N.D.Williams’ Books

The central character in Tessa McWatt’s novel This Body (2004) has left Guyana for Toronto and later London; she wants the reader to believe her problem is “the great sexuality of memory“. Unlike other migrants with more mundane, hardbitten complaints this would seem to be a great personal affliction, requiring neither help nor empathy; just someone to listen as she explains.

Considering the title of the novel her complaint might not be as pretentious as it sounds. On the epigraph page there’s a quote from a poem to help you focus (“I love this body/made to weather the storm/in the brain”). And the opening pages find the central character seated on a bench across the road from the Royal Albert Hall “adjust[ing] her right buttock with a flick of her fingers” while she “looks directly up at the loins” of a princely statue outside the building.

“The storm in the brain” sounds like an exaggerated phrase for the mental anguish some migrants might experience in lonely cities once diminished expectations and job (or jobless) pressures raise blood & ire. But how, you wonder, does ‘the body’ help ease this anguish? Imagine nights of basement-huddling sex with kind strangers under warm blankets in cold rooms in frozen cities and you might think you’ve found the answer; but you’d be way off the mark with this novel.

For after the opening pages raise you to a state of high erotic alert, This Body slips off into chatty narcissism. Quite flatly, you will feel let down.

There is not much sex to shout about; what passes for memory are irritating flashbacks; and the central character’s mouth becomes a distracted narrative device. It takes over from her body and for chapter after chapter it talks up a storm about sexagenarian life anxieties in England once the body’s youthful fires have diminished.

If you’re back in Georgetown waiting and waiting inside the US Embassy (silently cursing your luck, self-maximizing governance, the Garbage City) and praying to “get through” with those US Visa officials, you could pass the time with this novel in your hands. Tessa Mc Watt once lived in Guyana and now splits residential time between Canada and the UK. She has written two previous novels.

This Body was not intended to uplift new migrant aspirations. In fact, one isn’t sure what readership, home or abroad, McWatt had in mind. The central character starts off meditating on sex, and ends up bemoaning lost love & lost home. Your worldwide reader looking for substance and enlightenment might have to resort to groping the plot. Essentially what you find is this:

Victoria, the central character, grew up in Kitty and attended Bishops’ High School (she would have preferred the Ursuline Convent but her father’s “indiscretions” ruled it out). Her father, surprisingly “tall for a Chinese man“, wears a “patchy, long bristled goatee“. Problem is, he has a voracious appetite for women. Not just any woman. Guyanese to the bone he fancied “women who’d moved to town from the country:  Amerindian women, fine-boned Indian women, and thick tar-skinned women.”

Unwilling or unable to control his plundering urges this unbelievable Chinese man fathers countless illegitimate children in Georgetown. Their mothers would walk past his house with the children in tow scowling at Victoria, his legitimate daughter. At some point Victoria decides she’s had enough. “The only lifelong dream [she] had was to leave the glaring eyes of her father’s mistresses and their bastards in Kitty.”  Which was as a good reason as any for leaving Guyana back in the days.

Mysteriously Victoria starts on a mini sexual odyssey of her own. First time her body partially surrenders is on a beach during a stopover in Barbados. Then in Canada she gives in to a taxi driver, Harry, “with whom she got drunk“. (This impulsive act had unintended consequences that required ‘a simple surgical procedure‘.) Then Victoria meets a Kikuyu from Kenya named Kola. She stays with him for six years (careful not to get pregnant again) until one day he too takes off.

At this point the Victoria’s head takes over: “She read each of the more than two hundred books he’d brought to her tiny flat, searching for some clue that would tell her where he had gone.” 200 books! This is an astonishing feat. Which Guyanese woman you know, schooled at Bishops High School today, would read even two books “searching” for her man?

You might start wondering: what on earth is wrong with this Chinese family?

The novel provides few answers. The story is not really about this Chinese family. The bulk of the narrative unfolds in England. By then Victoria’s body has reached the globally ravished but stoutly settled age of sixty one (though she looks much younger.)

On occasion she contemplates surrendering again to the old, heart-pumping desire, with a befriended Englishman, “to keep the juices flowing“. There is, in fact, one last flare up of consummated passion which is described with the patience and watchful anxiety that mirrors the act. But for the most part Victoria’s life in England is resigned to cooking & catering, to pining for the lost Kikuyu, and raising a boy child. Not her boy. Her sister, Gwen, died in a car crash back in Guyana, and her son is in England staying by Victoria.

These revelations, about her rampaging father and her always accepting body, are contained in flashbacks that snag you like so much annoying plimpla in the narrative flow. (Imagine! You there going along reading quiet, quiet, then all of a sudden you get jook by a “body” part!)

