N.D.Williams’ Books

Arriving at Norman Manley International in the late 60s, en route to UWI and the sunset red hills and the Julie mango season, there was for many Guyanese the anticipation of hearing and dancing to Jamaican rock steady. Students returning home had talked about its irresistible rhythms. When you heard Desmond Dekker you marveled at his sound – that plaintive falsetto sound, those faithful backing vocals, the searing guitar work in “007”.

Slowly you came to understand that “Rude bwoy” behaviour had something (and nothing) to do with an absence of good manners; that the street life of darkskinned Jamaican youth was harsh (“Rude bwoy get offa circuit charge”) and frequently enraged by vicious red-stripe baton licks.

But that falsetto sound! You hear it sliding and gliding in “Keep a Cool Head”, “Mother Long Tongue”, “A It Mek”. Later it would be dismissed as pleasantly “chirpy” by the conscious Marley rebels who were turning to the Africa-calling chants of Burning Spear, and that big embosoming Nyabinghi drum.

Round about that time the American soul singer Al Green was winning hearts with his falsetto. His was a distinctive, sexy-American sound oozing a sweetman’s glamour and game.  “Let’s Stay Together” and “I’m so Tired of being Alone” sent you onto the dance floor for an interlude of slow sway & grind. Came the 70s;  Marley’s “One-love” jams were still filaments of song floating in his head; roots reggae, moving away from the practice of Jamaicanizing American/UK hits, had begun to take root, and dancing feet no longer waited for the Al Green romantic-love falsetto.

Desmond Dekker’s “rude bwoy” falsetto, well-tempered in his island creole, was edged with societal worries.  His was poor-folk dance music, rooted in his shanty
Jamaica; closer in mood to the Portland Maytals than Trench Town Marley. The straightforward honesty of his delivery eventually gained him a foothold in the market. Suddenly his music was exportable. Immigrant souls grooved in basements to his beats and mod London youth found they could “relate to” the anger and style of his island culture.

Marley would later eclipse him with his world-trodding “sufferer” sound, but it would have been hard for Dekker to alter his timbre, to ask his horns and backing vocals to riff with the new times (even though his “007” is as powerful a hymn to Kingston inequalities as Marley’s “Burnin’ and Lootin’”.)

In radio archives somewhere there’s a BBC interview in which a curious BBC voice was asking Dekker if his “Israelites” had anything to do with the political problems of Israel at the time. In 1968 “Intensified [Music like Dirt]” won the Festival Song competition, but the decision did not make everyone happy. Many found the lyrics crappy (“Girls can’t hide from intensified guys.”) and the music barely interesting.

Tributes and reports of Dekker’s passing have surfaced in news media around the world. This from The London Times (5/26) adds to the romance and the legend of the man: “Born Desmond Adolphus Dacres in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1941, he was orphaned as a child and sent to grow up in the rural surroundings of Seaforth in the parish of St Thomas. By the mid-teens he was back in the Jamaican capital where he worked as a welder.”  (The name change from Dacres to Dekker!  Years before Ethiopia & the Ras inspired a revolution in colours, hats and hair culture!)

His high-pitched delivery would probably be considered too batty-soft by today’s dancehall standards. His bass lines don’t pound, his all-male backing vocals aren’t hard enough to blast car CD competition off the road. Besides, his songs came out of a personal struggle with the unscrupulous. Still, you imagine today’s dancehall Beenie men could have taught him a thing or two about management and marketing, about riddims tougher-than-tough, and postures more menacing than Jimmy Cliff’s.

“I just write what I see and hear happen,” he once said, reflecting that innocence of the pioneer 60s when the exploited reggae artist, closer in spirit to the exploited masses, didn’t yet understand the power of today’s cordless stage performer who prances & screams at sweating crowds.

 He moved away from his island, took up permanent residence in England, and seemed always ready for work.  Bankrupt but unbowed, they say. Hoping perhaps the reggae beat would rise again to give his career one last soaring revival. His island falsetto all but lost in today’s global wailing. Then one morning – bam! – heart attack. What a way a hard life ends! (W.W.)  

Is Communism finished? Will the public school system in New York city survive?

