Colonial Child Narrators
Consider, for instance, Trumper, 16, the narrator in George Lamming's seminal In the Castle of My Skin (1953) who kick-starts the novel this way: "It was my ninth celebration of the gift of life, my ninth celebration of the consistent lack of an occasion for celebration. From a window where the spray had given the sill a little wet life I watched the water ride through the lanes and alleys that multiplied the barracks that neighboured our house." For 280+ pages after those rumbling opening lines Trumper must sustain the rolling thunder we often hear in Lamming's refined English prose.
The uninitiated reader was reminded by academics that Trumper's voice was not really a child's voice. Literary convention allowed authors the freedom to use the child's perspective to make statements about the world around him. The child's view was clear and unbiased as it recorded adult behavior in colonial society and helped us examined problems of race, class, identity and labour relations.
The 12 yr old boy narrator in Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando (1965) was asked to grow up fast and observe himself growing up. On the surface the novel explores what happens when the boy is sent by his mother to live for the first time in a big town. The novel was written from memory and like Lamming's work was seized on by English depts. and hailed as a significant achievement.
Students of literature were advised that the phrase "the experiencing consciousness" might give focus their reading, weight to their writing. Far from being books simply about ‘growing up' or ‘the loss of innocence' these important novels spoke to us about "the fractured consciousness" in society (in the case of In the Castle of My Skin) and "the open state of consciousness" (in The Year in San Fernando.)
The boy in V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street (1959) did pretty much the same thing though to a less intellectually delighted reception in the region. He described what he saw and understood about the world around him. He made us laugh at the way we lived, and perhaps laughter, or his creator's singular way of seeing the world, wasn't the correct response to colonial comic-book behaviour.
A quieter reception apparently greeted Peter Kempadoo's Guiana Boy (1960). That boy got hardly any notice at all the first time the book was published. The novel has been reissued by Peepal Tree Press and has been dubbed (somewhat arbitrarily) ‘a Caribbean Classic'.
Guyana Boy (2002) is not a literary novel. It takes us back to the good old days though with little wistful postcolonial regret that those days are gone. Kempadoo, it seems, had all these wonderful memories of family & friends growing up on a sugar estate, and he decided to put them down in novel form.
In a newspaper article he reportedly describes himself as a self-made, self-taught man, "an accidental writer". Guyana Boy has the feel of a book unhurriedly written by a not too ambitious author who decided to follow the literary fashion of the times. It strolls along with a wise old man's gait and a boyish excitement at reliving memories of a place the author once knew fondly as home.
Eschewing stylistic trimmings the narrative is arranged in neat chapters with homefelt titles ("My Uncle Tomby", "Saturday Night", "Rice Cutting", "Pa's Death") which follow one after the other in train carriage sequence, though each sequence fades as quickly as you engage the immediacy of the next.
Scholarly minds might have been put off by the lack of empire-ending gravity in the prose; and the readership for this novel will probably be restricted to people of Kempadoo's (more literate) generation, so faithful is the author to colonial detail. Today's young readers would be perplexed by references to, for instance: lime swank, the school Royal Reader, "a squingy little boy hanging about the girls' latrine waiting for his sister", boys who shouted "Surrender" when play fighting, "lush paragrass and fresh donkey dung", vaudeville shows at the Tajmahal; and brilliantine.
Kempadoo doesn't ask his narrator to adopt a special voice for narration. The boy (Lilboy) is alert and intelligent, but he seems rarely troubled by events unfolding around him. Even the death of his father causes few ripples of sadness in his life. There is vivid description of the wake, the burial ceremony, his family distress. But the chapter ends: "I felt like crying real bad but remembered my Pa and what he had said to me; and didn't." And the following chapter begins: "The girl came up the punt-trench bridge from the other and she passed me, carrying a bucket on her head, and I knew she was Mary-Ann." Which is the start of an account of Lilboy's sexual awakening.
For the most part the boy lives sealed off from estate and world unpleasantness. There is no lack of warmth in his family circle. Rarely, however, does he experience a pivotal moment of self-discovery, some jolting misstep that would point him to eventual maturity. At the end he leaves the pastoral scruffiness of Berbice for Georgetown, the capital, where presumably he will experience the first real adventure of his life.
Still, the book is vibrant with descriptions of village good neighbourliness and colourful characters. (Sugar estate life in those days would have been intolerably dull, you imagine, without colourful characters.) On the page the village folk talk & live as intensely as they must have for years in the author's head: the fearsome Head teacher Pollard, Lilboy's sly lascivious uncle, characters like Big Willie, Jiggertoe, Alim (in Mohammedan pyjama-clothes), Pussyfoot and Bulbous Bessie (and she two-ton bubby).
With a clarity of prose that brings to mind the novels of Edgar Mittelholzer the author pays close attention to their eccentricities; and the creole dialogue, because it's not too rich in village profanity, retains a freshness of time & place.
You wish, though, there was more tension in the writing, more wrinkles along the narrative thread, to deepen our involvement with those vanished lives. There's a scene at the sugar estate, for instance, where Lilboy and his mother are attending a party thrown by the sugar estate manager. He wanders off with the daughter of the estate manager and they find themselves near a pond of fish:
"This is my pond and those are my fish, "the girl said. "Want to see me call them up?"
She took some pieces of bread from her pockets, gave me one, and we started to break them into small bits and throw them in a clearing in the pond in front of us.
"See how the fish would come and eat from me," she said. She called, "Fish, fish, fish."
Fish, fishes, I wondered. Why she doesn't say fishes like Mr. Cort told us at my grammar lesson in school? Singular fish, plural fishes.
There was movement in the water and a few hassars and houris and congo-fish came to the surface and ate pieces of bread. The girl held two hands together and stood up and was excited.
"See my fish, my own fish," she said.
"I have never seen such big hassars, in all my born days, Miss Elizabeth," I managed to say.
Scenes like that - resonant with issues of property, ownership and colonial assumptions - are far & few. The novel is content to chip along, chapter after chapter, at its own ‘accidental' memory-inspired pace; striking no anticolonial notes along the way.
On a simple storytelling level Guyana Boy reminds us that boys will be boys, in our literature and in colonial times. There is little trace of ethnic pleading, though for many readers now greying in the diaspora (songs of unshared memory constantly playing in their heads) this novel will be viewed as especially comforting.
These days considering our high consciousness of race & politics, of frightening big guns and fire breathing gunmen in our coastal villages and new thoroughfares that bypass the old public roads, Guyana Boy with its placid, pleasant surfaces might encourage among young readers a refusal to believe that - "fractured" though the psyche might have been in Trumper's Barbados - colonial life had its moments and rewards for boys on the Courantyne.
Book Reviewed: GUYANA BOY: Peter Lauchmonen Kempadoo: 168 pgs. Peepal Tree Press, England, 2002 (w.w)
