In the same way Derek Walcott’s plays and poems gave breadth & depth of understanding to the way we lived in the Eastern Caribbean, but you had to add rhythms like pepper and sauce from Arrow (“Bills”) or Shorty (“Money eh no problem”) to determine what was really going on in the islands then. It was always so.

 Curiously, Guyanahad no rooted music tradition to spice up the poems of, say, Martin Carter. Most of our homegrown kaisos sounded derivative. Most of the music played on radio or available in stores back then was imported anyway: from India or the UK, Mukesh,  Kishore Kumar or Englebert Humperdinck. Somehow Guyana’s native soil, so fertile in brainy foods (and the mind-baffling prose of Wilson Harris), could not produce an indigenous reggae or kaiso. Even our homegrown Rastas still look and sound today like knotty imitations Made in Korea.

 How this became so someone in academia will no doubt one day attempt to explain. In the meantime readers had to and have to make do with the poetic ruminations – cerebrations, if you like – of Wilson Harris, Ian Mc Donald, Martin Carter A.J. Seymour and Michael Gilkes.

 Michael Gilkes is not first and foremost a poet. Born in 1933 he left Guyanain 1961. The back cover to this collection tells us he is an actor, literary critic, film-maker and playwright; he has lectured at four universities. (Some university students might recall his pioneering book, Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (1975); and how back then its jargon-laden prose for the most part left readers who wanted elucidation as befuddled as the novels it examined.)

 But perhaps his most splendid triumph was the production of his play Couvade in 1972. It was staged again in 1993 but that first outing, at a time of high regional Carifesta excitement, with its narrative of dreams & survival possibilities, will go down as a truly electrifying experience for many who saw it.

 So what should we hope for in Joanstown his first and probably last collection of poems which won the Guyana Prize 2002 for best book of Poetry?

 If the title of the collection makes you groan, take heart; there is not much more of that level of wordplay. Gilkes’ poems might not satisfy your soul, nor shake readers out of complacency with startling images. Sentiments and thoughts tend to surface through bland, often prosaic lines that employ a vocabulary left over – you can’t help thinking – from his academic and theatre writings:

“Everything he did came easily.                         “Walk softly.

 Trees dropped their fruit                                      Keep your voice down

 For him to catch,                                                 Listen to the forest’s voice.

 Fires lit for him                                                   Try not to think of ways

 With one damp match.                                        You could develop this place.”

 Rain filled his bucket to the brim.”                            (from “Rainforest Guide“)

                                 (from “Swimmer”)

 
There are several, fond “When I was young” portraits, a dialect solo and loving snapshots of Georgetown that elicit sweet memories (“Woodbine”, “The Lighthouse” “Water Street“). Some poems are dedicated to old friends and acquaintances (Wilson Harris, A.J. Seymour, Henry Muttoo). Gilkes seems to be speaking from a time and to a generation of vibrant, creative folk now deservedly at peace with the world.

 At one point Joanstown throws up this intriguing thought: “Old men should write, not the young in their prime/their past’s too shallow to enfranchise them.”

His twilight time poems convey a sense of poet-retirees in wicker chairs flipping through a scrapbook of Caribbean sojourns and reveries. And what the twilight says in this collection might not always astound you with passion and insight:

              “If you could free this poem from its page

                you’d understand my futile ague then:

                that old malarial ache, that ancient rage

                that makes old men of poets, poets of old men.”

                                                                 (from “1. Late Sonnet”)

 Rebellious youth might find it worth their time and their poetry to turn away like not-for-me tigers; let imagination take them down solitary trails into opaque areas of inner life, those regions where fearless, self-probing souls have found the reinventive freedom that always eludes the tribe. The pleasant “Morne Fortunes” and “Littorals” of Joanstown provide warm-memoried rest stops; next morning the reader moves on.              

 Still, it bears repeating that, like Ian McDonald (whose memory-enhanced Between Silence to Silence was published in 2004) Michael Gilkes is a distinguished fortunate-traveler in Caribbean Arts and Letters.  The publication of this slim volume so late in his day is a tribute to the man and his achievement. (It’s the kind of culture gap that, in the absence of a regional publishing house, Peepal Tree Press, England has been keen to step in and fill.)

 So where, you wonder, have all the strong, insightful metaphor-wielding poets gone? where are poems with the memorable weight of Martin Carter’s “All Are Involved”? and how come we don’t hear much counterwailing music and world-trodding lyrics from someone with Bob Marley’s towering stature?

 One seductive theory might be that the times have changed: from (a colonial) self-contempt to (a postcolonial) self-romancing. There are multiple undistinguished stars on/off the dancehall stage clamouring for a turn at the microphone to work the crowd, for their 15 minutes of hoarse, anarchic fame. And check those hungry hands in the air, that burst of gunfire in the stands!

 In the new millennial spirit of egalitarianism no burgeoning talent – in politics, business or Sport – dares tower anymore. Towering talent risks attracting awe and envy, charges of selfishness, big wig elitism; then “Who he think he is?”

Too besides there are dueling cultural extravaganzas (fueled by the venting of inanities on media talk shows) being staged in Guyana and the Caribbean.  Some writers and songsters can’t seem to resist the draft into their service: to preserve or showcase our separate heritage; to serenade the victims at ethnic Arrival gatherings where fading memories in this day and age still require from us a song.

What artist, then, will summon the imaginative steel to stand aside and watch?  

 When you think about it, though, even two century-scoring poets batting like heroes for the region’s team can’t assuage a family’s pain from kidnapping, or elevate coastal hopes from the threat of flood waters, or shore up eroding confidence as island economies stumble.

