When Cheddi met Janet?
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 theres no shortage of academics ready to extrapolate on the human dilemma of being caught in the middle, as it were. For theres 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 youd have to look hard to find any period details. Late in the novel the action shifts to 1950s Georgetown and this time youd 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, dont 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 isnt quite up for that challenge. Perhaps the author felt shed 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 Jagans 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 Rolands friends from Trinidad and Guiana. As she waits for news from him she joins them in the rehabilitation of an old house theyve rented. Yes, the House of Waiting.
This mid-section of the novel sags with the tedium of the narrators waiting and the authors 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 isnt too confident depicting Rolands 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 Partys 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 (Rolands) child. And now despite rumors of British warships steaming toward the colony Sarahs 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 brides heart. Not our Sarahs 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 whats 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 fathers 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 wholl no doubt brush aside the novels 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 authors 1st novel peccadilloes, wishing her talent had been more self-assured, her knowledge of Guianas 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]
