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)

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.

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

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.)

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.