N.D.Williams’ Books

New author Ryhaan Shah lives in Guyana and is President of the Guyana Indian Heritage Association. If you visit her website and scroll through the postings you come away with the impression her world-view is comprised of hostile and irreconcilable dualities. In a country where six ethnic groups jostle each other in search of reliable services, narcoactive-free habitats and a national identity, Shah sees two overlapping cultural “worlds”, which emerged after colonial and postcolonial practices left one gaping crack in the nation’s crust.
 
In world #1 you’ll encounter disturbing behaviors and attitudes. A short list of these would include street obscenities & vulgarities, “bad manners and indiscipline”; people who on festive occasions “jump & wine”, people who at cultural events “wine down and mash up the place”; who indulge in “drunkenness and sexual gyrations”, wear “skimpy clothes” and get on bad to chutney & kaiso music.

In the world #2 – the one Shah wants exclusively for vulnerable Guyanese Indians – you’ll find certain uplifting virtues and behaviours. A short list would include dignity, sobriety, healthy lifestyles (inspired by anxiety about HIV/AIDS), “dignified cultural presentations”, behaviours that exemplify “modesty & self-respect”; the practice of yoga, Indian games like the kabbadi which teach the importance of “strength, discipline, team sport and gamesmanship”; and wholesome habits based on “reason, intelligence and sober reflection.”  

If instead of “world” you substituted the word “environment” many worried Guyanese parents of all races would hasten to sign up their children for tutoring in the values of #2.  Or substitute the word “planet” and watch how many people get on line, paying whatever it costs for a fantasy trip to that cultural space.

A few diehard nationalists always seeking accommodation might wonder if it is at all possible to have the best of both “worlds”. Could one not practice yoga while wearing “skimpy clothes”? And what is so appalling about “sexual gyrations” during Mashramani? about people chipping in a band one day of the year, ow beti, just one day?

But this after all is post-Independent, bandit-happy Guyana. Old habits of self-restraint have given way to predatory impulses, a gun-toting disregard for law and civic order. That six-pronged ethnic search for a national identity might seem futile these days, stretching on and on, past one electoral standoff after another, with no end in sight.

More contentiously to the point, Shah identifies the behaviours of world #1 with black creoles, and a plot to recolonise unwilling Indians. This recolonisation of Indians and their culture has taken on ominous political significance. In Shah’s view, the present (and past) Government in Guyana has turned a blind eye to and might even be encouraging creole assimilation of Indians.

Beneath Shah’s entrenched fears – or, put it this way, inside Shah’s cult of purity – one senses very real concerns for our nation: how to alter self-destructive habits & self-segregating tendencies; how to harness the waste of resources, the crime spray of energies, so that the country gets down to the task of creating wealth, building new confidence and a durable infrastructure (and still allow for manic occasions to mash and celebrate achievement, honour the achievers.)

When Shah the cultural activist turns cultural novelist (and finds encouragement from a sympathetic publisher) what results is this, her first novel, A Silent Life (2005). It attempts to address some of these concerns. Her central character joins company with Forbes Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, Walter Rodney, and more current scholar-activists who’ve returned over the years with ideas and ideology (and the charismatic language of deliverance) for our nation.

A Silent Life is about a girl, Aleya (“the gifted one”), born into in a fairly cohesive but struggling Muslim household in West Demerara. Through oral accounts she learns that her grandparents were advocates for change in the colonial days. Her grandfather talked to the workers about “dialectical materialism” but his words often sailed over their heads. It is her grandmother who proves more potent. Seizing the moment one day she whips the crowd into such a frenzy, her action upstages her husband and crushes his manhood. He hangs himself. She is reduced to regret and silence.

Aleya grows up in the lap of her grandmother. There is a symbiotic connection at an early stage of her development. Nani’s presence in the household, rocking, humming and smiling enigmatically is Aleya’s link to the past. “Your grandmother was one for reading and talking all day and all night…She used to write letters, and packages of books and leaflets used to come with strange stamps from foreign places.” (p.23) Stories about hard life on the sugar plantations and rice fields fill her childhood imagination and impress on her the importance of tribal memory.

