the narrator tells both of his experiences after his return to Guyana and with an English girl Pamela.  In Guyana, after walking, symbolically, on some dog shit,  he meets an old schoolmate Trinculo, now with knots like a Rastafarian and a job in the Ministry of Youth and Culture.  He received the nickname for his performance in The Tempest.  He continues in his note and becomes  noted for his capacity to embellish stories.  He does not perform well in his exams and thus is not accepted at a university abroad.  Invited  by Trinculo during work time to a bar, he tells the startled protagonist amid drinks about his adventure with the wife of Mr. Puddephat, the English drama teacher.  According to Trinculo, he met her escorting her dog in heat sitting on a bench on Main Street.  Meeting her by chance again, leads him to escort her home and to have intercourse with her.  His sexual conquest takes the form of a kind of revenge.

The narrator, a Cambridge graduate in French, now a professor in Canada, has a mechanical concept of psychic energy.  Involvement in sex depletes the desire to build or achieve something.  He has gone out with Pamela for several years but refuses to become intimate with her.  She thinks that he is “gray”, more appropriate for  England, and not for “the energizing light” there.  She questions his attitude: “Michaelangelo, what it boils down to is this. You’re not much of anything really. Hard in the chest, soft in your trousers. That’s what you are…”(61) When told that he must feel something, he should have memories for having lived there, he ridicules the country as a “pocket size republic” with “mudlanders muddling”. He did not care for much  beyond the city.

In the other story entitled “Monkey Wrenching Snaps”, we find the same antimonies in the character of Hunter Valcin:   repression, excessive desire for order, love of solitariness, and lack of belongingness.  His foil is Yardbrough, who is untidy, disorganized, yet married with several children and deeply interested in the welfare of others and in helping the oppressed.  Hunter’s mentor was the Latin teacher and the text is sprinkled with Latin quotations, for example, “Odi et profanun vulgus et arceo” or “mens sana in corpore sano”,  both of which  are placed in ironical and humorous contexts. The latter quotation was placed in this context.   Hunter prided himself on imposing his will on the unruly passions of his body but, as soon as he looks at a woman’s bottom, sordid images flood his mind.(146)  He goes to the bathroom and thinks of Daphne Licksamber, the girl who used to taunt him when he was young.   He immediately has an erection and dreams of having sex as revenge.  In the same way, Hunter, dissociated from his people, came to view himself with the metaphor of a rocket.   He was being prepared on the island for a “big launch” overseas, but if the technicians kept in touch with the rocket, he felt  “as if he were spinning weightlessly around the planet, devoid of purpose, with no connection to mission control anywhere.(142)  He was glad to sit and observe from afar the turmoil in the world and liked to think of each day  “as clean and unblemished, like a windswept beach awaiting his measured footprints.”(145)   It is interesting to note that only Yardbrough mentions the influence of economic forces on the lives of the people on the island.

Hunter is uncomfortable with any attempt to relate him to his past and is betrayed especially by his accent.  But such occurrences do not result in any attempt at reidentification with his past.  In his two trips to the island,  he is exasperated.  He is troubled by the heat,  the mud,  the food and housing, the lack of promptness, the undependability of things.  From the airport he is too supercilious to sit or communicate with the average person.

Three stories, “Julie Mango or Yu See Har Dare”, “Your Slip is Showing ,Comrade” and “Remember Who You Are” have as protagonists a girl called Juliette, a choice obviously intended by the author.  While they vary, all of the women show inner strength, independence, courage, and an ability to make and abide by their decisions in uncertain circumstances.  They choose to whom they surrender themselves and when to move on without nostalgia.  In two of the stories, the girls have to confront mothers who are authoritarian and, in their oppression, alienate their daughters further.  In the first story, the image of the doctor who is of “towering stature” is questioned.  He loves, but inexplicably slaps Juliette, a beautiful nurse who is his mistress.  She refuses to take his ride to catch the early bus before dawn to work  With a hurricane approaching, she asks him to come and get her, but he fails to reach her with his car.  Later on she walks to the house through the rain, and packs her belongings and leaves.  Soon rumor has it that she is now in the company of a lord.  Though the doctor does not explain himself, he seems to have fallen back on outdated forms of domination and not to respect her enough.

In the second, the girl is the daughter of a highranking party official, and her father is a senior minister.  Juliette is comfortable but intensely lonely, feels a certain barreness in her relationship with her mother and even asks her if she was breastfed.  Soon she feels that sex would alleviate her problem and gives herself to Corbin, the family driver.  Corbin takes her to a “sweet spot ” in a canefield at night , but she did not find much romance.  The impersonality of this encounter is underlined when Corbin himself  tells her his first name just before having sex.  In addition, her mother punishes her by forcing her to work instead of leaving for university.  She is introduced unsuccessfully by her mother to Colonel Puneshwar, a security chief  who seems awkward, clumsy, and dominating.  She meets Romesh who takes her on visits to the country, and gives herself  to him also, just after they toured a decaying church.  Sex seems to offer the only antidote to the depression from the surrounding neglect and decay.

“Remember Who You Are” is another intricately woven story in which the protagonist leaves home to work as a nanny in a two-career family in Connecticut, after she was helped  by Yomarys, a young woman she met at the airport.  She had been warned by her uncle to remember who she is because of his disappointing treatment by family who had emigrated to London and New York.  She was persuaded to take the trip as a sort of reward even though she knew that her mother, an ardent Jehovah witness was having an affair with the the priest, Mr. Papo.  At first she wanted to cut all links with her mother.  But there is rapid change in New York and Connecticut.  In New York, her good friend Yomarys is willing to return with a boyfriend for whom she had an abortion, and calls them “loosies”.  In Connecticut, the son seems self-absorbed and self-centred; there is a tug-of-war between Mr. Pidducks and his wife and she sometimes howls in her room. In the spring, Mr. Paddocks, after feigning to help her, makes a weak attempt at seduction.  After pitying him, thinking “he looks as sad as a flat tire,”she agrees. However, she continues to have dreams of her mother “as a mother hen” looking for her chick and misses the blue sky.  She  decides to return after she witnessed the treatment of Mr. Pidducks’ mother who has been left in a nursing home.  The contrast of the abandonment of this old woman and the old women walking on the island is stark.  She reflects: “When this is over–this wild spending of my saved up years, the panic, the flight from panic– when the time comes to spend the pennies of my last days, I would like to be back on the island, an old lady walking the dusty road…”(212

As we have seen, the big launch leads to a loss of identity, a self-centered and elitist existence.  In its emphasis on control it negates the vital; through its exclusion of the many who may not do well and stay on the island, it encourages a sense of inferiority.   In “Light of the World, ” Williams gropes toward a more inclusive and egalitarian solution. In the story above, the grandmothers remind one of the love and respect that the old deserve; here they  allow one to intuit a continuity and rootedness: “They are dreaming souls, lighthouses to so many ships, ancient and new adrift in the world.”(93)  Inspired by them, one can face the sea that is “the receptacle of sunken histories, green bottles with messages of lost ambitions, the loves we abort and throw away.”(93) 

 In this story, the action and portrayal of character is reminiscent of the magical realism of Alejo Carpentier.  Briefly,  the protagonist, a journalist, goes to interview an old woman, at the request of the editor, who met her twenty-five years ago. Yet Ma Memu is not an ordinary woman: her face was a shiny black moon; she has hair as copious as butterflies, and bosoms that look large and unused.”(99)  The young man tries to move and finds his legs are weak as if he is under a spell. When asked to kiss her and close his eyes, he finds that her breath and her skin are those of a young girl.  She tells him about her son Waverider. He runs away and injures himself.  Rather than tell about magic, he writes a popular story in which Ma Memu told him about how gold bullion will be found on the shore swept from the seabed by hurricanes.  This prompts the editor to ask him to return.  He refuses and calls the editor a “pussy”. 

Unemployed, he wanders by the ocean and meets Waverider who tries to talk with him as a man with “no family, no job, no home, no nothing.”  Waverider makes the important offer: “I can offer you the diamonds of living memory to fill that void.  Stuff myths are made of.” (112)  After seeing Waverider, the old man as lithe and swift in the ocean, he takes up the offer of smoking a vagabond weed and is enchanted by other visions: of Waverider triumphant over six men paddling a boat, of  being shielded by him with a “fatherly cloud.”  Soon he loses a sense of time .  Later, he meets a runaway kid and they talk about “school” as a bridge to the outside world.  When asked as to his choice of profession, the young man astounds his classmates by saying that he wants to be  a fisherman. As the journalist adds:

Well, for many, our island is still a place of no second chance. In the stampede  across the bridge connecting the island to the world, you could stumble and fall  under someone’s spiked heels: teacher’s contempt for your cheekbones, a father’s  indifference to your tears, the cruelty of the schoolyard.  Stumble fall, then crawl  away in shame, the remains of your life washed down to the sea with white rum.”   (119)    

Soon Waverider, now incarnated as a busboy, arrives and comments on the young man Strayboy, and adds that he may have developed somewhere else, but at a price:

That boy could have been a marine biologist…or an Olympic swimming champion…given a chance. But then that would have changed his life completely. You have to give up the island to join the world, and once  you’re out there, it’s hard to find your way back.” (121)

In one’s intense desire to join the world, “you run the risk of getting choked and robbed in the first dark alley of progress.”(121)

The busboy jumps to save an Englishman who did not really want to live.  Exhausted, both he and Waverider have to be nurtured back to health by Ma Memu.  Later she elaborates:

there is nothing out there…nothing but cells of loneliness, streets of pain,  …tired old imperial nations with no places left to conquer… New independent   nations shedding blood like bad memories…tribes of amnesiacs rushing  for trains, trolleys and buses…zombies hooked up to picture tubes for life  support. There’s nothing out there for you, my son.” (127)

 At the end the protagonist decides to stay there as a caretaker of the sea in wait for the modern day pirates who no longer “search for gold but for places to bury deadly waste.” He heeds the call of  Ma Memu.  He has got to catch the wave  and  has come to terms with ambition:

 Here I am, stripped finally of all desire; feeling no more those heart-pistons of  ambition, that urge to cross overseas, following old footprints; wanting no shiny  trophy on the shelf, no tiger head on a living room floor.(132)

Waverider redirects the voyage into the self but is his solution, that of a Buddhist nirvana, in which desire has been eclipsed, acceptable by most on the island?

