N.D.Williams' Books

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

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

By Wyck Williams

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

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

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

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

Run Toward The Falling Trees

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

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

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