The next stage in Aleya’s personal growth begins when she wins a scholarship to study Economics at the University of London, England. There is family pride and extended-family excitement at the news. Great aunts and uncles descend and offer advice & concern about her life abroad, the prospects for a future husband. For her sendoff a Koranic function is arranged. The household overflows with relatives and neighbours, music and prayers, and page after page of heart-tugging prose.

Despite or above all this, Aleya holds fast to the notion that this is her chance to prepare herself for a mission to “save the world”. There are paragraphs of tender moments shared with her grandmother in which their bond of radical thinking and resolve is forever sealed.

So the scholarship girl goes off to London, to new friends and cold weather and student loneliness. Unlike Sam Selvon’s lonely Londoners, catching arse and not disposed to grandiose musing, Aleya’s student loneliness gives her all the time in the world to cultivate her life’s mission. To this end she is abetted by university mentors.

There is a Professor Roberts, “sucking on the sweet tobacco of his pipe”, who reminds her: “You’ll need to take your studies further, a masters and then a doctorate, and you need to have some practical experience…Your ideas will require the wholesale re-education of people” (p. 78-79). For the practical experience he suggests she joins up with World Aid, a young organization that helps poor communities all over the world. “You could intern with them, then who knows, maybe a job?”

Letters arrive from Guyana with alarming news of brutalities inflicted on defenceless Indians. And Burnham only there living in style in “a big Monkey House”, banning split-peas and Christmas apples and making life miserable for everybody. And Cheddi Jagan only there complaining and complaining. But a new black leader named Walter Rodney is hitting back at “the Kabaka”.

In moments of swollen anxiety, the narrative “I” reaches down self-consciously into swirls of memory (as in “I see my grandparents dancing”, or “I hear my father sigh”). Aleya drags up images of her indentured grandparents standing on the stern of the ship as it moves away from the land of her ancestors; she sees them again labouring on the sugar plantation at Leonora. The “blood” of defiance, she believes, runs through her family history.

Just when it seems Aleya is emotionally ready and university-primed to come home, her narrative takes a detour. This nice Guyanese man, a student prince of a fellow, comes into her life. They take trips to Stonehenge, Stratford-on-Avon and Brighton Beach. They stay in hotels in Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam. In no time at all they get married and Aleya bears two handsome boys, Arek and Omar. The novel dwells on Aleya’s joy in raising her family. As for the mission to save the world (whose “world”, what “mission” is never made clear) Shah’s quivering prose puts it on hold and asks us to stay tuned.

Meanwhile, news from Guyana keeps flooding in. Her father writes of the situation worsening for Indians, but now Aleya is alert to “the corrosive racism” in his words. She is a very busy woman, traveling around the globe with the World Aid organization, meeting with government officials in Delhi and Kenya, attending conferences; too preoccupied to take on any-and-everybody’s problems. Too besides, she has problems of her own: she experiences what seems like an alien-in-England nervous breakdown; plus this husband of hers is turning out to be a strangely distant, unaccomplished man.

When eventually Aleya comes home she discovers very little has changed. Her parents and her Nani are happy to see her; but the Burnham regime is still in power (though the leader has passed on). Intolerance of dissent and petty tyrannies maintain the order of the day. She returns with impeccable job credentials and finds employment at the Ministry of Finance, but has her dream of revolution come unglued? will the cause she’d hoped to steel her life for survive the distractions of those glamorous years overseas? will her Nani’s self-imposed silence be redeemed?

What happens at the very end of Aleya’s journey is neither here not there. Readers should not be too quick to assume that as first novels go the narrative of Aleya is really the story of author Ryhaan Shah (though the novel is awash in ill-treated souls, stoic suffering and latent fears of recolonisation.)