In conclusion, I hope by this paper to have given you some idea of the themes and stylistic verve of these two texts. There was not enough time to appreciate the complexity of the short stories.  With regard to our topic,  Williams’ endorsement of a symbolic eternal femininity is shared  also by Antonio Benitez  Rojo.  Nonetheless, if one thinks of the voyage as integral to self-realization, the choices we have are not felicitous;  each seems to truncate, to its detriment,  part of the self:  the spiritual or the material, the intellectual or the vital, the lure of the outside and the autochthonous.   Values need to be reassessed and social reform contemplated.

 Copyright. Loknath Persaud,  Pasadena City College

 
1. N.D. Williams.  Ah Mikhail, Oh Fidel. Xlibris: New York, 2001 and N.D. Williams, Julie Mango. Xlibris: New York, 2000.  All future references will be
included in the text.
 

First posted on Sept 20, 2002 Guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com

 There are Indians and Indians. Good fiction – not mewling and puking newspaper prose – helps us understand and respect the differences between Indians in, say, Fiji, Trinidad and Jamaica. One could talk of Naipaul’s Hanuman House Indians and Roy Heath’s Georgetown Indians, knowing they came out of separate colonial crucibles, reflecting different formative experiences. This way one can ignore the cries one hears these days from unhappy Indians, many in the diaspora and affiliated with institutions of higher learning, who would have all Indians submerge their psychic differences, gather under some giant pan-Indian tarpaulin, as if to perform a set of intercontinental, self-cherishing rituals for scattered souls.

 Jamaica’s Indians are probably more Jamaican than Indian, when you think about it, though their representation in Jamaican literature is miniscule. Reading V.S. Naipaul’s Biswas, a Guyanese must strain sometimes for communal resonance or self-recognition; his Indians are not our Indians; then again Port of Spain, Shorthills, Arwacas in no way resemble the Courentyne with its backdams and rivers and giant blue skies. There are, of course, Wilson Harris’ Indians who swallow their Indianness and become difficult metaphors for the transcendental points his mythic novels are making. One is delighted, therefore, to engage real Indians in the realist fiction of Rooplall Monar’s Janjhat.

 The temptation is to approach this slender novel with the expectation that like Naipaul the author would tear away veils, show us the humanity in his characters; the private demons they wrestle with in their transplanted worlds; their loves, their fears and hatreds. Though the range in this book is narrower and the skills not as assured (at least back then: Monar has published much more since, including Tormented Wives, 1999)  Monar takes us behind the tattered bamboo flags, under the shiny saris, into the souls of his troubled Indians.

You get the impression, for instance, that when his older Indians are not talking about the Estate days, the greatness of “ahwe culture“, the importance of raising good Hindu sons and daughters and resisting the seductive power of those Christian Sunday schools, their thoughts turn not surprisingly to sex: to women – young, old, too old – their bubbies and wining behinds; and the stained wedding sheets as tests of doolahin chastity. Take away their Indianness and these obsessions are like those of any grey-haired ethnic group in Guyana.

 Monar’s larger concern would seem to be the human desire: transplanted through slavery and indentureship: forced now to deal with new post-colonial dilemmas – the ‘emancipated’ body, its sexual unease, its curious preferences, its ‘modern’ fear of failure. Sex, the great ethnic equalizer. Pointing Indian men to whore- houses in the city. Enticing young Hindu women to try new fashions and fabrics that reveal more than navels and midriffs.

 In Monar’s Indian world creoles are a non-interfering but unsettling presence; creole behavior serves to reinforce the values and norms of wary Indian generations. Big-Bye, the central character, “always admired girls who dressed fancy – pants, short dresses, lipstick, powder – but his mooma…oh, she was against that. ‘Not propa fo Hindu gal dress so…That fo black girl.”  Big-Bye’s mooma worries about the volatile state of his identity: “Sometime me going hear you eating black pudding and souse. You must see Hindi film, never mind you na understand the talking.” (p.66).

 Data, the girl he marries, lived with her parents in a logie “two hundred rods away from the Nigger Yard section of plantation Lusignan”; she likes to swim; she enjoys the sensation of her body submerged in a stream of lilies and moss; but “swimming is not proper for a young girl, her mother always warned.” Young Indian girls are frowned on for dancing with abandon at weddings, shaking their bubbies and behinds. “Only black man doam that.” (p.8)

 A minor theme is this novel is education as a way out of the canefields. The central character’s best friend ’succeeds’ but only because a punitive father keeps his nose to the grindstone of books and ‘eddication’; he becomes a clerk at Enmore Estate Pay Office. Big-Bye, newly married, accepts a life as a mule boy, liming after work at street corners on bright evenings, with visits to the cinema in Buxton on Saturday nights; then returning home to his wife, pulling up her nightdress even if she’s fast asleep. The author might have missed an opportunity to follow the parallel paths of the two friends as they drift apart in their constricted world.

 What Monar does with lighthearted fidelity is examine the anxieties of the young bride who must share living space with her mother-in-law. After weeks of learning the daily routines, the chores and family habits, and despite due respect and loyalty shown, Data feels estranged; her personal identity is all but invisible. She longs for some measure of freedom. “People in the street still referred to her as ‘doolahin’….she wanted people to know her by her name.” (p.76)

 Venturing out to the main road one day she is stopped at the door by the mother-in-law and berated for wearing clothes that show off her shapely hips and breasts. “Take out that monkey dress this minute”  the mother-in-law screams. Reassured that her husband doesn’t mind (“She’s no stupid woman. She’s a modern woman” her husband liked to muse) Data challenges her mother-in-law by stepping out again, this time in tight-fitting pants. And again she runs into generational fury. “Women like them does give the Hindu religion bad name. If them been want wear pants them shoulda turn fullah woman and black woman.” (p.88)

 The novel will move towards its resolution: the three central characters in a house (with its miniature dramas, not unlike the one Mohun Biswas struggles to escape from): a young bride, her husband, her mooma-in-law: the forces of ethnic conformity; the individual’s struggle for personal freedom, for riskier choices; and the creole world, causing disquiet and alarm simply by being there.

 Published in 1989 when – is it accurate to state? – feminism and cultural relativism were not yet full-bodied preoccupations, with a stridency of message and a ripeness of appeal, Janjhat succeeds in striking so many chords at the heart of Guyana’s ongoing ethnic and gender antagonisms. No group exonerating sermons here. Characters bare their fears and longing almost without authorial permission.

 Monar shades in their trembling humanity without pleading some case for the Indian right to exist in a polarized land, since they have always been proprietors of a landscape their forefathers with cutlass, file and fading memories claimed as their stake in the Guyana  here and now. There’s an inward-turning innocence, too, about this humanity; a polite reserve and a substratum of unexamined fear that makes it vulnerable to the tribal animus, the predatory impulses plaguing our land today.

 Janjhathas been praised elsewhere for its preferred use of Guyanese Creole, for its apparent validation of a community whose canal and canefield lives are considered underrepresented in Guyanese fiction, for its depiction of Indians whose dignity and right to exist have been violated at painful periods of our history. Like Oonya Kempadoo’s stylish and more accomplished Buxton Spice, Monar’s novel runs the risk of being co-opted by advocacy groups and touted for its sexual frankness, or its affirmative message.

 In some respects Monar’s Indians are Naipaul’s Indians and Roy Heath’s Indians, for his novel is really about individuals who elect to shape their own destinies while fighting off the johncrows of history swooping at their genitals, peck-pecking at their courage, their hunger for new worlds, untraditional roles, bright possibilities.

At another level, where generations clash, where sexual longing makes us search for salvation in forbidden places, we can hear in the chests of the characters our own shallow breathing, see in theirs our own time-worn faces. In a hop, skip and leap of the imagination we might even recognize our own stupid prejudices and fears in the marginal lives of Monar’s Indians.

 Book Reviewed:

Janjhat:  Rooplall Monar: Peepal Tree Press/Demerara Publishers, 1989

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 lump’a 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 she’s 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 Naipaul’s characters distinct and memorable wasn’t 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 narrator’s voice has grown up from pre-adolescence to characters wanting to be representative of Trinidad’s 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 (“most’a 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. Kempadoo’s strength remains her descriptive power, her poet’s eye for sharp C/bean detail: “White take she complexion too, she dark and smooth skin. Both’a them slim and she tall too . You can’t tell how old she is, the way how she walk kang-a-lang flapping she big foot so, or running race with the li’l 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 they’d 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, Stella’s 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 Chatterley’s Lover (from England) and Peyton Place (from America); or fell back on grubby yellow-edged paperbacks, and the advice columns of Ann Landers. Today’s readers need look no further than Kempadoo’s 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

First posted February 22, 2002at GuyanaCaribbeanpolitics.com

 Apparently in the year of its British publication (1991) The Shadow Bride was shortlisted but did not win the Booker prize for fiction. It would have been a sweet triumph for its author who was born in Guyana in 1926, and migrated to Britain in the 1950s. He has lived there ever since, and has written nine books all amazingly rooted in his memories of Guyana. Not just Georgetown, Guyana. His characters struggle with their destinies in the old Mackenzie, up the Morawhanna, along the Essequibo coast.

 The Shadow Bride is ideal for any Guyanese wanting a book to read on those long flights home from London or New York. You get a sense of traveling back through time to a Guiana as emotionally turbulent and fractious as today’s, though Heath’s mannered prose could wrap you up in its sentence flow or eventually put you to sleep.

 His prose style comes from the difficult but formative colonial period when education mattered; it has an old schoolmaster’s respect for the English sentence; it has been described as “plodding and tedious”, but it’s a period prose with a distinctive charm and correctness. In other same-period writers like Wilson Harris that prose can congeal your senses with swirling imagery and abstractions. (At times you feel the rhythms of Harris’ prose working away inside your psyche like fingers kneading dough for pastries.)

But in these post-Independence days, given the crude enunciations that pass like gas for intelligent discourse on the nation’s TV channels, and the self-congratulating rubbish one comes across in the diaspora press, you could be forgiven a faint nostalgia for Heath’s English, with its ordered good sense, nuanced insights and quiet observations.

 A “modern” Guyanese prose style (with its appropriate ‘modern’ interest in sex) can be found in Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton Spice. There the measured language of Heath gets crushed, heated and reshaped into scintillating, edgy sentences: “…the silver tops of the coconut trees talk to me. They swish and sway and whisper with scratchy voices. Their sharp edges glittering on big-moon night.” (Buxton Spice, 146). Roy Heath writes a meticulously correct prose that requires patience, a leash on our craving for narrative rush and distillation: “The sun had long passed its zenith and cast louvred shadows beyond the palings along a path cleared by the watchers at the gate.” (The Shadow Bride, 40)  From “the old school”, you might say, with “Chapters” and a writerly attention to local detail.

