Mixed Race, Troubled Hearts: Mittelholzer’s “Sylvia”
Near the end of Part I of Edgar Mittelholzer's Sylvia (1953), the central character, Sylvia Russell, barely 14-years old, still a student at Bishops High School, experiences a moment of blinding self-discovery. She is standing naked in a hotel room in New Amsterdam, looking at herself in the mirror as if newly born. She is worried about letters she has found in her father's jacket, letters from his mistress; and snapshots of the woman posing naked on the Seawall; confirming what people had been whispering, that her father was "a rake".
Sylvia is a mixed-race girl. She has begun to wonder what life holds in store for her in Guiana of the 1930s. She idolizes her white father. Conversations with him have always informed her developing sense of being. And at that moment, curious about her pubescent sexuality, his words give her "a sense of consolidation".
"Ignore the vapourings of people. People suffer from fear. People are ineffectual escapists. People strive always to side-step reality, because reality baffles them, or is more often than not ugly or terrifying. Reality generally carries with it the threat of death - or discomfort. So people try to run away from reality into the pretty bubble-lands of religion. Only you are real. Only you have significance." (p. 108)
It might seem a bit of a stretch, allowing such thoughts to surface through the mind of a 14-year-old, but in this stroke of startling illumination Mittelholzer shares something in common with the American writer Ayn Rand who through conversations between characters would insert the philosophical principles that underpinned their decisions and behavior. (Think of Roark's arguments in the Fountainhead, 1943.)
Wilson Harris takes this literary device to upper-sphere levels of often impenetrable discourse, his characters becoming mouthpieces for counterpointing ‘visions' and interlinked identities across rivers and continents. But Mittelholzer - always the grounded realist, the least abstract of Guyanese writers - would rivet the sensibilities of his characters in events, in the secular reverberations of the individual's time & chosen place.
This is British Guiana in the 1930s. Georgetown like some multi-tentacled beast is slowly emerging from the mudflats and swamps of plantation politics. A mishmash of estranged souls struggles to establish a society, setting up boundaries defined clearly by job, profession, race, residence, religion, money, property, skin complexion, hair texture, other pedigrees of separation. Within this turmoil of colonial differentiation, Mittelholzer reminds us, men and women must find mates, sort out the baggage of love, consider marriage.
At age 14 mixed-race Sylvia seems less concerned about the large umbrella issue of ethnic identity. Uppermost in her mind are familiar adolescent anxieties: with whom could she fall in love? what was it like to have sex?
And whom would she eventually marry? The Portuguese boy she really likes (he goes to St Stanislaus College, but he's not from "the coloured middle-class", the group her father considers right for her)? Or Jerry, the young man with "good hair" she meets one day, his handshake "powerful and masculine", but his manner and accent a little on the crude side?
The conflict between desire and restricted choices, her terrifying reality, could resonate just as powerfully with 14-year olds of mixed or unmixed blood at B.H.S. today - girls more secure, one hears, in their ethnic identity; bombarded by the "vaporings" of newspaper sophists, but facing the same bewildering pattern of denied possibilities and stifled desires. And daughters unlikely to hold intellectual conversations with their worried, race-conscious fathers.
Sylvia was published in 1953, years after Ayn Rand's most popular fiction (The Fountainhead), but their concerns would seem to be similar: the individual's struggle for dignity & independent thought, the refusal to sacrifice oneself (in the colonial context, the emancipated self) to fashionable ideals, the importance of scepticism & reason when faced with populist rhetoric or (in the global context) fundamentalist hatreds.
Sylvia is often referred to as a novel about race & tropical sex ("She violated the taboos") and one can see why. Sylvia's father came from England to build a bridge over a river in the Interior. He stayed on and meets Sylvia's mother "dark of skin and dark of eyes and hair", and part Amerindian. When Sylvia was conceived out of wedlock - with features "European, though her cheekbones were high [like her mother's]" - he could have walked away or returned home. Instead he first makes a promise to support the child, then he decides to marry her mother.
For this breakaway act of autonomy he loses English friends & privilege but finds a tenuous place and purpose in the colony. Mittelholzer's roots his main character's dilemma in her father's individualist temperament. He's not a (BG) bhagee-loving family man. He soon grows weary of his wife's shallow mindedness and resumes his skirt-chasing ways (at "Scandal Point" near the Seawall with the naked girl in the photo); but to Sylvia he offers his philosophies of free will & survival in a constricted colonial world.