What really gets your goat, though, is McWatt’s somewhat carifestive way of developing character, using cultural brushstrokes. Kola, the Kenyan Kikuyu she lived with, is drawn in bright African references. He enchants Victoria with his knowledge of Ethiopian spices, Nigerian palm wine, East African stew, African lullabies, traditions & aphorisms. Given Victoria’s body yearnings you might well ask what kept their intimacy alive all those years.

Victoria never reveals her secret though she admits this much: “He said he’d noticed the fine line of her back in the market and felt he’d known her before, in Africa.” Yes, it takes your breath away. What a man, what a line! What a union of immigrant souls!

Then there is Derek, the boy Victoria is raising. At first he’s nurtured on stories of Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur. In an abrupt cultural switch he’s told the myth of Kanaima in the Guyana forests. This improves Derek’s image in the classroom, but in the schoolyard he’s tagged as Kanaima boy. To add anguish to the plot lines Derek, as he grows older, develops a need to discover the identity of his biological father. He gives up surfing Camelot sites and uses the computer’s search engines to locate him.

Sex, memory, escape from seed-scattering father, love’s labour vanished, identity search - and next Mc Watt throws (sudden) death into her salad bowl of themes and preoccupations. We find out late in the novel that Kola has died. His African wife contacts Victoria with the news after finding her letters to him. Seems he was deported from Canada and imprisoned by a Kenyan Government fearful of his revolutionary ideas. He was “confined to dirty six-foot cell…like a caged animal“; and there he died.

As if to complete the circle of the wanderlust Guyanese soul Victoria decides to return home. Just to visit. The prose of these homecoming chapters is awash in (re)migrant apprehension, sentimental encounters with once familiar people & places, and much contrived creole dialogue. They serve as a reminder of how the passage of time can sometimes play evaporative games with the memory of ambitious authors overseas.

“The taxi driver blows his horn and shouts “damn fool” as a minibus with Bombay schmaltz blasting out its windows overtakes them…  St George’s Cathedral, lofty wood and cracking paint, still stands as a testament to her Christian name… Booker-McConnell’s department store, with its imports and delicacies, is humming with shoppers…” This author, you sense, has been abroad so long she has to scrape the memory barrel for verisimilar, back-home details. Instead of a strong sense of place readers must make do with ‘researched’ or tourist video images.

McWatt’s previous book was a Finalist for The Governor General’s Award in Canada. They seem fond of migrant/multicultural poetry & fiction over there. The book didn’t win, but Mc Watt need not lose faith. Next time around, to please those quirky Canadian judges, a sequel to this novel, shorn of schmaltzy sentences & situations, providing deeply-felt, penetrative insights might just do the trick.

And those Guyanese lucky to “get through” with the US Embassy need not lose faith either. They can take away these life lessons hidden in This Body: once in the big city, Toronto or London, put down roots and memories fast before they fade away. As for ‘that body’ travelling with you, be wary of the hazards it creates, the surprises it springs.

Because listen, you taking a big chance with your own backtracking genes. The Spirit of Kanaima will not answer your prayers. And watch out for that dark stranger smiling and staring at you on the underground train, who swear he know you from some place.

Book Reviewed: This Body:  Tessa Mc Watt: Harper Perennial, Canada: 2004, 328 pgs. (w.w.)

After all where is it written that only the underprivileged make more compassionate authors, or even more compelling subjects for authors?

Derek Walcott in his latest work The Prodigal considers himself lucky to be writing “from the privilege of all your wits about you in your old age”. Much of his poetry is filled with painterly metaphors for his world citizenship, and in particular for his native
St Lucia, its sea salted folk, their kweyol interlaced lives. You sense always the investment of the poet’s entire life in his poetry and paintings, life & art wrapped like a monumental gift for his island people: “you whom I loved first”.

David Dabydeen’s writings reflect a very different kind of privilege, that of metropolitan residence, university education, scholarship & research skills, plus the cornucopia of words that could build up from academic discourse. His subjects have been The Old Empire, the transatlantic journeys of indentured souls, the truths that lie hidden in famous paintings or submerged in historical records.

But in this reissued first novel The Intended (2005) the subject is really himself, his personal journey to England after 12 early years in Guyana, and his success at replantation and self-renewal overseas.

The Intended won the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2002. A Guyanese reader might be overly impressed by the prose flow (‘The boy could write.’) the way back in the days people in the market square were overly impressed by the oratory of lawyer-politicians trained in England (‘If you hear the man speak!’) Like Walcott he reveals a penchant for painterly description; there is much first-book energy deserving of notice, and a good deal of EngLit insights to raise approving eyebrows.

You come away thinking that despite its Guyana origins the novel seems pronouncedly British in its concerns and accomplishment. Not that there’s anything shape-shifty about that.

 Semi-autobiographical first novels are often an announcement of pubescent writerly talent. The Intended is really a showcase of literary talent which Dabydeen has already developed to produce highly praised books of poetry and fiction. In the reader’s mind back home there should be little doubt: The man could write! 