 But back to The Shadow Bride.  It is also an “East Indian” novel, in the sense that its main concern is the vicissitudes of an East Indian family, though Heath half-strips them of their Indianness and shows us vulnerable human transplants whose struggles with colonial conditions, though less spectacular, was just as traumatic as the African creole’s. It questions the fond assumption that East Indians as a monolithic entity or as individuals were somehow insulated by religious belief and cultural practice, and therefore suffered considerably less psychic damage in the colonial era.

 Making this point was certainly not the author’s purpose in writing the novel; but for readers who like to raid fiction in search of sociological analysis and cultural truths this book might prove a resourceful data trough.

 The Shadow Bride is fascinating and instructive in other ways, not the least in that drama of loyalty and responsibility played out between an East Indian mother and her son. Betta Singh, the son (a bright boy who should have gone to Queens College, but was tutored privately instead) comes home after completing medical studies in Dublin.  His mother, Mrs. Singh, has a simple plan for him: set up private practice in Georgetown, and win for the Singh family respectability and pride.  

 Betta Singh has other ideas. He hears stories of the ravages of malaria on the sugar estates. Burning with an idealism (and here one is tempted to draw parallels with a young Cheddi Jagan returning home as a dentist) he decides to take his practice where his skills are most needed; he takes a post as government medical officer for the indentured laborers on the sugar estates. 

 His mother is appalled: Betta Singh, her only surviving child, is throwing away his prospects “by working among the poorest of the Indian poor”. She is a strong, wealthy woman, sustained by her Hindu faith, but she feels a need to keep her son close to home and hearth. “Since your father’s death, I’ve had to face the world alone” she pleads. But Betta Singh’s “thrust towards independence” would not be stalled. “You are from India,” he reminds his mother, “and I was born here.”

Betta Singh’s moving away, and his decision later to marry a non-Hindu woman, leads to bitterness and deeper estrangement. (Husbandless, and now losing her son, Mrs. Singh turns to a Hindu priest for counseling; he moves into her home, first as a “spiritual partner”, then “as their intimacy grew, as her bed mate”.)

 His G.M.O. travels through the sugar estates – Uitvlugt, Leonora, Anna Catherina - bring the son face to face with destitute state of the workers. He sees the women bent double in the flooded rice fields, in “postures of work, postures of prayer, of despair and affection, postures of remorse, of envy, of humiliation and tyranny, of incredulousness, of astonishment and dying.”  He has battles with callous plantation managers over issues beyond the need for quinine to fight malaria. Doubt and self-questioning grip him: “Was he, like Dr Giglioli more gifted for research than general practice?”  At thirty, and wanting a woman’s love, should he marry before it’s too late and make as many children to “justify his existence to his ancestors”?

 The fortunes of mother and son will follow separate paths, each making decisions that bear no relation to that original ground of family legacy and hope. Tragic circumstances eventually bring them full circle; they return to each other and reconciliation seems possible. But what pulled them apart and that interfering landscape have changed them forever as individuals. Heath reveals a ‘modern’ storyteller’s feel for the family saga with its generation gaps, its defining incidents and ironies.

 The novel is filled to overflowing with colonial real life: its supporting cast of Creoles, Muslims, Hindus and Europeans, its subplots and old days description add colour and tension to the canvas of a 1920s Guyana

 The drama of allegiances played out in The Shadow Bride between a controlling mother and her own-way son could be read as a metaphor for that other struggle over displaced souls, between Mother India and Guyana’s East Indians. But the book has other layers of meaning.

 Returning home and making life choices are issues still worked out today by so many of Guyana’s Betta Singhs and Walter Rodneys. The Shadow Bride helps us understand how difficult these choices still are, the sacrifices made (in blood, sweat and meagre salaries); the conflicting loyalties, patria ou familia; and those heart-mauling encounters with tigers of the unpredictable.

 On any flight into or out of Guyana The Shadow Bride would make a fine companion. You might want, next, to move back to Heath’s earlier novels, reissued in The Armstrong Trilogy (1994), even if you’re not from his generation and don’t care much for flying. Understanding the past is so necessary to growth and wholeness, people like to say. First generation novelists like Roy Heath are important to Guyana; they lived through that past; they had the émigré resilience and grit, the imaginative power to preserve chapters of our past before they vanish into history’s footnotes.

 The Shadow Bride does this without sentimentalizing recent history. One hopes the book has found a place on secondary and tertiary school reading lists. It stays faithful to the truth of our human complexity in a prose style that for all its quaintness is set to endure.

 Book Reviewed:

THE SHADOW BRIDE: Roy Heath: Persea Books (1996)

The title of the paper is taken from a song by Bob Marley, ‘Exodus’, which also includes an invocation used, according to Joseph Owens in his 1976 book Dread, during a Rastafari ‘reasoning’ following the death of Haile Selassie in 1975:

           Jah comes to break down oppression

          and to set I-n-I the captive free

          to take away transgression

          and to rule with I-quality

           Equality and justice come for man,

           And Babylonkingdom must fall.

           For all the European propaganda

          is to see I-n-I slave.

           But at this time I-n-I stand for I-ver

           to see the redemption of I-n-I, Jah Rastafari.[1]

The movement of Jah people, in other words the people of God, is an Exodus, not from the slavery in Egypt which is so fundamental to the religious consciousness of blacks of the former slave states of the US, but from the Babylonian exile referred to in the Bible by the psalmist: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” and later in Psalm 137: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” There is a subtle difference between these perceptions of slavery or exile. Owens, again, mentions a Rastafarian he met in Kingston who, when asked who he was, replied: “I am a sojourner in a strange land,” and would reveal no other details.[2] Of course on the one hand this refers to a state of exile from their original African home, through the Middle Passage and slavery and what they perceive as the ‘whitewashing’ of black history, but there is another equally important sense of spiritual exile, which I intend to pick up again later.

At the risk of telling many of you things you know well already, I will first outline the history and doctrines of the Rastafari movement before looking at a number of literary representations of Rastafarians.

After slavery, the nagging dialectical absence which was Africa, continually brought to mind in ways that white society denigrated, usually with ridicule (as in phenomena such as Pocomania, or African drumming) surfaced in a new form in the announcement by the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, firstly that black people could be proud of their appearance and identity (“Black is beautiful” was a slogan he coined), but also that finally a return to Africa might be possible. His Black Star Line was thwarted by the authorities, and he himself reviled and destroyed, but in the late 1920s he prophesied: “Look to Africa, where a black King shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near.”[1]

The subsequent crowning, in 1930, of Ras (Prince) Tafari Makonnen as the Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia awoke the interest of black people, especially in Jamaica, in the only African country which had never been colonized or fallen under the influence of whites. Ras Tafari claimed direct descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and took, among others, the titles ‘King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.’ Within months, several Jamaican preachers, apparently independently of each other, began to teach that he was the Messiah who would lead the children of the slaves from their captivity in Babylon (i.e. the countries controlled by the colonizers) to the New Jerusalem of Zion in Africa. From the beginning such preachers fell under suspicion from the authorities; one of them was found guilty of sedition for preaching the doctrine and distributing pictures of Selassie, which he claimed were passports to Ethiopia.

However, the movement flourished, fuelled by the resistance shown by the Ethiopians to the invasion by Mussolini’s troops in 1935. Some Rastafarians lived in isolation, but others came together to form a community outside Spanish Town, which was repeatedly raided by the police. When the community was finally broken up in the 1950s, the paradoxical effect was to increase the movement’s membership by spreading their message more widely. Clashes with the authorities and the police escalated in the late 1950s, and as a result of widespread disquiet among middle-class Jamaicans, some Rastafarians requested an independent report, which was carried out by a team from the then University College of the West Indies including Rex Nettleford, and published in 1960 as The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica. The report confirmed the group’s own claims about their peaceable nature, but did not completely allay middle-class fears.

After Jamaican independence in 1962 Rastafarian ideas spread to other Caribbean islands and emigrant Caribbean communities in the US, Canada and Britain. A particular landmark was the visit paid to Jamaica in April 1966 by Haile Selassie himself. Countless thousands of Jamaicans went spontaneously to what was then Pallisadoes Airportto give him a tumultuous and chaotic but peaceful welcome, which took the authorities completely by surprise. When His Imperial Majesty looked down from the steps of the aircraft on the vast sea of faces, he wept.

Since the 1960s the movement has changed noticeably in character. Under pressure from world events such as the military coup which ousted Haile Selassie, (which enjoyed support from Caribbean troops sent by Cuba), and Selassie’s subsequent death, as well as the concrete experiences of would-be emigrants to Africa, Rastafari moved away from belief in a literal return to Africa, which once had people selling their possessions and packing their bags in the hope of promised ships, or alternatively the creation of an ideal utopian state in an independent Jamaica, which palpably was not happening, towards a more mystical and spiritual sense of personal redemption.

The rise to world prominence of Bob Marley in the 1970s and the ever-increasing appreciation of his music since then, also had a significant effect. There is a strong current of belief that Marley inherited Haile Selassie’s ring, and with it his messianic status, on the death of the Emperor. Though there was still persecution of Rastafarians, most notoriously in the Dominican ‘Dread Act’, which gave virtual freedom to military personnel to shoot Rastas on sight, current trends indicate that Rastafari is strong and growing on the islands with predominantly African populations, such as Jamaica, Barbados or St Lucia, and in the emigrant communities, although there is still a largely class-based division in which Rastafari is rejected by those with Westernized middle-class aspirations.

Rastafarians see black people as the true Jews, and draw their inspiration from close reading of the Bible, particularly the first books of the Old Testament, the Psalms, the first pages of St John’sGospel and the Book of Revelation. They believe that Armageddon (which they punningly call Harmageddon) will come soon with the destruction of the present Babylonian world order and the establishment by Jah of the New Jerusalem (Zion) as is foretold in the Apocalypse. Meanwhile they are expected to follow a strict and pure lifestyle eating only pure (organically grown) vegetarian food, drinking no strong alcohol and rejecting Western medical treatment, contraception and legal marriage. Depending on the strictness of their observation they also have a number of taboos drawn from the book of Leviticus on, for example, second-hand clothes, pork, salt, magic and witchcraft.