Set against political upheavals faraway in the Soviet Union in 1991, this novel follows the anxieties of an idealistic young man from the Caribbean who must contend with the breakdown of order in the city where he lives, and in the public school where he works. Through his eyes we witness violence in the streets, tensions in the school, the loneliness, grief, fear and stubborn hope that tear at the heart of immigrants and natives alike. The author brings a narrative intensity and insights to areas of darkness we have heard of in New York´s multifarious city.

Read an excerpt from this novel.

Order ” Ah Mikhail,O Fidel”

What could you say about the sea if you’re an islander?
It’s always there, around and beyond us: churning and receiving; washing up all the dead stuff of the world: sunken histories, green bottles with messages of lost ambitions, the loves we abort and throw away. On Sunday afternoons our islanders come down to the beach; they show off bathing costumes and muscles; they gleam and splash about like carefree porpoises; then, salty-skinned, with sand in their hair, they turn their backs on it and go home.
What could you say about old ladies if you’re an islander? They’re always among us, in straw hats and headkerchiefs, beneath and beyond us like ancestral graves. On Sunday mornings our old ladies go to church. They startle you in their starched church clothes many decades behind the times. If you stop to say, “Hello Aunt B.”, they lift their bowed heads; trembling fingers of memory reach for your face; they squint at you, then smile, for they’d seen you coming long before you had arrived; and they ask about your mother.
These days, of course, I know better.
Old ladies are somebody’s mother and somebody’s grandmother. They’re not waiting to die. They are dreaming souls, lighthouses to so many ships, ancient and new, adrift in the world.
As for the sea, it’s the last resting-place for the useless and the used; for skeletons and bones that rattle only what is real; a place for sunken vessels stripped of vanity riggings. You could step off our island and cross over seas, the way you cross borders from France into Spain, or Canada into the USA.
And you could call me caretaker of the sea.

Read Full Excerpt from ” Julie Mango”

Order “Julie Mango”

The Friendship of Shoes goes back to early pioneers of Caribbean storytelling like Samuel Selvon and V.S. Naipaul for its inspiration. There are strong characters, humor and stories within stories. The Caribbean experience is explored wherever its people can be found: in the city of New York or on the coastal lands of Guyana, in NY public school classrooms or the streets of Kingston, Jamaica. This new collection opens the doors for readers to discover once again the marvelous potential of the Caribbean imagination. Using familiar techniques of kinetic prose and precise observation Williams follows his characters as they join the movement of people around the globe. The Caribbean experience remains his focus. A teacher must try to adjust to the realities of New York city classrooms. A businessman returns to his island and finds the turmoil in the streets has crept into his soul. In this new collection stories within stories reveal the characters’ struggle with old fixations and new feelings about themselves and their place in the world.

 Order ” The Friendship Of Shoes”  A new collection of stories by N. D. Williams

 Read Excerpt from “The Friendship of Shoes”

The cast of hard-scrambling islanders so impressionistically drawn by Naipaul in Miguel Street is known affectionately around the world: Big Foot, Hat, Bogart, Laura, B.Wordsworth, Boyee. The colonial landscape in which they grew up – at least some aspects of its comedy and deprivation – has virtually receded from public consciousness. Hat would probably turn in his T & T grave, perplexed at today’s kidnappings & trash can bombs, narco & criminal enterprise, the Muslimeen Inc. and talk of incongruous bed fellowships; youth rudeness and traffic jams all over the place. He’d be intrigued by the World Cup soccer arrivants, the UWI., poet Derek Walcott and journalist Keith Smith; topeed & cornrowed heads, the airport’s Departure Lounge & the nation’s Arrival Days; and mass excitement at festivals of light and carnival. But ask the boy narrator how much human relations and values have “developed” after all these years, he might say, looking at you in wonder: you asking me? why you don’t go back to Miguel Street? judge for yourself: (WW) 

1. A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say “Slum!” because he could see no more. But we, who lived there, saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else.  

2. Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, “What happening there, Bogart?”  

Bogart would turn in his bed and mumble softly, so that no one heard, “What happening there, Hat?”