His central character, a Guyanese Indian, comes to England to get an education. Quite suddenly he finds himself down on his luck and dependent on British social services and security cheques. His days are spent just getting by on the margins though you’d never know it if he didn’t remind you. Compared to the rough-and-tumble migrancy of Sam Selvon’s London fellas or George Lamming’s boat migrants, his day-to-day street hardships seem trifling; they’re eased considerably by the fellowship of two friends, Shaz of Pakistan and Joseph, a homeless Rastafari youth.

On occasion the plot ushers in two white girls from privileged homes (Monica and Janet) to focus our attention on the young men’s heterosexual growth; but for the most part the three lads drift a lot and ‘ol talk a lot.

They talk about “O” Level & “A” Level exams, about sex, about Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness”, Milton’s “Lycidas”, Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”. They find summer jobs, lose touch for awhile. The Rasta youth gets arrested, then becomes a fugitive from the law. But always they find each other again, and a sense of shared responsibility & caring develops among them.

Self-absorption (that deepens into voluble self-awareness, though not quite angst) fairly well sums up the predicament of the Guyanese narrator. Even after he befriends the other characters, something keeps him psychic yards away from England’s cultural mixing. From this detached point he offers insights into uncertain citizenships in British society, the problems of adaptation for brown and black newcomers, the attitudes of English people, those money-grubbing Pakistanis, those shiftless dancehall Jamaicans; and how hard it is for everyone to get along.

 His close friend Shaz was born in England, his parents from Pakistan. This would make their kinship as “Asian” brothers an easy congruence; but Shaz exudes a native-born confidence that extends to women and sexual adventuring. The narrator makes fumbling attempts to keep up with Shaz, but is reminded each time of his fresh-from-the-canefield greenness in matters of erotic fun. To compensate for failure he stays focused on his migrant ambition, on his desire to become “somebody”; and he lives self-consciously distanced from Shaz, though sex is constantly on his mind. Then there’s Joseph, the black youth who lives in a Boy’s Home run by the Social Services. He plays the guitar and becomes intrigued with the narrator’s opinions of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. At some point he puts down the guitar and picks up a camera and has crazy ideas for making films. Inevitably cultural “difference” sets them apart. The narrator grows weary of Joseph’s dreamy vagrancy & his anti-social urges, and on one visit he recoils: “When he raised his head, he looked like a gollywog, his wooly locks spread out in spikes.”  Pages later, as the narrator sits in the Oxford University Library, Joseph creeps into his thoughts, “reminding me of my dark shadow, drawing me back to my dark self.” His sense of separateness deepens, and in a spasm of self-disclosure that would warm the hearts of concerned family & neighbours back home in Berbice the narrator explains his West Indianness this way: “I’m different really. I come from their place, I’m dark-skinned like them, but I’m different, and I hope the whites can see that and separate me from that lot. I’m an Indian really, deep down I’m decent and quietly spoken and hard-working and I respect good manners, books, art, philosophy. I’m like the whites, we both have civilization.” (p. 127) He experiences the occasional flashback to childhood days in Guyana, but he’s far from being a homesick soul. These sections, filled with village incident and a small cast of village folk, are lovingly written; you notice the author’s attention to exact local detail. They provide sociological colour and context that explain the character’s unsureness in England.  Like snapshots of a life “back there” they impinge on the narrator’s behavior in England only when he’s poised to do something untried & unfamiliar. 

On the last page as the narrator gets ready for Oxford – “I watch the clouds being rinsed in their original colour and the darkness slowly unpeeling from the sky. I wait under the street lamp, wanting to be visible, but the light flames upon my head, flames upon my skin and I have to step back into the shade” – there’s a hint of muted triumph and self-congratulation as the novel sweeps to its lyrical finish. You’d think the poor fellow had suffered nightmarish hard times along the way but managed somehow to survive, keeping his wits about him and his ambition pristinely intact.

The Intended is an earnest first novel about commingling identities, making it perhaps essential reading for outward-bound Guyanese, but not a casual read for bus or subway riders. A Courantyne reader might be struck by a few graphic scenes of, for instance, two country donkeys mating, described in way that makes you think this observed act could only happen in Guyana. Student hopefuls heading to England might be drawn to Dabydeen’s cultural insights and personal revelations, and the central character’s chin-up determination should inspire.

 The novel was first published in 1991, years before the new Islamism and a new wave of immigrants (from Eastern Europe) took root in England. This might propel it very fast toward a library shelf of dated books, though not before postcolonial scholars have had a feast of pickings off its characters & themes.  Still, once the dark clouds over Guyana have lifted, and the death grip of ethnic power politics finds lasting release, one can hope for a resurgence of a literary culture in our nation, and who knows? maybe the return of the coffee table to Georgetown living rooms. Then Arts lovers could point to The Intended with its stylish ‘arriviste’ prose and say with homeboy pride, “The man could write!”  