Their organization is loose, their leaders being more by acclamation for their wisdom and lifestyle than anything else. They reject the idea of working for wages or profit, so that the Rasta selling products he has made himself from door to door or in the streets has long been a common sight. Their most recognizable feature is the untrimmed beard and hair worn in matted ‘knotty’ dreadlocks, also of biblical origin, recalling the source of Samson’s strength against his enemies and captors, and also the mane of the lion, the symbol of Ras Tafari. The hair is often enclosed in a knitted woollen ‘tam’ in the Rastafarian colours (the red, yellow and green of Ethiopiawith black). More well-known (and contentious) is their use of ganja, which they term the Healing of the Nations or the Chalice, as an aid to meditation and reasoning.

The Rastafarian use of language has had a wide influence. There are a number of features that can be observed, some of which were in my quote at the beginning. The basic speech is Jamaican ‘patwa’, but instead of the typical Caribbean 1^st person subject pronoun ‘me’, which Rastafarians see as emphasizing a slave mentality condemning them to being the object of an alien ruler, they stress the ‘I’, and its plural form ‘I-and-I’, which means both ‘we’ and a kind of royal ‘we’ to denote the two bodies of the physical and spiritual man. ‘I’ is then used in other phrases such as ‘Yes-I’ or ‘Thanks-I’, or in punning usages such as ‘inity’ for unity, ‘iree’ for happy, ‘ital’ for pure, ‘livity’ for lifestyle. Many are well aware of the punning allusions to sight involved. Rastas take on a Rastafari name instead of their ’slave name’, and these often include ‘I’, like the two who climbed the St Lucia Petit Piton with me, Jah-I and I-Sett (Seth). Rastafarians refer to each other as ‘bredren’, and pioneered the greeting ‘Peace and Love’.

It has seldom been appreciated how much influence the movement had on 1960s culture, particularly in Britain, where ‘Flower Power’ ideas from California combined with the Rastafarian ideals current among Caribbean musicians on the London music scene, who regularly used the Healing of the Nations, in influencing groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

The first serious literary studies of Rastafarians occur in Roger Mais’ novels The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) and Brother Man (1954). As a journalist working in Kingston for The Gleaner, Mais would have had the opportunity to discover for himself what was going on in the poorest districts, and his portrayal of Rastafarians as gentle and peace-loving, indeed in Brother Man as the epitome of Christ-like goodness, is striking for the time it was written but broadly reflects what the Jamaican academics’ report would later discover. Ras, in The Hills Were Joyful Together, is a stable point of goodness in the currents of emotion, abuse and violence circulating in the Kingston yard. One example:

When Ditty saw Puss-Jook standing before her, she gave a little gasp and dropped the dry limb. One hand clutched the front of her blouse. He took two steps towards her. She turned and fled in terror. She ran straight up to Ras, standing under the tree.

‘Save me, do. Him goin’ kill me. Do, Ah beg you. Don’t mek him get me, do!’ [...]

‘All right, hush! Tek it easy, now.’

Puss-Jook looked on, a smile of amusement curling his lips.

He came slowly across the yard, making the cane whistle through the air.

Ras stood waiting for him, his arm about the trembling girl’s shoulder. He could smell her fear rising up from her armpits to his nostrils. He held himself easily, waiting for Puss-Jook to come up to them.

Puss-Jook stood a few feet away. He brought the point of the cane to rest on the ground. He looked on with that same amused, contemptuous smile.

‘You can have her if you want, Ras.’

Ras said, ‘Howdy brother. Peace an’ love.’

‘Say you can have her if she tek you’ fancy. High time fo’ she to get a man.’

‘Yuh words are wantin’ in wisdom an’ elegance,’ said Ras quietly, as though he was speaking a sermon. ‘They flow from de mout’ of a fool. They not deservin’ an answer. But brother, don’ try to draw me anger. Go-long yuh ways befo’ yuh tongue trip you. Peace an’ love.‘[2]

Ras is transformed in Brother Man into the rather mawkish figure of John Power, a Rastafarian shoemaker. The portrayal lacks depth, however, and while it emphasizes the idealism and non-violence of Rastafari, it completely omits the Ethiopian dimension, so that Power is indistinguishable from a Christian St Francis figure.

A far more sophisticated investigation of Rastafari can be found in the work of the Guyanese author N.D. Williams, who now lives in New York. His first novel, which won the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1976, is entitled Ikael Torass. The semi-autobiographical novel charts how the protagonist, Michael Abbensetts, moves through the three stages of the book’s sections from being a ‘Departurist’ whose memories and experience of his Caribbean homeland are brought to a focus on the day he misses the plane out, through ‘Arrivant’ at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica (where, I am told, many of Williams’ acquaintances found themselves portrayed or caricatured) to the final section ‘Homing’ where the world of Rastafarians provides an alternative to the conventional, middle-class university environment and the strident politics of 70s Jamaica.

In a way that rings entirely true, Williams describes the series of chance meetings, missed appointments, sudden appearances and disappearances, completely independent of European schemes of schedules and clock times, by which Michael becomes aware of the Rastafarians and what they might offer him. First the Rasta imitators, a group of disaffected students christened by one shocked right thinker the ‘malcunts’,  who exude a certain danger and excitement that remind him of his working-class school friend Skully Wilson, take him to ‘check on the bredda’. But he later meets more authentic Rastafarians, the country teacher Im, who has been sacked for expounding Rastafarian ideas, and Ras Alphonsus and Jah Mighty, who give him ambivalent insights.

His meeting with Im takes place one Christmas when he is looking after his girlfriend’s flat. Im’s appearance is described first:

…my eyes slowly focussed on the knitted tam and the angular face, and I said, ‘Jesus Christ’ half in apprehension; it might have been my subconscious speaking for his face bore a close resemblance to pictures of Christ they hung in every classroom back in St Francis. Later I was to discover how easy it is to see Christ in every bearded tam wearer, carrying a tamarind crook and peculiar weary sacrificial expression on his face.[3]

The narrator uses the same gently ironic tone as Im, who has refused all but a glass of water, tells his life story, his experience as a three-year-old seeing the look of affection on the face of an itinerant Rasta selling yardbrooms when his horrified mother sets their dog on him, and later as a schoolboy his discovery of his father’s hypocrisy. To his parents’ distress he has become a Rastafarian, and explains to the protagonist, who he casually christens Ikael, about the corruption of the society they live in: “Babylon burning. Rome on fire again!”[4]

He drums with his fingers the way Skully had done when a teacher had given him detention. Im explains it as ‘communing’, an expression of powerlessness but at the same time a discovery of a source of spiritual energy, but only as a result of suffering. It grows dark as their conversation continues, and Michael, from habit, gets up to put on the lights. Im rebukes him:

That man fearful of darkness?’

‘Look… Im, this isn’t my place. I’m only… I’m just putting on the lights…’

‘That man don’t tell I why…’

‘Cause it’s dark, and I can’t see, and I don’t want anybody coming in here from inside…’

‘Ikael. man…’

‘… and look, my name is Michael, right?’

‘Hold on, nuh. Man and man don’t need light but enlightenment…’[5]

The contrast between technology (electric light as messageless medium) and spiritual awareness could not be clearer. Im leaves him thinking about the mystery of the dry river-gully whose water has disappeared as though it had flown away. To find out where it went it is necessary to go back to the time when the water flowed, the metaphorical search for both African and spirtual origins.

Another time Im and the protagonist want to attend a meeting at which a man from Africa is to speak, but due to mix-ups and missed buses they miss the meeting. Only a handful of the brethren are still there:

This is what I will always remember — the strange power of bredren in meditative silence, broken occasionally by the wind playing in overhanging trees through which the moon poured fragmented light. [ ...] They seemed immersed in dream, deep wish, the flame of love, the fire of anger, the love of remembrance, as if what they had just heard, what we had travelled over 120 minutes to hear and just missed, was a miracle of revelation. They were conscious, however, of the earth on which they stood; with the watchful, alive weariness of lions pausing in stride to lift their heads, all turned and listened when they heard a movement down the passage way. [...] Soon we were in circle and passing the weed from hand to hand. Long concealed, half buried ways of feeling were suddenly very real; after centuries that fire in the forest clearing still glowed with living embers. Community was, still and despite, possible.[6]

A noteworthy point is how the despair of loss which drove so many slaves to prefer death is replaced in Rastafari by this new awareness of the earth as an exile’s intimation of home. This resonant description is immediately relativized by the author with the statement: Freud would have loved this place. Religious passions running loose in the streets, the fetish about hair and dirt and ganja and no pork! Enormous repressions, I’d say, of one kind or another.[7]

The two other Rastafarians presented are Ras Alphonsus, who teaches the protagonist about ‘iditation’, the importance of living in harmony with nature and listening to the true divine voice within the self: I-nity, beloved. Unity is falsehood, the crooked way, the trick of the Pope, the loop of the politician. I-nity is the fulfilment of the individual within the consciousness of His I-mannence. Is freedom from scatta scatta scatta — all that reggae and migratin’. Is the horn listening to the drum listening to the flute listening to the heartbeat, yu na see’t. Is the loyalty of I & I, not the oppressive royalty of I.‘[8]

However, it is noticeable that he spends all his time lying in the hammock and makes others, the women and girls, provide refreshments. Jah Mighty is another recognizable type, Rastafarian only when it does not interfere with his pleasures, unreliable to the point of solipsism.