3. His choice fell on a man called Razor. It was hard to think of a more suitable name for this man. He was small. He was thin. He had a neat, sharp moustache above neat, tiny lips. The creases on his trousers were always sharp and clean and straight. And he was supposed to carry a knife.

4. Ella sat down on the pavement, and said, “Yes boy. I think I going to take that exam again, and this year I going to be so good that this Mr. Cambridge go bawl when he read what I write for him.”  

We were silent, in wonder.  

“Is the English and litritcher that does beat me.”  

In Elias’s mouth litritcher was the most beautiful word I heard. It sounded like something to eat, something rich like chocolate.

5. I went inside and I said, “Ma, you want to buy a poetry for four cents?” 

My mother said, “Tell that blasted man to haul his tail away from my yard, you hear.”  

I said to B.Wordsworth, “My mother say she ain’t have four cents.”

 B. Wordsworth said, “It is the poet’s tragedy.”  

And he put the paper back in his pocket. He didn’t seem to mind.

 6. I couldn’t bear to look at the fight. I looked all the time at the only woman in the crowd. She was an American or a Canadian woman and she was nibbling at peanuts. She was so blonde, her hair looked like straw. Whenever a blow was landed, the crowd roared, and the woman pulled in her lips as though she had given the blow, and then she nibbled furiously at her peanuts. She never shouted or got up or waved her hands.

7. Morgan got really drunk that night and challenged everybody to fight. He even challenged me.

 Mrs. Morgan had padlocked the front gate, so Morgan could only run about in his yard. He was as mad as a mad bull, bellowing and butting at the fence. He kept saying over and over again, “You people think I not a man, eh? My father had eight children. I is his son. I have ten. I better than all of you put together.” 

Hat said, “He soon go start crying and then he go sleep.”

8. I suppose Laura holds a world record. 

Laura had eight children.  

There is nothing surprising in that.  

These eight children had seven fathers.  

Beat that!

9. She herself was quite gay about what was happening to her. She used to point to it, and say, “This thing happening again, but you get used to it after the first three four times. Is a damn nuisance though.” 

She used to blame God, and speak about the wickedness of men.

 For her first six children she tried six different men.

 Hat used to say, “Some people hard to please.”

10. Eddoes was crazy about cleanliness. 

He used to brush his teeth for hours.  

In fact, if you were telling a stranger about Eddoes, you would say, “You know – the little fellow with a tooth-brush always in his mouth.”  

This was one thing in Eddoes I really admired. Once I stuck a tooth brush in my mouth and walked about our yard in the middle of the day.  

My mother said, “You playing man? But why you don’t wait until

your pee make froth?”

11. Eddoes said, “I was talking to one of the old boys today. He tell me he thing is to never throw away shoes. Always look in shoes that people throw away, and you go find all sort of thing.”

12. Nobody in the street knew Miss Hilton. While she lived, her front gate was always padlocked and no one ever saw her leave or saw anybody go in. So even if you wanted to, you couldn’t feel sorry and say that you missed Miss Hilton.

 When I think of her house I see just two colours. Grey and green. The green of the mango tree, the grey of the house and the grey of the high galvanized-iron fence that prevented you from getting at the mangoes.

13. Mrs. Bhakcu would say, “You better mind your mouth. Otherwise I come up and turn your face with one slap, you hear.” 

Mrs. Bhakcu was four feet high, three feet wide, and three feet deep. Mrs. Morgan was a little over six foot tall and built like a weight-lifter.  

Mrs. Morgan said, “Why you don’t get your big-belly husband to go and fix some motor car and stop reading that damn stupid sing-song he always sing-songing?”  

14. “I did everything for him. Everything. I gave up everything. Money and family. All for him. Tell me, is it right for him to treat me like this? Oh, God! What did I do to deserve all this?”  

And so she wept and talked and wept.

 15. But once Hat got into serious trouble for watering his milk.

 He said, “The police and them come around asking me how the water get in the milk. As if I know. I ain’t know how the water get there. You know I does put the pan in water to keep the milk cool and prevent it from turning. I suppose the pan did have a hole, that’s all. A tiny little hole.” 

Edward said, “It better to be frank and tell the magistrate that.”

 Hat said, “Edward, you talking as if Trinidad is England . You ever hear that people tell truth in Trinidad and get away?”  