Book Reviewed: The Intended: David Dabydeen:  Peepal Tree Press, England, 2005, 176 pgs. (w.w.)

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)

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

After 40+ years my Penguin soft cover The Mystic Masseur has survived boxes and climate change and interludes of neglect surprisingly well. The cover though stained still hangs tough, but the pages have faded into brownish-yellow. Reading the novel again the other day I found myself lapsing into that earlier excitement at discovering what a master of West Indian prose and character invention Naipaul already was. Then I started skipping pages, not laughing as much; noticing how rather too often the Great Belcher belches.

Then I paid more attention to the parts I’d underlined  for reasons that are still vague, except perhaps it was possible then to identify similar scenarios of existence  in colonial Guiana, analogous behaviours in our villages and townships far away from Fuente Grove, Trinidad. So here for new readers – from the man who would teach us ways of looking at ourselves! from the Knight surveyor of our darkness! from his Mystic Masseur  – 18 lluminations:

1.         Fuente Grove – Fountain Grove – seemed a curious name. There was no hint of fountain anywhere, no hint even of water. For miles around the land was flat, treeless, and hot. You drove through miles and miles of sugar-cane; then the sugar-cane stopped abruptly to make room for Fuente Grove.

 
2.        “I been thinking. I have a cousin working in the Licensing Office. He could get you a job there, I think. You could drive motor car?”

        “I can’t even drive donkey cart, Mrs. Cooper.”

        “It don’t matter. He could always get a licence for you, and then you ain’t have to do much driving. You just have to test other drivers, and if you anything like my cousin, you could make a lot of money giving out licence to all sort of fool with money.”

 
3.       “Since when you start reading?”

    “I learning all the time, sahib. I does read only a little tiny little bit.

Smatterrer fact, it have a hundred and one words I just can’t make head or tail outa. Tell you what, sahib. Why you don’t read it out to me? When you read I could just shut my eyes and listen.”

        “You does behave funny afterwards. Why you just don’t look at the photo,     

     eh?”

  “Is a nice photo, sahib.”

  “You look at it. I got to go now.”  

 4.      And then there was Soomintra to be faced. Soomintra had married a hardware merchant in San Fernando and she was rich. More than that, she looked rich. She was having child after child, and growing plump, matronly, and important. She had a son whom she had called Jawaharlal, after the Indian leader; and her daughter was called Sarojini, after the Indian poetess.

 
5.       “But, man, we got to think about money now. The time coming when we won’t have a cent remaining.”

          “Look, Leela. Look at this thing in a practical way. You want food? You have a little garden in the back. You want milk? You have a cow. You want shelter? You have a house. What more you want?”

 
6.        “Leela, is not only come I come for you; but I have something to tell you, and I want to tell you first.

          “Say it quick. But I must say you was able to keep it to yourself a damn long time. Eh, eh, is nearly three months now you drive me away from your house and in all that time you never bother to send a message to ask me, ‘Dog, how you is?’ or ‘Cat, how you is?’ So why for you come now, eh?”

 
7.       She cared for the garden at the back of the house and minded the cow. She never complained. Soon she was ruler in the house. She could order Ganesh about and he didn’t object. She gave him advice and he listened. He began to consult her on nearly everything. In time, though they would never have admitted it, they had grown to love each other.

 8.       “I was thinking, man. I didn’t like the taxi-driver. He come here, he see all the books, he never mention them once. He ask for water and for this and for that and he ain’t even say, ‘Thank you.’ And he making a pile of money bringing these poor people here every day.”

 
9.      You never felt that he was a fake and you couldn’t deny his literacy or learning – not with all those books. And he hadn’t only book learning. He could talk on almost every subject. For instance, he had views about Hitler and knew how the war could be ended in two weeks. “One way,” he used to say. “Only one. And in fourteen days, even thirteen – bam! – no more war.”  But he kept the way a secret.

 
10.       “Is what life is, sahib.” Ramlogan followed Ganesh’s gaze.  “Years does pass. People does born. People does married. People does dead. Is enough to make anybody a proper philosopher, sahib.”

          “Philosophy is my job. Today is Sunday….”

 11.     Last Christmas Suruj Mooma take up the children by their grandmooma and this boy just come up to she cool cool and say he taking up dentistry. You could imagine how Suruj Mooma was surprise. And the next thing we hear is that he borrow money to buy one of them dentist machine thing and he start pulling out people teeth, just like that. The boy killing people left and right, and still people going. Trinidad people is like that.

 
12.       He spoke in Hindi but the books he showed in this way were in English, and people were awed by this display of learning.

         His main point was that desire was a source of misery and therefore desire ought to be suppressed. Occasionally he went off at a tangent to discuss whether the desire to suppress desire wasn’t itself a desire; but usually he tried to be as practical as possible.”