Perhaps the most extraordinary portrayal of a Rastafarian in Williams’ work is contained in the short story ‘Zeke’ from the collection The Crying of Rainbirds (1992). The story is told by a literary narrative voice making a television documentary about Zeke’s life. Born Bedward Moffit, he ran aware from his rural home to become a reggae superstar, but ‘no one would buy his pain’. He received extravagant praise for his ‘performance poetry’ from a famous literary figure, who then disappoints him by ‘becoming inaccessible’. After an attempt to set up a school for ‘ghetto youth’ he is disillusioned when, in spite of initial enthusiasm, people begin drifting away. He goes through a phase of running maniacally through city streets, and another of standing at intersections holding up traffic, before meeting Peter Shury, a businessman’s son, who becomes his first disciple. Together they go to the hills where they ‘capture’ some government land, plant vegetables and some ‘herb for the mind’. They meditate on the Bible (“The King turn to the Bible like a pilot to a compass.”) and talk about the ‘movement inside’ and about Africa. Says Shury:

‘Right there so I knew I had to use my life to play music, to make a tunnel of light with sound so that people could see through the haze of fear, self-love, money problems, to the movement inside.’[9]

One morning Zeke wakes up racked with pain: ‘Pain hold me down on my chest, round my neck and shoulder, like some iron clamp. When I turn this way pain follow me like a chain; turn that way, it just rattle on me. All the try I try I couldn’t move.[10]

The memory of the Middle Passage drives Zeke down towards the sea, starting to sing. This leads to the misunderstanding with Mr and Mrs Zybowski, American tourists who are shopping in the market. Mr Zybowski recognizes in him a singer he would like to get under contract, or at least capture on camera. Mrs Zybowski is so shocked that she drops the soursop fruit she is holding. The market traders assume that the ‘dutty Rasta’ has committed some crime and pursue him to the harbour throwing stones and sticks at him. Zeke, by now, is kneeling naked at the water’s edge, where he has an extraordinary epiphany as the crowd reels back, assaulted by smell: It occurred to him that human labour on the island was as much in chains now as then; that men and women toiled under the sun and the years went by and there was nothing, nothing they could point to with pride as their achievement. Zeke was overcome with a terrible feeling of despair, of anger. Right at that moment, feeling very much the feeling of any hapless slave who might have stood on that spot centuries before contemplating his new world, Zeke’s bowels had gone into motion. He was not unaware that he had soiled himself. He felt no shame, no fear. There was just this overpowering notion that nothing had altered; his time was standing still; his island world was neither shrinking nor expanding. Three hundred more years would pass and someone else would stand on these shores and discover the same baleful truth. A never-ending cycle, as monotonous and unbreakable as the sun’s daily passage across the sky.[11]

At this point Zeke, having smeared his limbs with mud and excrement like — as Mr Zybowski, who has read his National Geographical, realizes — Papuan tribesmen preparing for spiritual rituals of shamanic flight, starts swimming. He swims all the way to Africa. Sometimes he is driven back by storms, and once he is mistaken for a mythical sea creature by yachtsmen and shot at. Finally he arrives on the Guineacoast. When the television crew ask to film Zeke’s grave, they are forbidden to; they are not even allowed to take away the flowers of the tree like island poui that grows on his grave, recalling the Glastonbury thorn. They can only return with “the fragrance and the petals of our tale.”[12]

Middle-class distrust of Rastafarians in the islands that have defined their independence in Western terms, of the sort that leads to the harbour scene in ‘Zeke’, is picked up by Williams in ‘Monkey Wrenching Snaps’ from the collection Julie Mango.

Hunter Michel Valcin, who describes himself as “Child of his island’s Independence. Citizen of the world,”[13] is the son of a respected magistrate, but now lives and teaches abroad, in New York State. There his island accent is the occasion for various patronizing remarks. Invited to visit Yardborough, an old friend who now lectures at the island university, he is shocked by the heat at the airport which: “mugged him as if he were a tourist”.[14] He is picked up by a Rastafarian, who loses his own car, and disappears in the middle of a village with the words ‘Soon come’ for a quick joint, and who bears a name incorporating the ‘I’ with glorious incongruity: Bikesman: “Is long time now,” he began, settling back, his elbow sticking out the window: “Long time I man study this island/world situation… the futility of politics, or the politics of futility — See’t? —either way you deal the cards, is sufferation for the righteous… Now, I & I reach one conclusion: the only true salvation from and for the hege/money — See’t? — of oppressor nations is for I & I to recover that original ground of the spirit… Selassie-I, the true vine!”

Hunter was flabbergasted. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Just off an aircraft, a survivor of Customs and Immigration impertinence, here he was being sermonized by a fellow named Bikesman about man’s search for that original ground of the spirit. And, next, being asked about his position on this issue.[15]

Hunter remembers his Latin teacher’s words: ‘Odi profanum vulgus et arceo…’

If the general tone of Williams’ presentations of Rastafarians is positive, more serious criticism emerges in two specific areas: sexism and homophobia. In the story ‘Beach’ (from The Crying of Rainbirds) St Remy retakes possession of his island on a Sunday morning, standing in reverence contemplating the natural spectacle, before swimming in the ocean as though part of its element. But then, thinking of Crusoe and Friday, he sees four white legs. One of the girls, without asking permission, photographs him and, in revenge, he seduces her companion and subjects her to consensual rape although, to his annoyance, she appears not to have noticed that is what has happened. One recalls Earl Lovelace’s theme that the black man, in liberating himself from the ideas of slavery, expresses his liberation at the expense of women.[16]

Homophobia appeared in Williams’ first description of Rastafarians in Ikael Torass. Two Americans, thinking that a country where cannabis is a sacrament must be a paradise of individual hippie freedom, sodomize each other with the doors wide open on the university campus, to the disgust of the ‘malcunts’, who see their actions as ‘the wickedness of Babylon’. In the later story ‘Batty Bwoy, Divert!’ (from Julie Mango) there is a darker sense of threat in the Rastafarians in New York Citywhose conversation the narrator is meant to overhear when they talk about “Batty bwoy fi burn in hellfire.” These Rastas, who dress in fashionable clothes and drive an expensive Japanese car displaying traffic tickets to show they have no respect for ‘Babylon system’, describe their treatment of a gay:

“So we jump ‘pon him. Beat him till ‘im bawl. Kick him in his balls. Him curl up like a little girl, and the more him bawl, the more we stamp ‘pon him, kick him, mash up ‘im face.”

“Me had to pull the dred away, else him woulda kill the batty bwoy.”

“Him lucky. If I had my gun I woulda push it up ‘im backside… and… boosha… boosha.”[17]

Though these men clearly have little in common with the principles of Rastafari, the story goes on to show how it echoes the attitudes of elders, which result when a desire for purity calcinates into fundamentalism to be enforced by extremism. The narrator remembers one of the first victims of Aids on his island, taunted by voices “rushing out like guard dogs to snap at his ankles, snarling from behind Selassie’s palace gates at his wayward soul” saying: “Jah go lick you with diseases, batty bwoy!”[18] He turns on them: “You fellas… you children of Zion… you so quick to punish, so ready to judge. I don’t mind if you wait forever for ships of salvation to take you back home. Just leave me alone.”[19]

In the novella My Planet of Ras (1997), a German tourist called Kristal Marie Braun visits Jamaica in 1969, the year of the Woodstockfestival and the first moon landing; her discovery is of a new planet and alternative society centring on three Magus characters: Selassie, reader and healer with herbs, Ikael, artist-painter, and Kilmanjaro, master drummer. The reason a German protagonist is used would seem to be a comparison Williams develops between cults of personality, specifically that of Hitler or Hirohito and the Emperor Ras Tafari of the visit to Pallisadoes three years previously: “a riddle as profound as those twin births from the same egg: Brandenburg Bach and the Belsen bakers”.[20] Here Williams enlarges on one of the more curious aspects of Rastafari: why is Haile Selassie seen as the incarnation of God? And why the emphasis on ‘I’? An interesting light is thrown on these questions by a startling parallel.

At the end of the twelfth century the Cathar heretics of Languedoc, against whom the so-called ‘Albigensian Crusade’ was launched, asserted that the Church of Rome was “the Great Whore of Babylon, Satan’s citadel and the seat of all damnation, not in any circumstances could they tolerate what they described as superstitious practices and gross material errors.”[21] The Cathars were the last organized Gnostics in Europe, heirs of a religion which developed at the same time as Christianity only to be ruthlessly suppressed because of its doctrines. Gnosticism teaches that the human being contains a divine spark of the true God, but is now in exile in the material world, which is the work of a demiurge. To be human is to be a slave to delusions of reality. Not intellectual abasement before an institution like the Church, but spiritual movement to try to unite that divine spark with the unknown God will bring salvation.

Rastafarians, then, sojourners in a strange land, by their belief that God is incarnated in Haile Selassie also see the divine in man, black man, and thus become associated with a Gnostic tradition which, as I have described elsewhere, is still very much alive. The danger in this, as the Churches do not tire of stressing, is the solipsistic enthroning of one’s own error. But what is gained is the freeing of the individual imagination, and the understanding, or as they say ‘overstanding’ that language, the Word, is the source of the divine, and this provides the creative fire to destroy the manacles of slave memory in an alchemical process of story that even we, the descendants of European perpetrators, can share and use for our own redemption songs.            

©Michael Mitchell, University of Warwick, 5^th July, 2004.

First posted Jan. 08, 2001 Guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com

Disembarking at Norman Manley International Airport, Kingston in September 1967, I was a student with simple ambitions; first journey away from home; with no idea what kind of world I was stepping into. University students back home on vacation would tell of the island’s smoky blue mountains and the poui flower. They played 45rpm records of rock steady music and demonstrated dance steps; they spoke of color prejudice and rude bwoys and they gave imitations of that languorous Jamaican speech.

 Looking back I’m convinced my life might have taken a different shape had I touched down at that airport one year earlier. Or had I left for St Augustine, Trinidad; or Ithaca, NY: a student wanting only to leave home, get a university education.

The music and the dance steps were there when I arrived, but the beat and the body movements had changed. And there were young women from other islands, beautiful and spirited, who would dance with you all night; and mountains you could stare at for hours. Students were privileged to make excursions to the North Coast, to dine in the city’s fine restaurants. At Christmas we got invited to lovely homes in the hills. Ordinary people deferred to you. It was for me a safe place, a high ecstatic time.

 After one year I discovered the campus was filled with prodigious talents. As if summoned by fate many brilliant minds had gathered here to work and study; years later some would make their own mark on the world. I met and befriended the poets McNeil and Scott, intense young men, still struggling then to hone their craft. Rex Nettleford’s NDTCwas in its infancy but its dance explorations swept me away. Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountainwould receive an astonishing production at the university’s creative arts centre. I counted myself lucky to be there at that junction, criss-crossing the lawns, commingling with so many talented folk.

 It wasn’t long before I discovered the other campus on the island:  Martin Carter’s Universityof Hunger.  We had heard about it: Trench Town and Tivoli Gardens; other dungles of desperate living. Poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite was speaking and writing about these places with missionary fervor as potent sites of resistance, survival and renewal. In 1968 Walter Rodney arrived and urged us to venture out, make connections. Never mind the risks, there were brothers and sisters out there with burning faith, redemptive truths.