What a situation!  Educated men and women returning home from university with (what Dehuti looking out from Mohun Biswas’ world would describe as) “modern ambitions”; disgruntled Guyanese setting out on their own desperate journeys (and encountering humiliation at Caricom airports.) As Hat back in Miguel Street would say: You see the sort of place Guyana coming to now?

One can only hope this sentimental novel about personal & political convulsions in and out of Guyana might encourage unhappy readers to stop and think. Not turn inward behind window grilles of ethnic culture; or fly away home on a prayer and a song.

 
Book Reviewed: A Silent Life: Ryhaan Shah: Peepal Tree Press, England                                             (2005), 186 pgs.W.W

[N.D.Williams][Caribbean Fiction][Guyana]                                                            

Marina Budhos, daughter of a Guyanese Indian and a New York Jewish woman, was born and raised in Queens, NY. Her first novel, House of Waiting (1995), examined what happens when two characters from different cultures meet, marry then find their union threatened by problems unforeseen, hidden or outside their control. The central characters in the novel are a Guianese Indian and a New York Jewish woman.

Publishers still tumble head over heels for a book like this, and there’s no shortage of academics ready to extrapolate on the human dilemma of being caught in the middle, as it were. For there’s the perception that a mixed-race, or a mixed-cultured, person may have more important and interesting things to say about ‘what it feels like’ to be neither/nor in situations of cultural hybridity. Stranded between cultures, as it were. Taking it both sides.

The book is set in 1950s New York, though you’d have to look hard to find any period details. Late in the novel the action shifts to 1950s Georgetown and this time you’d have to look even harder. The author writes: “Georgetown resembled a great heap of freshly cleaned laundry – its corrugated tin roofs glinting white in sunlight, clapboard buildings with their painted trellises and verandas. In between sprouted bougainvillea and the bruised red of flamboyant trees, the Caribbean a calm blue stone beyond” (p. 222). When she arrives there the narrator parks a car “in a slumbering, residential street”, and later observes “the slow-hipped saunter of women balancing baskets on their heads.”  

 The central characters are introduced as products of highbrow culture, you could say. Sarah, the Jewish woman, used to read movie magazines; she fell in love once with Clark Gable; at times she would practice swooning like Vivien Leigh. More to the point, as she tells us, “I thought of myself as a cross between Jane Austen and a sultry Joan Crawford.” She is college educated and well-read in French Philosophy and the Enlightenment.

As for the 1950s Guianese she is attracted to, Roland Singh, he sweeps her off her feet when he declares: “I remember the first time I read Balzac I understand I was poor…And then I read everything I get my hands on. I read Tolstoy and Marx and the Cambridge History of the West Indies. I read until my eyes go bad under the kerosene lamp” (p. 33) His laughter is a bit loud and his behaviour in restaurants less than refined, but their attraction is the stuff of a Gone with the Wind romance. Sarah says: “Everything seemed possible, my life now connected to this man with peppery-smelling skin and the sound and smells of a place I could hardly fathom.” (p.48)

There is, of course, sexual passion. Making love to a man with “nut-brown thighs” and “peppery-smelling skin” is perhaps an experience beyond the wildest imagination of any NY Jewish woman then and now. Budhos writes as if for the sensibilities of readers back in the 1950s, as if fearful a Committee of un-American Activities might scrutinize every sentence on the page for morally offensive descriptions. So, if you can imagine it, this happens: “Roland thrust deep inside. A flash of heat stung my legs. We were moving, as if hugging something hot and painful between us. A moment later we let out a shout, and collapsed with a long shudder.” (p. 36)

Eventually, if at the time contentiously, they get married, but the glue to the marriage is to be found in the lives of another couple from different cultures (Guyanese Indian) Cheddi Jagan and (Jewish) Janet Jagan. It is, don’t forget, the 1950s and Roland Singh is smitten by the anti-Empire ideas and ardor of the Jagans in Guiana. He tells his Jewish wife of his plans to return home and join the young warriors’ march to constitutional reform and electoral triumph.