 
13.      The boy ran up the steps. “The meeting starting to start, sahib.”

 14.     Then the mood of the meeting changed.

        The bearded negro stood up and made a long speech. He said that he had been attracted to Hinduism because he liked Indians;  but the corruption he had seen that day was entirely repugnant to him. It had, as a matter of fact, decided him to join the Muslims, and the Hindus had better look out when he was a Muslim.

 15.        “You don’t know how lucky you is,” he began, and jumped up immediately, saying, “Gimme a chance. It have a boy here I must give a good cut-arse to. Just gimme a chance.”

            He squeezed his way between desks to a boy in the back row. The class was instantly silent and it was possible to hear the noise from the other classrooms. Then Ganesh heard the boy squealing behind the blackboard.

          The headmaster was sweating when he came back to Ganesh. He wiped his big face with a mauve handkerchief and said, “Yes, I was telling you that you is a lucky man.”

16.        He was in a temper when he returned late that night to Fuente Grove. “Just wanted to make a fool of me,” he muttered, “fool of me.”

           “Leela!” he shouted. “Come, girl, and give me something to eat.”

            She came out, smiling sardonically.  “But, man, I thought you was dining with the Governor.”

           “Don’t make joke, girl. Done dine. Want to eat now. Going to show them,” he mumbled, as his fingers ploughed through the rice, and dal and curry, “going to show them.”

17.        “Suruj Mooma right, you know. Too much of this education is a bad bad thing. You remain here, educate yourself and yet you is a bigger man than Indarsingh for all the Ox-ford he say he go to.”

18.       They brought their sadnesses to Fuente Grove, but they made the place look gay. Despite the sorrow in their faces and attitudes they wore clothes as bright as any wedding crowd: veils, bodices, skirts all strident pink, yellow, blue or green.

Excerpts taken from The Mystic Masseur: V.S. Naipaul: Penguin Edition, 1964   

New author Ryhaan Shah lives in Guyana and is President of the Guyana Indian Heritage Association. If you visit her website and scroll through the postings you come away with the impression her world-view is comprised of hostile and irreconcilable dualities. In a country where six ethnic groups jostle each other in search of reliable services, narcoactive-free habitats and a national identity, Shah sees two overlapping cultural “worlds”, which emerged after colonial and postcolonial practices left one gaping crack in the nation’s crust.
 
In world #1 you’ll encounter disturbing behaviors and attitudes. A short list of these would include street obscenities & vulgarities, “bad manners and indiscipline”; people who on festive occasions “jump & wine”, people who at cultural events “wine down and mash up the place”; who indulge in “drunkenness and sexual gyrations”, wear “skimpy clothes” and get on bad to chutney & kaiso music.

In the world #2 – the one Shah wants exclusively for vulnerable Guyanese Indians – you’ll find certain uplifting virtues and behaviours. A short list would include dignity, sobriety, healthy lifestyles (inspired by anxiety about HIV/AIDS), “dignified cultural presentations”, behaviours that exemplify “modesty & self-respect”; the practice of yoga, Indian games like the kabbadi which teach the importance of “strength, discipline, team sport and gamesmanship”; and wholesome habits based on “reason, intelligence and sober reflection.”  

If instead of “world” you substituted the word “environment” many worried Guyanese parents of all races would hasten to sign up their children for tutoring in the values of #2.  Or substitute the word “planet” and watch how many people get on line, paying whatever it costs for a fantasy trip to that cultural space.

A few diehard nationalists always seeking accommodation might wonder if it is at all possible to have the best of both “worlds”. Could one not practice yoga while wearing “skimpy clothes”? And what is so appalling about “sexual gyrations” during Mashramani? about people chipping in a band one day of the year, ow beti, just one day?

But this after all is post-Independent, bandit-happy Guyana. Old habits of self-restraint have given way to predatory impulses, a gun-toting disregard for law and civic order. That six-pronged ethnic search for a national identity might seem futile these days, stretching on and on, past one electoral standoff after another, with no end in sight.

More contentiously to the point, Shah identifies the behaviours of world #1 with black creoles, and a plot to recolonise unwilling Indians. This recolonisation of Indians and their culture has taken on ominous political significance. In Shah’s view, the present (and past) Government in Guyana has turned a blind eye to and might even be encouraging creole assimilation of Indians.

Beneath Shah’s entrenched fears – or, put it this way, inside Shah’s cult of purity – one senses very real concerns for our nation: how to alter self-destructive habits & self-segregating tendencies; how to harness the waste of resources, the crime spray of energies, so that the country gets down to the task of creating wealth, building new confidence and a durable infrastructure (and still allow for manic occasions to mash and celebrate achievement, honour the achievers.)

When Shah the cultural activist turns cultural novelist (and finds encouragement from a sympathetic publisher) what results is this, her first novel, A Silent Life (2005). It attempts to address some of these concerns. Her central character joins company with Forbes Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, Walter Rodney, and more current scholar-activists who’ve returned over the years with ideas and ideology (and the charismatic language of deliverance) for our nation.