 I ventured out; I found these places: they held men, women and children in shacks, gullies and yards with towering mango trees; sugar cane and oranges, The Healing of the Nations; bearded men, drums and wailing horns, handsome portraits of His Imperial Majesty, Count Ossie; black green and gold threads of remembering and forwarding; leanbodied Israelites of uncrushable spirit. All there.

But they lived hard, isolate lives, marking time, under constant assault and lockup: Carter’s university men, “half sunken in the land”. How could their world be part of my life?

 The price paid for throwing a light on their plight and place was tumultuous. Suddenly one evening Rodney was banned: students took to the streets of Kingston in protest; some intellectuals called for the death of intellectualism, for socialism as the only way forward to economic upliftment. Havana was reaching out to the island asking for connection. The music in the 70’s took on a harder menacing edge. I still danced to Issacs, Cliff, Holt, Toots and Ellis. But now I listened to Bob Marley.

 For me Marley is right up there with Miles and Mozart; so much music poured out of them!  I play Duppy Conqueror and get goose bumps when touched by its heart-rippling truths: despots and duppies stand ready to despatch you to prisons of poverty, to dungeons of the spirit; with luck friends will greet you when they set you free again; your freedom is always conditional; beneath pounding pleasures and simple ambitions lie masts and riggings of the human spirit deep inside you must hold on to. And this too: ideologies and movements rise and fall, you must make your own way in this world (this last affirmed by V.S. Naipaul after his journey to a different island, commingling with different folk).

 These days websites offer places for men and women to click and make fast connections. I was fortunate to have travelled to Jamaica in 1967. O, the connections, the sweet vibrations! Rodney: man of all downpressed peoples. Marley: locksman for all times.  Jamaica: gateway

First posted May 06, 2003 on Guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com

“Never such faith again; never such innocence.”

                                 - Derek Walcott (from “Homage to Gregorias”)

 They’re passing away, those lean old men and women born in the 1920s & 1930s. Many still alive are probably shuttered in silence and horror at what has come to pass since the colonial days. Their simple faith in things like mercurochrome, winning the English Football Pools one day, life-supporting foods like yam and bhagi has been supplanted by sadness at the depravity of armed criminals these days; at the (psychological) barricades separating old African villages from old Indian villages; turning once places of pleasant boyhood memories into encampments of resentment and fear.

 A recent editorial (in Stabroek News) lamented the passing of famed souls – Peter D’Aguiar, Joseph Pollydore, Dr Balwant Singh – and wished for a handful of writers less bent on brilliant careers, with the dedication and resource to shape their lives into biographies or videos for our schools, for public education; building up some sort of national archive of human narrative; the retrospective glance encouraging introspection, then fresh visions of what anyone could achieve.

Public ignorance or indifference is what’s distressing. The thought that these men and women have taken to their grave bodies of lived experience, the building blocks of their setbacks and success, which could be forever lost in those “forests of history thickening with amnesia”(as Derek Walcott puts it). But someone always rises to pay homage (as Walcott did in, for instance, The Bounty: paying homage to those gritty true souls of his birthplace, St Lucia.).

 
Take, for instance, the tribute by David Granger (Stabroek News, Feb 02, 2003) on Harry Hinds, whom he described as “one of the founding fathers of the Guyana Defence Force”. Granger’s words go beyond mere tribute to “an illustrious military career”. There is beneath the admiration and respect a friend’s urgent wish to remind a crime-distracted nation of the debt we owe to men like Harry Hinds. (It set me thinking of Harry’s father, Basil Hinds, whose passion for jazz music and the radio programme “Just Jazz” in the 60s opened my adolescent interest in that musical form.)

 Others have scrambled to fill the void in public memory: Stanley Greaves in his tribute to the drummer Art Broomes (Stabroek News); letters to the Editor honouring the poet, Mahadai Das. And always the compulsion to set down for public record important fragments of experience that would otherwise just disappear, with no more to be said. These letters create ripples of understanding inside anyone whose life came even marginally in contact with the departed souls.

 Like the letter sent to Stabroek News by a Victor J. Fitt: about his grandfather, Manoel Cypriani da Silva, who came from Madeira in the early 1900s: opened a small shop, bought property, built a school, a church, a culvert; engineered a project using empty boiler tubes from the sugar estates; did all this with hard labor, pragmatism, “the university of commonsense”.

 And through each testimony, the same binding seam: these were men and women who must have looked out on their colonial inheritance and wondered what they could do with it. These were citizens with little interest in ethnic movements “going back”. Individuals who’d found a profession or “calling” and wished to live like people anywhere, performing ordinary tasks with extraordinary passion and skill; confident in their homegrown ways, their heads filled not with “Culture” nor doctrines of envy & group entitlement, but ideas for reinventing themselves from scratch, for building new prosperities with the mud and mortar, the backbone and brain of their colonial circumstance.

 
Less distinguished, but just as “heroic”, were the efforts of so many self-made folk – not blessed or cursed with much formal education; misled too often by ruling elites, ideologues and charlatans in shiny robes. The men liked their rum, betrayed their women and had fierce opinions on everything from Test cricket to American foreign policy. (Some became “characters” with names that still enchant village memory: “Cato” and “Mary Bruk Iron”). Not quite free of dissoluteness, prejudice, deceit, they were tough, ordinary folk who found something in society worth living for even as they struggled to escape its limitations.

 My uncle, Tommy Greene, was one of them. For years he played the saxophone with the house band at the Palm Court. Jazz and popular music was his passion. He loved listening to Sonny Rollins. Back in the 60s he was certain an authentic Guyanese “sound” was emerging. I started listening to the bands of the day practicing in bottom houses, playing at nightclubs, singing on the radio. The Tradewinds, Johnny Braff, Sammy Baksh. Our music innovators, you might say, turning aside from imported models; searching within the heart of the nation for fresh arrangements of melody, rhythm, sentiment; finding a sound that bore little affinity to Jamaica’s reggae or T/dad kaiso. Something different, indigenous to Guyana, was indeed emerging back then. Only folk with souls anchored in their native soil would have heard and recognised it.                                                                                      

First posted Oct. 18, 2003 on GuyanaCaribbeanpolitics.com

“Is a hard life, ain’t it?”  Stevenson nodded. “But a man

 must follow his duty,” da Silva pontificated, “wherever

 it lead him, whether to something small or big… he must

 be whatever he got to be – unknown soldier or servant

 or saint.”

               – from Heartland, Wilson Harris

 The Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez recently published his autobiography Living To Tell The Tale.  In an extract from the book, reproduced in the UK Guardian, he writes of a band of brothers, a group of journalists with whom he spent a memorable night in the city of Barranquilla. “We had so many things in common,” Garcia Marquez says. “We were marked and disliked in certain quarters because of our independence, our irresistible vocations, a creative determination that elbowed its way forward, and a timidity that each one resolved in his own way.”  That evening spent in Barranquilla – “in the paradise of its brothels” – would instill in the young journalist a passion for literature and point the way to his fabulous future as a writer.

The Caribbean has had its groups of artists, most famously those writers who sailed for England on the Windrush in the 1950s – George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Edgar Mittelholzer. They would meet and encourage each other, elbowing their way forward through London’s cold streets; each man following his duty, holding fast to his appointed work. A focal point for their talents was the BBC program Caribbean Voices whose leading light Henry Swanzy would encourage contributions from Vidia Naipaul and Andrew Salkey among others.

 (Curiously there was no C/bean band of sisters back then. Jean Rhys, the most celebrated writer of that period, must have beaten a lonely path from the Caribbean to Europe. She might have been comforted (or unmoved) by the mushrooms of feminist scholarship decades later; women groups offering the support of theory and sympathetic interpretations of her fiction.)

 Artists groups like these, without political, separatist or tribal agendas, are free-forming, with a fierce commitment to art, literature, (“New World”) intellectual growth, human development. They come and go with the times; they respond to a spiritual vacuum in any society; the dearth of ideas; the impoverishment of the imagination.

 In the 1940s AJ Seymour in founding Kyk-Over-Al was responding to a need to provide a forum or haven for “the ablest minds in the country”. It attracted and nurtured the talents of Martin Carter, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew. Their role as writers was pretty much prescribed by the anti-colonial struggle: disabusing the psyche of self-devaluing habits, clearing the ground for national ownership, nurturing love, curiosity and faith in our landscape. (Some of this ground-clearing continues today in the writings of Ian McDonald.)

 A little-known post-Independence group did emerge in Guyana, a generation of writers and artists that sustained each other in the rancorous 70s and has gone on to make its mark in the world. Victor Davson, Brian Chan, Janice Lowe, Terence Roberts, John Agard formed the nucleus of that group. What bound them together was a preoccupation with the future of a newly Independent Guyana. Their work was experimental, not nostalgic, engaged with the contemporary, not history-bound. This generation inherited the energy and vision of Seymour, Burrowes, Harris, Denis and Aubrey Williams, Carew; it was acutely aware of its predecessors’ ground-clearing work.  

 Much of their time was spent in viewing, reading or discussing their work. Seymour was considered determined but bowtie-stodgy; Aubrey Williams astonishing for his use of Amerindian motifs; Mittelholzer had written, in My Bones and My Flute, the scariest piece of Guyanese horror fiction to date. They were all revered, argued over and loved.

 The Guyana of the 70s – that period marked by “a crossfire of relationships”, when life hinged so much on Party favor or disfavour – exerted fierce pressure on their integrity as artists. Somehow the group held together, pursuing in poems and paintings their imaginings of Guyana as it might be in the future. There was great interest in the all-encompassing political vision of Walter Rodney, and dismay at the institutions of repressive government that emerged at the time. Anxious minds questioned whether national unity could be forged or forced using a model borrowed from Cuba. The socialist Government of the day, it seemed, was attempting just that.

 Unlike Garcia Marquez whose support for Fidel’s revolution remains undiminished, individual artists felt there was a need here, first, for a careful shoring up of our nation’s fragile foundations. Above all a climate of creative and intellectual freedom; a ceasefire of relationships after the flag-lowering, flag-raising ceremonies; sensitivity to the prejudices and fears native to all of us at that turning point in history. Just as one respects the tides and undercurrents as one navigates the mighty Essequibo, one had to be patient with new power, respect the flow and flowering of diverse being in the nation.

 Two writers who served as spiritual icons for the group were Wilson Harris and Martin Carter. Harris’ fiction towered over the cultural landscape. His slim novels came rapidly one after the other in the 60s – Palace of the Peacock, Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour, The Secret Ladder. They offered density, substrata of meanings; they urged readers to turn their backs on coastal hubris, plunge into their interiors; they laid bare the state of Guyana’s “complex hunger” and warned that the chasm between race and race, man and woman could not be easily subsumed in the debased language of Party politics.

