N.D.Williams’ Books

Coming after publications of poetry and a novel, High House and Radio (1991) is a collection of Rooplall Monar’s short stories. If the back cover is a reliable guide readers are invited to follow the lives of characters who once occupied cramped living quarters on a Sugar Estate, and who now live independently in their own individual houses. These issues of upmoving transition might not have been the author’s intention, and the stories don’t quite succeed that way.

The stories come draped in the satins of Guyanese Indianness, and on that level they might intrigue those pursuers of groups and constituencies, the pollsters and formula-ready academics who like framing what we think about the plight of our favourite collectives. But collectives (ethnic or religious) are ice cages for the human spirit. You expect our writers to chip away at them so that individual fates might be freed, and minds be made open again to multiple points of view.

Monar’s fiction has encouraged snappy comparisons with writers working a similar literary terrain, Sam Selvon (in Ways of Sunlight, 1957) or V. S Naipaul (in Miguel Street, 1959). Those older writers brought to bear incisive scrutiny and humour on a mosaic of desperate living. After his remarkable achievement with Janjhat (1989), Monar in this collection creates a world that showcases the Indianness of his Indians. The stories, which are delivered with a stage performer’s excitement, don’t probe deeper than that; nor do they expand our understanding much beyond surface perceptions.

His Indian folk occupy a self-contained village on the coast (Annandale). They no longer work for the sugar estate, but lack of education has severely handicapped their life prospects. The old estate worker solidarities have started to crumble; anxieties and divisions develop sharper edge. “Over me dead body, no Hindu blood in me family“, a Muslim father shouts at his daughter who’s thinking of getting married. “Greed and selfishness invade people spirit“, another character says in a bitter-jokey rum shop mood.

Monar has set his own limits for these stories - intense creole talk and amusing vignettes that release ripples of laughter and recognition. Characters often get drunk and feel emboldened to perform reckless acts. Village tricksters use their wits to survive. And humour is at the level of the unemployed man whose day to day problems are compounded at night by his unhelpful wife whose bulky body and thick thighs make bedroom intimacy strenuous if not completely satisfying work.

On occasion black creoles from an adjacent village (Buxton) cross boundary lines: a woman, unhappy with her black obeahman, searching for a Hindu spiritman. Then there are “thiefing black people” who raid backyards for poultry; and idle black youth whose crude sexual comments as Indian girls walk by raise tension & alarm.

Tension swells into aggression as when politically generated violence sweeps across the land. A few stories (“Election Fever”) look at the volatile situations especially during Election time when Indians became random targets. Though Monar doesn’t write with an activist’s eye for Indian victims, the stories shed light on an underlying predicament. People may feel securely entrenched in their village culture, but that communal self-sufficiency sometimes half-blinds them to the world around. Hiding true selves behind masks of benign passivity, they are often naively surprised when violence bursts into their homes.  

Monar’s prose - “And don’t talk, them coolie people beetee yapping while one-two coolie women beating they chest dab dab: ‘O Bhagwan, is real murderation.’” - lies like thick-thick paragrass on every page. A character in this collection, in an effort to motivate the author, must have whispered in his ear, “Man, write if yuh writing”; and Monar with great exuberance proceeded to do that. Sometimes he appears to be flaunting his easy way with creole words. At other moments the narrator’s voice wears you down with its revved-up monotalk.

You sense the need for editorial trimming and control so that the language hews to the task of delineating character, providing insight. A worldwide Indian reader, drawn to the book’s Indianness, must slow down and tread gingerly through a word field like this: “But gat luck, she nah gat none big brodda in the house, else he mighta fat-eye she, cause nowadays, you cyan trust some buddy an sissy never mind them come-out pon one mumma-belly.”

So much of any book’s success depends on the cast of invented characters. Monar has called up folk from his own village experience; but Danky, Mule, Bansi, Bungu, Naimoon & Shairool don’t stay on in the imagination after you’ve closed the book. They behave in hilariously recognizable ways, arguing & cussing, scheming & daring, beating tassa drums & cooking mutton curry; and on drunken occasions they dish out “one proper cut-rass” to their wives.

(Back in the days, if you remember, the women screamed “Murda, murda, O Gawd, dis man gon kill me“, and eavesdropping neighbors minding their own business often shrugged as if a village woman screaming “murda” was nothing to get excited about.)

Still, when you consider, for instance, the Naipaul inventions (in Miguel Street) - Hat, Titus Hoyt, Bhakcu and Eddoes - Monar’s village folk sound as if they’d walked straight off a punt trench dam onto the author’s page. Which is saying, there is more to the process of character creation and the short story form than just rushing narrative and creole intensity.

In the Booker sugar estate days of the 60s (where these stories are set) when folk creativity helped stoke anticolonial fires, fiction like this gave cause for awards and celebration (In this collection one story is dedicated to our pioneer folklorist Wordsworth Mac Andrew). Monar’s fiction may have emerged too late for Guyana Prize awards, though his work received a special Judges’ Prize in 1987. And Janjhat will be valued as his remarkable breakthrough Guyanese novel.

But new territory is already laid out and waiting for Monar’s attention. Up from the estate canefields more of his Indians have moved through the villages to new uneasy residence in the city, where they dispense political patronage and must “look outward”, share residential space and intermingle with non-Indian creoles and strangers. Life for many in the city (depending on the rains, the visa hunt) feels saturated with sullen & resentful arse-catching. Add to that political skullduggery, abrasive public manners and flourishing careers in banditry & river piracy and there’s enough raw life to engage any writer’s ingenuity.

Edgar Mittelholzer and Jan Carew once worked like porknockers in similar areas of human scramble & depredation. They’ve left us enduring literary models.

Too besides, screams of “Murda, murda” in the city and surrounding villages these days are like “Businessman Shot Dead” headlines, matters for our nation to be gravely concerned about.

Imagine, then, literary forays into narco-crime fiction, or political-murder mysteries; or melodramas filled with the creole anguish of desperate G/town housewives. In this day and age, if serious literary fiction seems unwanted or must stay locked up overseas in institutions of higher reading, a second tier of well-crafted books could keep us pleasurably engaged. Writers with Monar’s storytelling talent would appear to have their work cut out for them.

Book Reviewed: High House and Radio: Rooplall Monar:  Peepal Tree Press, England, 1991, 176 pgs. (w.w)

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)