A Silent Life is about a girl, Aleya (“the gifted one”), born into in a fairly cohesive but struggling Muslim household in West Demerara. Through oral accounts she learns that her grandparents were advocates for change in the colonial days. Her grandfather talked to the workers about “dialectical materialism” but his words often sailed over their heads. It is her grandmother who proves more potent. Seizing the moment one day she whips the crowd into such a frenzy, her action upstages her husband and crushes his manhood. He hangs himself. She is reduced to regret and silence.

Aleya grows up in the lap of her grandmother. There is a symbiotic connection at an early stage of her development. Nani’s presence in the household, rocking, humming and smiling enigmatically is Aleya’s link to the past. “Your grandmother was one for reading and talking all day and all night…She used to write letters, and packages of books and leaflets used to come with strange stamps from foreign places.” (p.23) Stories about hard life on the sugar plantations and rice fields fill her childhood imagination and impress on her the importance of tribal memory.

The next stage in Aleya’s personal growth begins when she wins a scholarship to study Economics at the University of London, England. There is family pride and extended-family excitement at the news. Great aunts and uncles descend and offer advice & concern about her life abroad, the prospects for a future husband. For her sendoff a Koranic function is arranged. The household overflows with relatives and neighbours, music and prayers, and page after page of heart-tugging prose.

Despite or above all this, Aleya holds fast to the notion that this is her chance to prepare herself for a mission to “save the world”. There are paragraphs of tender moments shared with her grandmother in which their bond of radical thinking and resolve is forever sealed.

So the scholarship girl goes off to London, to new friends and cold weather and student loneliness. Unlike Sam Selvon’s lonely Londoners, catching arse and not disposed to grandiose musing, Aleya’s student loneliness gives her all the time in the world to cultivate her life’s mission. To this end she is abetted by university mentors.

There is a Professor Roberts, “sucking on the sweet tobacco of his pipe”, who reminds her: “You’ll need to take your studies further, a masters and then a doctorate, and you need to have some practical experience…Your ideas will require the wholesale re-education of people” (p. 78-79). For the practical experience he suggests she joins up with World Aid, a young organization that helps poor communities all over the world. “You could intern with them, then who knows, maybe a job?”

Letters arrive from Guyana with alarming news of brutalities inflicted on defenceless Indians. And Burnham only there living in style in “a big Monkey House”, banning split-peas and Christmas apples and making life miserable for everybody. And Cheddi Jagan only there complaining and complaining. But a new black leader named Walter Rodney is hitting back at “the Kabaka”.

In moments of swollen anxiety, the narrative “I” reaches down self-consciously into swirls of memory (as in “I see my grandparents dancing”, or “I hear my father sigh”). Aleya drags up images of her indentured grandparents standing on the stern of the ship as it moves away from the land of her ancestors; she sees them again labouring on the sugar plantation at Leonora. The “blood” of defiance, she believes, runs through her family history.

Just when it seems Aleya is emotionally ready and university-primed to come home, her narrative takes a detour. This nice Guyanese man, a student prince of a fellow, comes into her life. They take trips to Stonehenge, Stratford-on-Avon and Brighton Beach. They stay in hotels in Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam. In no time at all they get married and Aleya bears two handsome boys, Arek and Omar. The novel dwells on Aleya’s joy in raising her family. As for the mission to save the world (whose “world”, what “mission” is never made clear) Shah’s quivering prose puts it on hold and asks us to stay tuned.

Meanwhile, news from Guyana keeps flooding in. Her father writes of the situation worsening for Indians, but now Aleya is alert to “the corrosive racism” in his words. She is a very busy woman, traveling around the globe with the World Aid organization, meeting with government officials in Delhi and Kenya, attending conferences; too preoccupied to take on any-and-everybody’s problems. Too besides, she has problems of her own: she experiences what seems like an alien-in-England nervous breakdown; plus this husband of hers is turning out to be a strangely distant, unaccomplished man.

When eventually Aleya comes home she discovers very little has changed. Her parents and her Nani are happy to see her; but the Burnham regime is still in power (though the leader has passed on). Intolerance of dissent and petty tyrannies maintain the order of the day. She returns with impeccable job credentials and finds employment at the Ministry of Finance, but has her dream of revolution come unglued? will the cause she’d hoped to steel her life for survive the distractions of those glamorous years overseas? will her Nani’s self-imposed silence be redeemed?

What happens at the very end of Aleya’s journey is neither here not there. Readers should not be too quick to assume that as first novels go the narrative of Aleya is really the story of author Ryhaan Shah (though the novel is awash in ill-treated souls, stoic suffering and latent fears of recolonisation.)