 Harris’ work became the centre of reference. The assertion of the narrator in Palace – “Somebody must demonstrate the unity of being.” – was like a mantra for young artists. His uncanny way of yoking words and images somehow sparked fresh illuminations. Back then you felt lost in the prose but somehow understood what he was saying. He too was clearing new ground. 

 Despite the prisonlike hardships of the 70s, poems and paintings from the group seemed determined to search for ideas of human development, to open a conduit of creative thought between Guyana and the world. Always forward and outward looking, firmly rooted in the tradition of Seymour, Carter and Harris, keenly aware of the work of other fine artists like Stanley Greaves, Ron Savoury and Donald Locke, this group never jettisoned its vocation.

 There were evenings of intense talk which revealed their separate preoccupations, quirks of passions: Roberts would argue that Faulkner was the greatest writer America ever produced, and how he’d come across the border-crossing prose of a new writer, Cormac McCarthy. Chan who loved the jazz piano was in those days absorbed in the fiction of the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar (he would ask us, in between cigarettes and XM, to consider the viewpoint of Oliviera in Hopscotch: “…an awful lot of people would set themselves up in a supposed unity of person which was nothing but a linguistic unity and a premature sclerosis of character.”)  And there was Agard’s fascination with the African motifs in the work of Berbice sculptor Philip Moore, his unifying theory of “Godmanliness”.

  The problems of Guyana’s “complex hunger” remain. These days proposals for social development are as plentiful as channa:  ethnic separatism, power sharing, racial quotas; “models of aloof security”; cultural inbreeding, ancestral dressing. Other manifestations of “superstitious unreasonableness”. Backtrack, law breaking, rasta.  

 Artist groups grow old, grow weary of watching out for each other’s souls; bonds that once sustained eventually sever. Individual experience, temperament, “the panic of associations” prompt ruptures and permanent disagreements. That artist group of the 70s, like its Caribbean forerunners on the SS Windrush in the 50s, moved away from Guyana. Though not as prolific as the first wave of writers (perhaps not as “duty” driven) it has achieved some measure of success and recognition: books of poems or novels have found publishers; extraordinary paintings are now on display in homes and galleries around the world.

 John Agard (who did not return home) has established a reputation as a poet-performer and children’s writer in England. Victor Davson is co-founder of Aljira, A Center For Contemporary Art, in New Jersey. (An exhibition of his paintings and drawings now in Allenton, Pennsylvania, titled “Bad Cow Comin’”, draws significantly on his experience growing up in Guyana)

 Meanwhile one hears of new artist groups in Guyana (like “The Janus Young Writers Guild”, founded in the late 90s) which continue to define and defend the values that would keep us all human, civil and productive; grappling too, one imagines, with the old twinned colonial memory (Jagan-Burnham).  

 And hanging by a spider’s thread to that mysterious longing that runs like a river through the ground-clearing work of the Seymours and Rodneys and Harrises back to our native ancestors; to that spirit you hear in the living voices of our school children when they sing with bright innocence “My Guyana, Eldorado”.

First posted January 26, 2003: Guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com

 Poems of Successionis the only copy I own of Martin Carter’s poems. I don’t plan to buy more recent publications, though they might contain excellent poems missing from this collection. Succession was printed as “the first almost complete collection of the poetry of Martin Carter” and contained poems he wrote between 1951 and 1975. It’s fairly representative of his work, and when he died in 1997 I pulled it out (distressed by the erosion on the book’s spine) and read the poems as a private tribute.

 I’ve been reading them more earnestly since, dipping into the pages whenever there are headlines of “dark times” in the city; or reports of  the “awful sorrow” in coastal villages with names like Friendship, Better Hope; the shuttered houses, the flight of Indians in fear for their lives, the gunning down of police ranks – those painful, malignant things that poison our wellbeing, creating in so many “a bafflement of speech”.

Martin Carter was for me the mapmaker of Demerara’s cities, the way Wilson Harris cartographed the rivers of our soul’s hinterland. Growing up in Georgetown in those globally turbulent 60s, knowing there was a poet who lived in Lamaha Street, across from the train line, who wrote poems about “the leaves of the canna lily near the pavement”; then discovering his Black Friday 1962, that dark time in our history  “when the sun and streets exploded”, and some ran “this way”, while I ran “that way” and Carter was with us all; all this made me feel captured in history, as on film for a time capsule. My life became meaningful. The poet, my hero.

 Reading him closely, thereafter, I was haunted by his images of the city; then found myself resisting much of their appeal. I didn’t question his heart’s authority. He’d written:

                    I know this city much as well as you do,

                   The ways leading to brothels and those dooms

                    Dwelling in them, as in our lives they dwell.   (from After One Year) 

Those dooms dwelling in our lives? Somehow that line struck a dissonant note. It was time, I felt then, to discover my city, my Georgetown.

This meant relinquishing the branch one shared with him, his poet’s high perch from which one viewed through his anguished lens the making of so much history in Georgetown. For although Carter was the kind eagle, “the heart’s life”, soaring in that vast blue Georgetown sky, you felt the perch was, perhaps, too lofty. It made for generalizations that sounded facile and high-flown.

                      In every human city in this world

                      Men murder men, as men must murder men,

                     To build their shining governments of the damned.
(from  After One Year)

 
Those lines had the sweep of some powerful universal truth back then; they left you somehow a little uneasy with the poet’s spectatorial perch, as if Carter was missing grainier insights into our blighted villages, our city streets. (I still hold on to these lines, written in 1972, but with a ring of authenticity for any Lagos or Kuala Lumpur of today:

                        In a small city at dusk

                        It is difficult to distinguish

                        Bird from bat.  Both fly fast:

                        One away from the dark

                        And one toward the dark.
                                                                             (from  In A Small City At Dusk)

 What is alarming (it pains me to admit) is that his poems are losing their significance for me with each passing day. Beneath the much praised craftsmanship, little that resonates remains. The anti-colonial Freedom poems, for instance, I bypass; likewise the Death of a Comrade poems that so enamored academics back in the seventies.  The University of Hunger invites me up on that transcending perch, that view of the eternal verities of the world.  It’s terrible to admit, but I’ve been there! And in any event the world is a more jumbled place these days, some new nations locked-up in narcotic activity, or collapsed in gun-infested swamps. (“The unwanted unwanting the world“, Carter once wrote.)

 Does this mean that for me Martin Carter has become irrelevant? Am I a romantic longing for the pre-Independence days when the railway embankments trembled only from the passing of trains, and hope was “a blade of fury”. Is it fair ask his poems to pierce the new darkness, help us understand the post-colonial time: the city’s uncaring smut, its “festival of guns”? Why hasn’t his quietly built achievement inspired some new talent, some less soaring but equally kind eagle, refracting our capital city where one-eyed sophistry, brazen banditry, the gaping wounds of racial harm would make us strangers again, harden our heavy hearts again?

 Truth to tell, back in my youthful longings of the 60s he was always twinned in my psyche with Wilson Harris, the one examining the fissures in our city, the other pouring over prints of our interiors, appeasing our hunger for larger identities to transcend our origins. You felt at the birth of our Independencethat with these two national treasures, their powerful imaginations enriching nascent souls in classrooms, our humanity would triumph in Guyana. Making their profound kinship with the landscape ours, our nation couldn’t lose its way in the world.

 Perhaps it is a measure of my current despair.  There are lines from Cartman of Dayclean which, like an old stain, refuse to go away:

                             hidden cartman fumbling for a star

                             brooding city like a mound of coal

                             till journey done, till prostrate coughing hour

                             with sudden welcome take him to his dream

                              with sudden farewell send him to his grave.

Haunting, eagle-eyed lines, sharp and portentous.  Is that how he really saw human existence in Guyana?

 Carter didn’t find much to celebrate in his later poems, unless there’s a volume I haven’t read (and, sad to admit, will not acquire). Those short, ruminative pieces written in the 70s (selections from The When Time) with titles like “Before the Question” “If It Were Given” “As When I Was” I find not particularly compelling. Carter seems at this stage to be fiddling elliptically with his talent, the way a man past his prime scratches his balls now and then.  (There are researching scholars out there who will respectfully disagree.)

 What remains, then, on the pages of Poems of Succession are mere intimations of what Guyana could become as a nation.  That instantaneous generosity shown to strangers, a people’s readiness to be each other’s friends. You have to listen hard to find it in the clamorous march of Carter’s Comrade poems. It stayed intact, surfacing through the cracks and divides of the Burnham/Jagan years; it almost disappeared during the armed-forced socialist union of the Comrade years.  I mean, those layers of forbearance, overriding fear and distrust, that got us this far as a nation, that get us through the coastal travails each day.

 I heard it in the music that woke the nation to fresh mornings of labour and hope back in the days of radio; you hear it in that amazing old Guyanese composition “Happy Holidays” which defines our spirit at Christmas. A readiness for friendship that wards off periodic cries for partition; a kindness of heart that sutures communal wounds, offering hope again.

 With luck it will see us through the current slime of lawlessness in Demerara’s towns and villages.  It was always the fertile ground for a new synthesis. Still is, once we’ve found ways to ease debilitating poverty, drain our little gun-infested swamp.

 Book Reviewed:

Poems of Succession:  Martin Carter, New Beacon Books 1977.

Vincent Roth: A Life in Guyana: Vols 1 & 2

For the general readerthe remarks on the back cover of the 1^st volume of these books moreor less sums up the extraordinary life of its subject: “As an eighteen year old Vincent Roth arrived in British Guiana in 1907to join his father, who was a Government Medical Officer and Magistrate. By thetime he left for Barbadosin 1964, Roth had spent thirty years in the interior working as asurveyor and magistrate until blackwater fever nearly killed him. Thereafter hecontributed immensely to the development of Guyana as a journalist, naturalist, historian,rebuilder of the national museum and founder of the zoo in the BotanicalGardens.”

Having read that, and with expanded awareness, it would be nice to stop by the museum, visit the zoo in the Botanical Gardens, ponder the decrepit state of once proudly kept habitats (consider, too, how with the dismantling of colonial hegemony “horticulture” has gone the way of discarded practices, rules and rituals; in its place habits of neglect and degradation of public spaces, and our interminable preoccupation with showcase “Culture” as the panacea for ethnic identity issues); then ask yourself: do I really need to know more about this remarkable man from the British Guiana days?