16. “What happen to the car, Uncle Bhakcu?” I asked. 

He didn’t reply. 

“The tappet knocking?” I suggested. 

One thing Bhacku had taught me about cars was that tappets were always knocking. Give Bhacku any car in the world, and the first thing he would tell you about it was, “The tappet knocking, you know. Hear. Hear it?”

17. Edward said, “And we better wear gloves. I know a man was catching crab one day and suddenly he see his right hand walking away from him. He look again and see four five crab carrying it away. This man jump up and begin one bawling.”

18. So late that night we all climbed into the Cocorite bus, Hat in his leggings, Edward in his, and the rest of us carrying cutlasses and big brown sacks. 

The shovel Hat carried still stank from the cow-pen and people began squinging up their noses.  

He said, “Let them smell it. They all does want milk when the cow give it.”

19. In the fading light the Trinidad fast bowler, Tyrell Johnson, was unplayable, and his success seemed to increase his speed.  

A fat old woman on our left began screaming at Tyrell Johnson, and whenever she stopped screaming, she turned to us and said very quietly, “I know Tyrell since he was a boy so high. We used to pitch marble together.” Then she turned away and began screaming again.

20. My mother began to cry.  

To me Ganesh said, “What you want to go abroad and study?”  

I said, “I don’t want to study anything really. I just want to go away, that’s all.”  

Ganesh smiled and said, “The Government not giving away that sort of scholarship yet. Only Ministers could do what you say. No, you have to study something.”  

I said, “I never think about it really. Just let me think a little bit.”

21. I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.

Extracts from Miguel Street: V.S. Naipaul: Penguin Books,1971

Years later scholars and critics would preoccupy themselves with Naipaul’s “politics”, his hybrid “identity”; or his satiric scalpel so merciless on a society too fragile. But as young readers in we marveled at his craftsmanship.Guyana’s realist prose masters, Jan Carew and Edgar Mittelholzer, had written serious novels, but nothing as sparkling and entertaining (yet serious in purpose) as The Suffrage of Elvira.

 An academic writing about the experience of reading, about the state a book puts you in, describes precisely what many of us felt: “a peculiar process of immersion, of filtered double-consciousness, a two-way involution of self into character and text into voice.” A few readers thought Naipaul exposed too much (of the East Indian community) too brilliantly; others were irked by his “treatment” of non-Indians. The more creatively ambitious paid attention to his shaping of sentences and paragraphs, his characters’ pan-beating speech rhythms; how Naipaul ‘captured’ the frustration and desire churning beneath the surface of everyday existence. The Suffrage of Elvira dealt with “the coming of democracy” to colonial society. While we await fresh talent and new fiction that explores the dislocations in our lives after “the coming of Independence ” or “the coming of Socialism”, here from pages of crystal-clear prose, illustrating one way it could be done, 23 slides. – W.W.  

1. Elvira was stirring before dawn. A fine low mist lay over the hills, promising a hot thundery day. As the darkness waned the mist lifted, copying the contours of the land, and thinned, layer by layer. Every tree was distinct. Soon the sun would be out, the mist would go, the trees would become an opaque green tangle, and polling would begin.  

2. “You shy, Mr. Harbans,” Foam said. “I know how it is. But you going to get used to this waving. Ten to one, before this election over, we going to see you waving and shouting to everybody, even to people who ain’t going to vote for you.”  

Harbans shook his head sadly.  

Foam settled into the angle of the seat and the door. “Way I see it is this. In this Trinidad this democracy is a brand-new thing. We is still creeping. We is a creeping nation.”  

3. “I don’t control no votes, so nobody ain’t want me. Just because I don’t control no votes.” He stopped for breath, and added with spirit: “Chittaranjan, the next time one of your wife chicken come in my yard, don’t bother to look for it. Because that night I eating good.” He became maudlin again: “I don’t control no votes. Nobody don’t want me. But everybody chicken think they could just walk in my yard, as if my yard is a republic.”  

4. “Funny man,” Harbans said, driving off. 

“He always ready to play brave brave, but you never know when he going to start crying,” Foam said. “He lonely really. Wife dead long time. Daughters don’t come to see him.”  