Sarah is swept up in his revolutionary fervor: “I imagined myself trundling down the roads in his country, dressed in a safari dress, hair tied in a dramatic white scarf, all the village people smiling with gratitude at Roland and me. I wanted to be as good, as pure with purpose as Janet Jagan.” (p.55)

At this point one expects the author to trundle her characters down to Georgetown, let her readers follow the twin-cultured couple as they shadow the real life exploits of Cheddi and Janet Jagan. Budhos isn’t quite up for that challenge. Perhaps the author felt she’d be on shaky ground, unsure what her characters would do once they set foot in 1950s Guiana (“Assistance for some of the historical background,” Budhos tells us in her Acknowledgments, “was provided by The West On Trial, by Cheddi Jagan”).

So Roland Singh goes home alone. Sarah his wife stays behind (she confesses she lacked Janet Jagan’s “faith”) and the novel stays with her, attends to her loneliness and alienation (she is on non-speaking terms with her parents), and a kind of gypsy-bohemian existence she starts with Roland’s friends from Trinidad and Guiana. As she waits for news from him she joins them in the rehabilitation of an old house they’ve rented. Yes, the House of Waiting.

This mid-section of the novel sags with the tedium of the narrator’s waiting and the author’s uneven writing. (A sentence like “We drove and drove, out of the city, past Westchester, the car gobbling roads like a hungry insect.” should never have been permitted the light of day.) Budhos isn’t too confident depicting Roland’s Trini friends and Trini (circa 1950) conversation.

On several pages Sarah pines and sobs for her Roland. He sends her newspaper clippings and letters updating the political developments – his union activism, the Progressive Party’s triumph at the polls, its dastardly betrayal at the hands of Anglo-American imperialists. (He writes, too, of “his long hours on the road, the color and smell of the mango trees.”) She examines again her motives and her cut-loose family ties.

Wondering where to go next with the plot, the lonely Jewish wife helps out the NY author by announcing she might be pregnant. After anxious calculations with the calendar she confirms that, yes, she is with (Roland’s) child. And now despite rumors of British warships steaming toward the colony Sarah’s quickened heart tells her she must travel to Guiana and join her husband.

How she gets to Georgetown – after apparently agreeing to work with the British Consulate in planting evidence at Freedom House that would indict the Jagans as dangerous communists – is one of the absurd twists at the end of the novel which the author has no time to explain. The last 17 pages of feverish prose record what rapidly develops.

Sarah discovers disturbing truths about Roland that would break any foreign bride’s heart. Not our Sarah’s heart. She realizes that, frankly, she does give a damn about her Roland. And as street tensions build, as the novel now on the verge of melodrama races toward closure, she must find a way to get her husband out of his broken country, salvage what’s left of his romantic ideals, take him back to New York.

Since publishing the book the author has travelled to Guyana (flew to Kaieteur, and made an important trip to her father’s village in the Corentyne). Described in the diaspora Press as an Indo-Guyanese writer, Budhos is the author of a second novel, The Professor of Light, about ‘the troubled relationship’ between a Guyanese Indian and his American daughter.

Deferential praise for House of Waiting based on its exotic characters and its multicultural settings has probably blossomed and might even bloom in New York city. Empathy with the dilemma of the Jewish-wife character who demonstrates an unshakable loyalty to her Guianese man might win over old Party Comrade readers who’ll no doubt brush aside the novel’s technical flaws.

Meanwhile students of literature and human complexity might wonder how seriously to take House of Waiting. They might glimpse in this novel the possibilities of a really fine book about love & family bonds, political ambition & foreign intrigue. They might even forgive the author’s 1^st novel peccadilloes, wishing her talent had been more self-assured, her knowledge of Guiana’s people and places more grounded in experience and observation. As it reads now House of Waiting is hilarious.

                                                                                                                         -W.W.

 Book Reviewed: House of Waiting:  Marina Tamar Budhos, Global City Press, New York (1995) 245 pps.

[N.D.Williams][Caribbean Fiction][Julie Mango]