What a situation!  Educated men and women returning home from university with (what Dehuti looking out from Mohun Biswas’ world would describe as) “modern ambitions”; disgruntled Guyanese setting out on their own desperate journeys (and encountering humiliation at Caricom airports.) As Hat back in Miguel Street would say: You see the sort of place Guyana coming to now?

One can only hope this sentimental novel about personal & political convulsions in and out of Guyana might encourage unhappy readers to stop and think. Not turn inward behind window grilles of ethnic culture; or fly away home on a prayer and a song.

 
Book Reviewed: A Silent Life: Ryhaan Shah: Peepal Tree Press, England                                             (2005), 186 pgs.W.W

[N.D.Williams][Caribbean Fiction][Guyana]                                                            

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 there’s no shortage of academics ready to extrapolate on the human dilemma of being caught in the middle, as it were. For there’s 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 you’d have to look hard to find any period details. Late in the novel the action shifts to 1950s Georgetown and this time you’d 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, don’t 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 isn’t quite up for that challenge. Perhaps the author felt she’d 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 Jagan’s “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 Roland’s friends from Trinidad and Guiana. As she waits for news from him she joins them in the rehabilitation of an old house they’ve rented. Yes, the House of Waiting.

This mid-section of the novel sags with the tedium of the narrator’s waiting and the author’s 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 isn’t too confident depicting Roland’s 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 Party’s 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 (Roland’s) child. And now despite rumors of British warships steaming toward the colony Sarah’s 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 bride’s heart. Not our Sarah’s 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 what’s 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 father’s 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 who’ll no doubt brush aside the novel’s 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 author’s 1^st novel peccadilloes, wishing her talent had been more self-assured, her knowledge of Guiana’s 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]

So how come the Chinese in Guiana(in the days of cork hats, Phensic and quiet Sunday afternoons) didn’t develop an aggrieved sense of being marginalized despite being at one stage poor and oppressed? How do we explain the absence of a heritage group with academic spokespersons and cymbals of oppression and martyrs exhumed for cultural rehabilitation? One simple answer might be that they were too busy taking care of business, the laundry & grocery business; or too preoccupied with educating their children; or maybe they were just too few in number to matter.

 
And when the political climate turned inhospitable and the daily demands placed on life seemed no longer endurable, many simply packed their entrepreneurial skills, memories and family photos in boxes and fled to North America. Not entirely in the spirit of ‘We done wid allyuh’.  Men and women still without a country.

 
For our ethnic argumentalists this might be too facile an explanation, but Trev Sue-A-Quan’s Cane Ripples: The Chinese in Guyana (2003) confirms and explodes some of the myths we still hold about the Chinese. They were perceived, for instance, as blessed with a sense of fair play and race-blind impartiality which made them eminently suitable as cricket umpires. They ran the laundry business for the privileged class who needed neatly pressed shirts, trousers and suits. Sue-A-Quan’s book suggests, however, that the lives of the Chinese were in many ways more humanly complex and less self-absorbed than we might think.

Cane Ripplestaps into the memories of the Chinese community now dispersed around the globe. Their personal histories are presented in the form of  39 ’short stories’, essentially oral accounts based on interviews that cover the Chinese experience in Guiana from the 1860s to the 1960s (a neat, if somewhat arbitrary time frame).
 
The author Dr. Sue-A-Quan went to Queens College in the 60s, studied in England and Beijing and has academic degrees in Chemical Engineering. He has published an earlier book based on research, Cane Reapers: Chinese Indentured Immigrants in Guyana (1999) so these ’stories’ are not the extraneous material from some unfinished academic enterprise.

On face value they offer insights into the fabric of colonial life that might resonate with the experience of other ethnic groups aging in diasporas elsewhere: how they adapted and compromised old beliefs, how they struggled with each other and with themselves, and given the vagaries of chance how they survived and prospered in the city, on the plantations and in far flung villages.

“In the period between 1853 and 1879″, Sue-A-Quan, the researcher tells us, “There were 13,541 immigrants from China who landed in British Guiana, many of them obtained by deception and false promises.”After they’d served their term of indenture most chose to remain. By the end of World War II their descendants were joined by “new” Chinese immigrants but their numbers never exceeded 2% of the Guianese population. (Current estimates put that number down to 1% of the population in Guyana.)

A concentration of Chinese on Crown land along the Demerara river led to proposals in 1865 that they be allowed to establish a colony within a colony. The village of Hopetown became the ‘Chinatown‘ of the day. “Hopetown continued to grow and the 1871 census showed 567 Chinese men, women and children living there. By 1874, the number of residents reached about 800. While there was some cultivation of rice and vegetables, and the raising of poultry and livestock, the Chinese were later involved in the production of charcoal.” (p. 7)

Younger generations, less enthused about agriculture and charcoal, eventually moved away from Hopetown and started new concentrations in and around the big city, Georgetown. They opened new business ventures in jewelry, tailoring, baking, cookshops & cakeshops and merchandising. It is the descendants of these Chinese entrepreneurs, many now retired in Canada, whom Sue-A-Quan contacted. Their memories and stories have been shaped into a book that makes compelling reading. (A book, one might add, that is thank-goodness free of cultural high-mindedness.)