5. Mrs. Baksh didn’t like it at all. “Nobody ain’t listening to me,” she said. “Everybody just washing their foot and jumping in this democracy business. But I promising you, for all the sweet it begin sweet, it going to end damn sour.”  

6. “How Hari?” Baksh asked. “He write yet?” 

Hari was Dhaniram’s son. 

“Boy in England, man,” Dhaniram said. “Studying. Can’t study and write letters.”  

7. To get the van into the yard they had to pull down part of the rotting wooden fence and build a bridge over the gutter. Some poorer people and their children came to watch. Baksh and Foam stopped talking; frowned and concentrated and spat, as though the van was just a big bother. And though it wasn’t strictly necessary then, they put up the loudspeaker on the van.  

8. Pundit Dhaniram had been educated at one of the Presbyterian schools of the Canadian Mission where he had been taught hymns and other Christian things. He cherished the training. “It makes me see both sides,” he used to say; and even now, although he was a Hindu priest, he often found himself humming hymns like “Jesus loves me, yes, I know.” 

9. Harbans had come in a brand-new, blue-and-black Jaguar. 

“Lorry! What happen to Harbans?” 

He wasn’t the candidate they knew. Gone was the informality of dress, the loose trousers, the tie around the waist, the open shirt. He was in a double-breasted grey suit. The coat was a little too wide and a little too long; but that was the tailor’s fault. Harbans didn’t wave. He look preoccupied, kept his eye on the ground, and when he hawked and spat in the gutter, pulled out an ironed handkerchief and wiped his lips – not wiped even, patted them – in the fussiest way. 

10. Ramlogan was striding ahead, flinging out his legs, shaking and jellying from his shoulders to his knees. 

11. From the veranda Chittaranjan said, “Let them wait until I come down.” He clattered down the front steps. “Is this modern age. Everybody want something for nothing. I work for every penny I have, and now you have these people complaining that they is poor and behaving as though other people depriving them.” 

Ramlogan, grasping the fence firmly, agreed. “The march of time, brothers. As the saying goes. Everybody equal. People who ain’t got brain to work and those who use their brain to work. Everybody equal.”  

12. That day Dhaniram was not being a pundit. He was in his other, more substantial role as the owner of one-fifth of a tractor. No dhoti and sacred thread; but khaki trousers, yellow sports shirt, brown felt hat and brown patent leather shoes. 

13. Foam said, “Is those Witnesses. They can’t touch nobody else, so they come to meddle with the poor Spanish people in Cordoba . Telling them not to vote, to go against the government. Who ever see white woman riding around on red red bicycle before, giving out green books?”  

14. She spoke to Baksh kindly. “Man, let me see your belt a little bit, please.” 

Baksh replied with equal civility: “Yes, man.” 

He undid his leather belt, pulling it carefully through the loops of his khaki trousers as though he wanted to damage neither trousers nor belt. Mrs. Baksh took the belt. Herbert began to cry in advance. Mrs. Baksh didn’t look at him. She held the belt idle for some moments, looking down at it almost reflectively. On a sudden she turned; and lunged at Herbert, striking out with the belt, hitting him everywhere.  

15. “Herbert,” Mrs. Baksh said. “You mustn’t tell your father he lie. What you must say?”  

“I must say he tell stories,” Herbert said submissively. But he perked up, and a faint mocking smile – which made him look a bit like Foam – came to his lips. 

“No, Herbert, you mustn’t even say that your father does tell stories.”  

“You mean I mustn’t say anything, Ma?”  

“No, son, you mustn’t say anything.”  

16. That happened just after noon. Less than three hours later a breadfruit from Ramlogan’s tree dropped so hard on Chittaranjan’s roof that the framed picture of King George V and Mahatma Gandhi in the drawing room fell. 

Chittaranjan rushed to the kitchen window, pushed aside his wife from the enamel sink where she was scouring pots and pans with blue soap and ashes, and shot some elaborate Hindi curses at Ramlogan’s backyard.  

17. Ramlogan, a big greasy man in greasy trousers and a greasy vest, was leaning against his shop door, his fat arms crossed, scowling at the world.  

