N.D.Williams' Books

There's much memory-inspired talk and hazy atmosphere. In a way it resembles the purple-haze inner world atmosphere of the 60s. Readers of the 90s or the newborn 00s, hoping for a fresh ambience - expecting, say, servings of sex and the cell phone intensity that reflect their time now on the world stage - will probably turn away from this book and go reading elsewhere.

Shinebourne is a writer who fled 'Burnham's Guyana' and took up residence in England, much the way you imagine émigré writers once fled Pinochet's Chile or Castro's Cuba and took up residence anywhere. The scale of 'oppression' and 'flight', you might argue, is not exactly the same but it sounds significant when you're told on the book's jacket that a character, Sylvia Rivers, "is one of the many thousands who fled the political repression, corruption and social collapse of Guyana in the 70s and 80s" (The stories of the many thousands might make for more sensational revelations; Shinebourne's writing talent on the other hand wants to offer something more refined, more layered with meaning.)

Listening, for instance, to her story as told through Sylvia Rivers in Hopscotch, you're touched by how much she misses Guyana; and how England so cold; how stimulating her friendships were in Georgetown; and how painful it was to be driven away by Burnham from the land of her birth. And that's about it. Nostalgia, regret and private anguish artfully served in the coffee shop of the character's head.

You get the impression, too, that once they relocate to England some characters seem to be having the time of their lives never mind the anguish. London and New York is an account of trips made to these cities. Wherever the author goes a longing for happier pre-Burnham times gnaws in her stomach; she turns then to food. The Canton in London's Soho "reminds me of my grandmother's cooking in old British Guiana". She finds a restaurant in London (after twenty-five years) that reminds her of her mother's cooking menu which "included fufu, metagee, peas and rice, plantains, yams, cassavas, eddoes, tanya, breadfruit, pepperpot made with fermented casareep". In New York's Chinatown she goes shopping for "red bean cake" the way her mother made it. (She finds it eventually in a Guyanese restaurant in Brooklyn.) If you think there must be a subtext of large scholarly issues somewhere beneath all this traveling and food-searching - from someone who fled Burnham's Guyana - then place an order for this book without delay.

Readers nurtured on Naipaul's short stories with their strong memorable characters, and Sam Selvon's funny-sad evocations of the arse-catching time he fled the (pre-Burnham) Caribbean might feel somehow let down by this collection. Perhaps it's unfair these days to ask short fiction to offer a story, give us fugitive souls still battling rootlessness, some humor maybe, unignorable sexual desire; a sense of place; some exposure of the nest of mixed motives for leaving home; the new forces shaping our daily lives. All this might be too much to ask of Shinebourne's stories. She's simply not the extrovert kind of writer.

What you get are itsy-bitsy juxtaposed scenes - a collage of moods, she would say - fragments of conversation and letters, some locally flavoured descriptiveness, all assembled under titles (Harold, Jacob, Chuni, Vera)that are as spare as the stories themselves. There are multiple space breaks, like silences during coffee conversation, during which you're supposed to reflect on what you just sipped. Sometimes the story stops jus' so and you wonder: what was that all about?

For the multicultural reader there's a report, in The Berbice Marriage Match, on an arranged marriage among Chinese-Guyanese (not the many thousand who fled, just this one family). For the political reader, Harold is a very short account of a Cheddi Jagan victory motorcade through the Courentyne. It's described with newspaper straightforwardness: "His car began to drown in the rising tide of bodies. They raised their fists, shook hands, blew kisses, waved hats and handkerchiefs…In their desperation to get closer, some jumped off the crowded bridge into the canal and swam to the other side." The Harold main character in a hiccup of irony discovers his personal life is not as powerful and progressive as the political party he supports. The story is over almost as soon as it starts and leaves you wondering again: is this all there is?

Shinebourne is anything but a prose maximalist. Bodiless paragraphs, string bean sentences are served tastefully, if somewhat dryly, on her pages. Don't expect a steaming plate of national character insights. There is much to sip and complain about; plenty pages of homesick food preparation, mind you, but little of substance for the general reader to stuff and digest. At times tired sentences sulk and refuse to work anymore for the author: "Did I expect the ghosts would rise like Lazarus from the dead? Round and round the table goes the conversation. Guyana was now the second poorest country in the world after Haiti and malaria returned; it was no longer the 'bread basket' of the Caribbean; no longer had the highest literacy rate in the region; our political culture was in ruins; we could not return home."

Maybe the short story is not the appropriate form for capturing anguished flight from Burnham's Guyana. Poetry with post-Martin Carter meditations, his crisp sour lines of disillusionment could possibly fill the breach. One suspects the rumshop is still the best place to listen to what is on people's minds and hearts after the flight from political repression in Guyana. A thousand backtrack stories, full of adventure, surprise and horror, delivered with the raconteur skills of a Marc Matthews or Ken Corsbie would probably stir the souls of many thousands of angst-ridden Guyanese.