Throughout the monologues there runs the thread of persistent struggle and family networking, of individuals taking gambles and eventually overcoming odds. There are so many “success” stories you wonder at times if matters considered too unpleasant weren’t perhaps subconsciously censored out of these recollections. (A sequel about their newly transplanted lives overseas might be interesting. Did entrepreneurial “success” and contentment follow them in the diaspora?)

There is little comment, for instance, on the imperial context back then; or what Chinese businessmen thought of Jagan’s prepubescent Marxism; or how early they noticed Burnham’s authoritarianism coming. You could put this down if you like to the Chinese wish to maintain a courteous distance from others (as those “others” kept their distance from them.) Or the Chinese “characteristics” (mentioned below) of “reticence” and “circumspection.”

But as Dr Vibart Cambridge in his brief, gracious introduction points out, “Contributors [to this book]  take us into their homes, share family histories, and tell us about the creation of some of Guyana’s most successful institutions and enterprises such as Central High school, Tangs’ Bakery, Lee Bros. Funeral parlor, Wing Lee Laundry, Ace Advertising Agency and Sheila’s Restaurant.” Readers can look forward to accounts of the lives of “successful” Guyanese like Vivien Lee, Ada Akai, J.C. Luck and Emmanuel “Sonny” Chan-A-Sue of the North West.

Their daily lives weren’t buttressed by prayerful allegiance to any of today’s populous religions, though here and there a story teller reveals abiding faith in the teachings of Jesus Christ. Nor for that matter was the adoption of English names at the time a cause for populist alarm and personal distress. Over generations, editor Sue-A-Quan tell us, unions with people of African, Indian, Amerindian and Portuguese origin resulted in descendants with the names Van Couten, Prabhu-Das, Denny, Singh, Saunders, Rayman, Joseph, Wellington, Maloney and Laurent.

Issues of Chinese identity were dealt with by the setting up in 1908 of the Silent Temple Lodge (“aptly named to represent the Chinese characteristics of silence and circumspection” p. 143), then later the Chinese Sports Club in Thomas Lands (which held the Chinatown Fair in October) and the Chinese Benevolent Association opposite St Stanislaus College in Brickdam where the Chinese New Year was ushered in with the traditional dragon dance, though no fireworks.

Portraits emerge of the lives and significant contributions of, for example, Dr I. N. “Dick” Luck (who served as GMO in all three counties), Ralph Lee, the funeral parlour entrepreneur (whose wife constantly reminded him to enter the house walking backward to prevent the spirits of the dead from coming in); fellas at the Sue-A-Quan radio stores who were capable of building transformers and amplifier systems, who installed new speakers in Georgetown cinemas when Cinemascope arrived in the mid-1950s.

The dentist, the shopkeeper, optometrist, barber, nurse, rice miller, tennis player each has a story to tell; though, curiously, there was no Guyanese equivalent among them of a music maker like Jamaica’s Byron Lee.

At times an intriguing revelation jumps out at you. For instance, a narrator speaking of the profit to be made from tree cultivation in the North West says: “A quicker return could be obtained from a tree known as the CongoPump. This produced a softwood that made an excellent brown paper commonly used for wrapping groceries and making paper bags. Attempts to grow the Congopump from seed were in vain but the trees would spring up naturally in an area cleared from the forest by burning. Apparently the seeds needed to pass through the digestive system of toucans and bats in order to get started, and in 10 years the trees were large enough to produce an economically worthwhile harvest.” (p.63)

Some books seem written for our national archives (assuming that institution survives our belated attempts at respect and rehabilitation). Sue-A-Quan’s Cane Ripples should fit well in school libraries and into any school program that encourages student research and independent study. On a certain level it reads as a modest attempt at anecdotal sociology. The editor is at pains to explain local terms that might puzzle world readers, and at the same time fill in gaps in knowledge for so many uninformed adults in Guyana.
 
Given the nation’s current mood to put right post-Independence wrongs, to open up brand new political highways, Cane Ripples might feel like a pleasant exercise in nostalgia, intended for the self-appreciative delight of Chinese in the diaspora (and their curious North American offspring.) Trev Sue-A-Quan, the professional engineer, manages to convey his enthusiasm about an ethnic group and its quiet evolution through generations. Enthusiasm about anything in these debt-relieved, conflict-weary Guyana days is reason for good cheer and is certainly welcome.

Book Reviewed: Cane Ripples: the Chinese in Guyana: Trev Sue-A-Quan, PH.D.  Cane Press, Vancouver, British Columbia (1999, 2003)                                                                                                             -W.W.

[Guyana][N.D.Williams][Chinese][Sociology]