18. The D.M.O. was a young Indian with a handsome dissipated face. He hadn’t forgotten his association with England and continued to wear a Harris tweed jacket, despite the heat. 

Foam asked, “You going to cut him up, Doctor?”  

The D.M.O. pursed his lips and didn’t reply. He did two things. He took off Mr. Cuffy’s stout black boots, said, “Good boots,” turned up Mr. Cuffy’s right eye-lid, then closed both eyes. 

“Heart,” he said, and filled the form.  

“Was that self I did think,” Lutchman said.  

19. Foam said, “Is not his fault, Ma. Is the gas.” 

“Gas! And the other modern thing is appendicitis. Nobody did have gas and appendicitis when I was small. It ain’t gas. Is just the sort of gratitude I getting from my children, after all the pinching and scraping and saving I does do. And tell me, for who I pinching and scraping and saving?” 

She got no reply.  

20. Perhaps it was this that helped to make Baksh the Muslim leader, though the position should have gone in all fairness to Haq, a fierce black little man who wore a bristle of white beard and whiskers and whose eyes flashed behind steel-rimmed spectacles when he spoke of infidels. Haq was orthodox, or so he led people to believe, but Haq was poor. 

21. Baksh stood at a counter with a tape-measure round his neck, consulting a bloated copy-book and making marks with a triangular piece of yellow chalk on some dark-blue material.  

22. “This democracy just make for people like Baksh. Fact, I say it just make for negro and Muslim. They is two people who never like to make anything for theyself, and the moment you make something, they start begging. And if you ain’t give them, they vex.” 

Ramlogan, thinking of Haq, assented with conviction. 

And if you give them,” Chittarajan went on, “they is ungrateful.”  

“As the saying goes, however much you wash a pig, you can’t make it a cow. As the saying goes.”  

23. When Harbans had left Elvira and was in County Caroni , he stopped the lorry and shook his small fist at the dark countryside behind him. 

“Elvira!” he shouted. “You is a bitch! A bitch! A bitch!”  

Extracts taken from The Mystic Masseur: V.S. Naipaul: Penguin Books,

England, 1969

Julie Mango by N.D. Williams. Xlibris Corporation. 300pages. USA. 2000.

Reviewed by D. Gokarran Sukhdeo
(Winner, 1998 Guyana Prize for Literature.)

The last decade or so has seen an immense number of published works emanating from Guyanese writers at home and abroad; some good, some mediocre. One of these works stands head and shoulders among its contemporaries, and certainly ranks among good modern writing. Julie Mangois a collection of short stories by N. D. Williams. It is however surprising and unfortunate that little is known of this author who has written prodigiously before.

Good literature is about the purposeful presentation of the lives of people through a language style and structure that will open up the souls of the common man to the reader. It inexorably arouses not just the five senses, but also the deepest emotions, and consequently effects a change in the reader. The reader becomes more informed, more empathetic, more motivated, and more involved. When the good writer describes a desert, the reader must experience a thirst; when he speaks of love, the reader must be ecstatic. The reader must become the protagonist and cry when the hero (or heroine) suffers or triumphs. In the end there must be a lesson to be learned, an example to emulate, or an error to avoid. In effect, good literature, as against the tradition of western popular writings, satisfies a dual purpose �” it represents reality, and promotes morality; or simply put, it both informs and improves the reader. The writer therefore has a responsibility to the reader and to society. He must look beyond the mercenary, as one who is responsible for shaping the mind of his younger brother, one who does not merely strut and fret his hour upon the stage, but also one who must leave social and historical footprints. It is within these parameters that good literature such as Julie Mango is examined.

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Dog At Your Door

              In her dark house you sisters sleep still unaware

              of this barking hungry dog outside scratching hard

              at the back door through which he smells your mother’s ghost

              burning up your bread  books and  boots in her oven

              You wake first and shake Norma wishing she could keep

              sleeping and dreaming of a song without questions

              and Ruth keeps her eyes shut for she will not tell where

              the key to your mother’s house is that would admit

              me who won’t ignore her and let out you who would

Brian Chan was born in Guyana and now lives in Alberta, Canada. These poems are from his new collection Gift of Screws which will be published by Peepal Tree Press in February 2006.