 If you’re a journalist, or spare-time naturalist, historian or just a builder you might be drawn; but a word of caution. Both volumes – culled, it appears, by the editor from a staggering twelve volumes! – total 600+ pages. It makes for grindingly slow reading, the way you had to sit or stretch out as the R.H. Carr thread its way upriver from Georgetown to Linden, the water muddy brown, the bush always green. In Roth’s case the language feels at times superannuated, the journey often tedious.

 A bookstore browser in G/town opening Volume 1 at random might come across this: “Dad and I settled down to our new life in Marlborough. We would get up and do our club exercises and practice our step dancing. I would then continue with my German and shorthand and after read a chapter or two of Telemarque or Im Thurm’s Among the Indians of Guiana. I would then spend the rest of the day butterfly or insect hunting.”      (Vol 1: p. 81)

 Not fully persuaded, flip the pages and there is this: “Another of the farmers in the Coolie Quarter of the ArukaRiverwas Abdul Ghani. He was a Sikh and the mastermind of all East Indians in the area. He used to lend money to the other East Indians and close down on them when they could not meet their indebtedness. As a result he gradually acquired several tracts of land all over the Aruka district. He also went by the name of Phagoo and once told me how this came about. Phagoo was his shipmate’s name on the voyage from India, but he died shortly after his arrival in the Colony. Ghani boasted that although he had come to the Colony as an indentured labourer to a sugar estate, he had never done one day’s work in the cane fields, having absconded as soon as he arrived and got away to the North West where he took Phagoo’s name”. (Vol 1: p.185)

 (At this point I for one would consider purchasing Volume 1, intrigued with the story of Phagoo, hoping to find more narrative about runaways like Phagoo, already conceiving a film titled A House for Mr. Phagoo, about an indentured labourer’s godfatherlike rise from dhoti to riches in colonial Guiana.)

 Further on you come across this: “During the morning, the distant beating of drums was heard as the masqueraders went about the village, arriving at the Government Compound at about ten o’clock. They consisted of a group of some dozen and a half Negroes, dressed in gaudy yellow and red costumes of every description, prancing and dancing about, and followed by a party of interested but naked Caribs.” (Vol 1: p. 238)

 The first volume is not all about runaway East Indians and prancing Negroes. In fact much of its 300+ pages consists of passages like this: “Back in Bartica I met J.N. Humphreys, my predecessor at Christianburg and Arakaka, who was now accountant at the Penal Settlement and Bartica Magistrates’ Clerk. He invited me over to the Settlement and after Court we went with Walter King, the Magistrate and Superintendent, in his launch. King asked Humphreys to bring me along to tea later on. Humphreys took me to the Public Officers quarters, the finest in the Colony, most luxuriously furnished, with even a billiard table.” (Vol 1: p. 303)

 Names of people long gone but embedded in our national memory – Van Sluytman, McTurk, Fiedtkou, Phang, Griffiths, Drepaul, Correia, Christiani, Van Sertima (“a dear old fussy Dutch lady”), Prem Das (“an East Indian catechist”), The Zulu (“an enormous African lady who washed and did other favours”) – places in the Interior that might have changed little, locals not all as fascinating as Phagoo, they fill-to-overflow the pages of Roth’s journals. Turn a page and Roth is meeting someone new, setting off somewhere in terra incognita; or retiring at night under a mosquito net to update his observations.

 If our homegrown naturalists, historians or land surveyors can stay the course, they will be asked to view our colonial landscape through an outsider’s eyes (being patient with Roth’s old, old-millennium words for Africans and Indians). The arid, bush-clearing prose, the careful delineation of features, accuracy of dates, measurements, time of departure, place of embarkation, race of inhabitants – page after page of all this “seeing” could be at times mind-numbing.

 But Roth offers ‘data’ that with the appropriate analytical skills might add to our understanding of the early rock formations of our nationhood, the predilections and capacities developed in Guyanese through colonial necessity. Wherever they settled and worked, off the sugar plantations or in the gold fields, they were tough, resilient folk, alert to opportunity after emancipation. Roth’s observations on language, superstition, the management of our land resources, his perspective on how our colonial society worked might prove of more than passing interest to academics as might his references to polygamy among the Carib Indians, his comments on black/white race relations in the 1920s, Indian/African relations in the 1930s and descriptions of Bartica in its boomtown days.

 Young Roth himself in this first volume comes across as a benign colonial administrator, different in some ways – he shows great interest in local customs – carrying out his duties as Warden or land surveyor without fear or favour; driven less by a sense of ‘imperial’ mission; a man of curiosity and ideas for improving life in a strange country. Much like your genial VSO from England today. He felt quite at home among the governing elite (he was secretary of the Overseas Club) dressing up “in the garb of civilization” for formal dinners; at the same time he was ready to get frisky with the natives if the occasion presented itself.

 In Chapter XI Roth is in the Wape area of the Cuyuni. He’s drawn to the sound of merriment at a dance hall where Carib Indians are dipping into huge jars of liquor and dancing in the moonlight to the sounds of fiddlers and drums. He joins them and follows them conga line fashion to another camp to continue the fete, the diarist in his head recording every shadow and movement even as he samples the liquor and dances until his knees hurt.

 (For the reader still curious about what happened to that irrepressible runaway Sikh, Phagoo, when Roth meets up with him again Phagoo is getting married for the second time. His new bride is a Nurse Menezes. “Ghani proudly showed me the wedding ring which he carried about wrapped up in a piece of tissue paper in his trouser pocket. He had to do this, he said, for fear lest his East Indian concubine who was still in the house, should get hold of it and throw it in the river.” Vol 1. p. 248)

 Volume I (1889-1923) has most of young Roth’s discovery and mapping of Guiana’s topography. It also details his first encounters with swarms of marabuntas, labba pepperpot, the healing powers of the piaiman, the Arawak language; and close encounters with tuberculosis and the land camoodi. If there were any rumblings of discontent among the colonized during that period Roth didn’t make note of them.

 Volume 2 (1923-1935) begins on a reflective note. Roth admits to a little ‘cynicism’ about his journal keeping; he continues anyway for like his father he has an eye on future publication. All is not smooth traveling. There are grumblings among the colonials. While Roth is out in the gold fields arbitrating land issues and enforcing laws that address the distractions to pork knockers and porkknockery caused by ‘ladies of easy virtue’, back in Georgetown members of the Legislative Council raise questions about his competence as an itinerant magistrate and dispute some of his judgments. He finds an ally in the then Governor Sir Edward Denham who is impressed with Roth’s work and invites him to Government House.

 Otherwise it’s more of the same: metronomic accounts of trips – to the Courantyne, the North West, Bartica-Potaro, Kaieteur, back to the North West – camps struck in the forest, snakes killed on the trail, land surveyed, rivers crossed, reunions with family, snapshots of passing scenes (“Presently we approached a small group of East Indian women, who, to my horror, were in the act of removing their skirts preparatory to crossing the trench. Fortunately they saw me in time to stop their disrobing until I had passed. Glancing back a minute later I saw them waist deep in the middle of the trench heading for the opposite bank.” Vol. 2: p. 221)

 The writing is more anecdotal and interspersed with amusing ‘yarns’. Roth, still the tireless, well-intentioned administrator, has lost some of the Overseas Club exclusivity of the 1^st volume. He is thoroughly familiar now with the landscape and its racially diverse inhabitants. He meets other famous expatriates, like Dr Giglioli. The inventory of names swells (though as yet there’s no mention of Cheddi Jagan or Forbes Burnham). And like many well-appointed Guyanese back then wanting to leave the country but relocate not too far, when his moment of decision came he chose Barbados.

 Rarely do we get a sense of what Guyanese thought and felt about their transplanted existence, so systematically does Roth set about performing his duties, imposing order on unacceptable situations, taking measurement, filing his official report, then heading back to the steamer at the stelling or the bateau on the river for the next trip. (You wonder, though: after so many years of intrepid travel the length and breadth of Guiana, wasn’t there one epiphanic moment, one intense encounter that changed Roth’s perspective on life a little, if not forever? So much, it seems, remained silently contained inside him.)

 Editor Michael Bennett has included an appendix as well as sketches Roth made of ‘shapely’ Guyanese women and mountains (he has an exotic eye for colour and contour). While these volumes will no doubt find their place on library shelves, they aren’t likely to move the reader to pick up and travel anywhere in the Interior if only to see if what was once there is still there. For that you need the incandescent fiction of Wilson Harris.

 For all we know Harris the land surveyor might have crossed paths with Roth in many of these regions. Harris mixed his memories with dreams & imagination to construct highly original works of fiction using image-enriched though uncompromisingly difficult prose (making it hard, therefore, for readers outside academe to raise questions about what he’s saying in his novels). The mixed-race descendants of Phagoo, if they haven’t backtracked to NY city, might probably be found in a community of brooding souls somewhere by the rivers of Heartland or Tumatumari.

 Roth the outsider (re)built our museum and left a faithful record in linear prose of what he saw as he travelled. One can’t help but admire the absorbed way he strikes a balance between his administrative duties and his journal writing, keeping it up through all those years. His books were written, Roth said, “for the possible interest and amusement of surviving friends” and there are times – blocks of pages, whole chapters – when the Guyanese reader might feel distinctly the outsider: written about, though not necessarily intended as Roth’s readers.

 (A footnote: Roth’s last encounter with the aforementioned Phagoo is recorded thus: “The last place I visited was the storeroom where the storeroom’s convict assistant turned out to be my old acquaintance, Abdul Ghani, once a prosperous shopkeeper and coffee grower on the ArukaRiver. He earned his sentence for stealing a sheep. This was I believe, his third term in prison for stealing.” (Vol 1: p. 304) Roth offers no clues to the sudden loss of fortune of ‘his old acquaintance’. As was his wont he states the plain facts and moves on. What really happened to Phagoo, his mysterious rise and fall from prosperity as he struggled to reinvent himself, is left to the Guyanese imagination.)

 Books Reviewed:
Vincent Roth: A Life in Guyana: Volume 1: A Young Man’s Journey, 1889 – 1923:  ed Michael Bennett (Peepal Tree Press, England, 2003)

 Vincent Roth: A Life in Guyana: Volume 2: The Later Years, 1923 – 35: ed Michael Bennett (Peepal Tree Press, England, 2003)