At the end of Part I as we prepare to follow Sylvia's emotional and physical growth Mittelholzer sets the reader up firmly on a plateau of anticipations. We wonder: will she stay faithful to the values & truths she has discovered at age 14?
Conventional thinking in 1930s Georgetown would have doomed her chances. Sylvia had to "grow up" and face colonial reality. The social forces at large would eventually overwhelm her. She would fall victim to the "fear" so many people discover and try to sidestep. Her inbred ambivalence could take her down paths to illusions of "arrival" until, desperate to be loved & protected, she suffers the fate of the "tragic mulatto".
But the novel takes a strange lurch into colonial melodrama. Before experiencing her own growth pains Sylvia bears witness to the struggles of older women. She brings their experiences back to her father for explanation. He offers psychological constructs, "sado-masochism" for what Naomi, Sylvia's mentor, is going through with her man. And the "Oedipus complex" for the strange attachment Sylvia has to her dad.
Human relations at that time, as reflected in the novel, seem sorely in need of "development". Men see women and turn into post-plantation predators. Sex is engaged without fairness or affection. (Typical of male cruelty is when Naomi's husband locks her out the house, leaving her to spend the night naked on the back steps in drizzling rain.) "All women are masochists," Sylvia's father tells her, giving little thought to his own sadisms. In the scramble for status in Georgetown, attitudes are as half-formed as the society the colonials inhabit.
In a sense Sylvia's father performs the role Mittelholzer might have invented for himself, the writer (privileged with education) as father of an unruly, pubescent nation. Foresightfully offering truths to live by, and levels of introspection on which to build a human knowledge base that helps define the national character.
The turning point of the novel comes when Sylvia's father dies. His badly mutilated body (and that of his ‘outside' woman) is found in a car. Someone resentful of his "rakish" ways must have fixed him good with a cutlass, no one seemed sure. His departure unhinges Sylvia. Bereft of his ability to frame her life choices, to instill guiding precepts in her still developing mind ("Live in your own world and do as you feel you ought to.") Sylvia's world spins this way and that into moodiness, a deepening vulnerability and the moment she "sinks away sweetly".
That Mittelholzer takes out the European father figure in his novel is significant. Sylvia's degeneration is in some way linked that other person left out of the family equation: her shabbily treated mother, the indigenous source of the narrative, despised by Sylvia - "her dark Negro-Indian face stupid and weak" - seduced with promises, plundered then ignored by her expatriate husband.
Mittelholzer's novels are praised routinely these days by scholars for the pioneering depiction of colonial Guyana. His name has been taken over by groups not fully acquainted with his body of work. Sylvia is out of print but its insights would seem highly relevant today when you consider the still-evolving mess that grips our nation. Reissued and in the hands of Georgetown's young people it could energize the challenge to find a new readership for our literature, an enduring place for that literature in our culture.
In some ways it's a schmaltzy soap opera of a novel, with a serialised structure and patches of ‘True Romance' writing. And some surprisingly erudite dialogue as when one character in an attempt to make himself "interesting" to Sylvia (now a nubile 18yrs) opines, "Speaking in this year 1941, there's only one poet of any substance in this colony - perhaps in the whole Caribbean area - A.J. Seymour." But Sylvia succeeds in chronicling the disarray of men and women scattered along the coast in the 1930s and grappling with large, new social questions: how do we break old habits of mistrust & self-distancing? at what points of shared interests do we merge and function as a nation?
The novel has its fair share of Guianese opinionists who on several pages argue the merits of capitalism and communism as if to raise colonial consciousness. And events overseas filter through (Mussolini in Ethiopia, Hitler annexing Poland) giving the colonials a vicarious sense of being connected to the world. But the streets and landscape are eruptive with people and their entangled anxieties about the future, and Mittelholzer spreads out like a map his main concerns: the native forces giving birth to our nation - absconding fathers, our willful daughters, those tumescent fields plowed over and over, women of hope and renewal.
Book Reviewed: Sylvia: Edgar Mittelholzer: Dell Publishing Company Inc. New York, 1953, 383 pgs (w.w)