 It’s the way of our new Caribbeanworld! Sound systems (spawned by the genius of Marley) overwhelming contrary voices, individual thought; blocko-blocking any new poet’s vision!
 
O tempores, O mores? No poet, no cry!

Be wary, though. Michael Gilkes’ Joanstown, like the grand-pèrejournalism of Ian Mc Donald, invites you to pull up a Berbice chair, share treasured moments, the “old men’s feverish love of faded things”; enjoy the splash of sunset years over the hills, the rivers and cane fields. Feel good about yourself.

Book Reviewed:

Joanstown: Michael Gilkes: Peepal Tree Press, England (2002)

                                                                                                           - W.W.  [N.D.Williams] [Books]  [Poetry]

Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences (2005) comes with much biographical baggage attached. It is a collection of short stories, but before you delve into the first the author sets you up with a Preface and a three-part Introduction. The book was conceived as a set of stories purportedly written by a group of real-life sixth form students – eleven stories, eleven writers – as penalty for acts of vandalism they once committed. There are portraits of the writers (as students in the 60s) and an update of their lives (as adults in the 90s).

The stories are set in Guyana, “a country which most of [the students] abandoned”, and the group committed the act of vandalism “at a sports club of the Imperial Bank on Friday 9^th July, just over a month after Independence”.

For readers who still live in Guyana, or who might be planning to abandon the country, the concept might prove more intriguing than the stories. Students at our prestige schools could consider this project (minus the vandalism) as part of their farewell rituals: strong sixth form male (or female) bonding, departure for institutions abroad, journal-keeping or blogs that record their progress around the world; and eventually stories sent back home “celebrating” their sixth form idealism, their failed or fulfilled adult lives.

The story tellers of this book are all old boys (and a few girls) of the old St Stanislaus College and the idea might have worked as a template to explore that venerable institution once run by Jesuit priests, the attitudes and assumptions built into the “education” they provided for the sons of the faithful and well-to-do. But McWatt slips away from this challenge to the imagination; his half-and-half stories offer few insights into why “abandonment” of Guyana became so abruptly the only choice for that student generation.

If you’re a Saints old boy (before the school admitted girls) the real-life and fictional names and references might stir some nostalgia. The pertinent question here is: do the stories, as works of fiction, stand on their own? Would a reader born in Lagos or Mumbai – and living now in Leeds, England, or Kingston, Jamaica – pick up this book and be informed? amused? disturbed?

All told, there are rewarding moments, in part because many of the stories deal with ghosts, disappearances and bacoos. (Which would seem predictable for young Guyanese students in the 60s abandoning the old country in a hurry, but in any event) McWatt writes with a priestly devotion that keeps you sufficiently engaged.

 His prose has the strolling decorum of old school Roy Heath; and a few of the stories remind you of Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute: the controlled pacing, the delineation of quaint characters, familiar but strange settings; though there’s a hint of high-toned propriety which might be McWatt’s own signature or perch.

“Alma Fordyce and The Bakoo” is set in a Georgetown Bar & Restaurant and is a droll tale about a naked bacoo in a glass jar whose penis suddenly comes alive to the astonishment of a spinster, Alma Fordyce. In “Uncle Umberto’s Slippers“, the footwear made out of old Firestone tyres disappears after the old man’s death. When they turn up again it seemed as if “in two and half years someone – or something – had put ten thousand miles” on their soles.

 “Two Boys Named Basil” is about mixed-race lads whose lives “seem to have been curiously and profoundly interrelated”. On a school trip climbing the Baracara Falls one Basil disappears leaving the other Basil torn with guilt; forty years later his face reappears Zelig-like in the background of a Guyanese tourist brochure picture.

If some of these mysterious goings-on remind you of Wilson Harris, the connection is not incidental. McWatt’s Guyana is by and large Harris’ metaphysical terrain; his settings are the Pomeroon, the Mazaruni, Kaiteur; characters experience “involuntary shudders” and “realize in a flash what they had known intuitively all along”. And “Afternoon without Tears” – a strong “tribute” to Guyana’s mythmaking genius – is so delightfully accessible, you could be forgiven for suspecting the writer is a Wilson Harris doppelganger.

This collection of stories might unwittingly give our literary tourists the impression there’s a constant flood of shape-shifting phenomena, as unfathomable as Harris’ prose, rushing back down our rivers from the Interior and breaking through seawalls of reason in Georgetown and on the coast. It’s reassuring to know that bacoo stories from Guyana are as common as UFO stories from North America or gravedigger stories from Nigeria. 

A startling inclusion at the end of one story, “The Tyranny of Influence”, are photos of four oil paintings by an Italian painter, Antonello Da Messina. The story is about a Guyanese painter. He stands before a blank canvas; he turns and sees a 15^th century painting in the background of which is a muddy stream of bleached skulls; he leans closer and is drawn inside the painting; he starts walking through the stream and finds himself mysteriously in Guyana’s Interior, wading through a shallow river and stepping over skulls strewn among the boulders.

For the Guyanese reader this is a clever start to an intriguing idea; the story carries you along on some Sci Fi intraterrestrial journey; but the streaming prose rarely rises above “cleverness”, and the glossy prints of the Antonello da Messina paintings stick out like postcards of jarring irrelevance sent back home by a self-confessed “lost” soul.

Several stories deal with sexual awakening. (One ’sex scene’ is set in the Pakaraimas; at the end of it the two former classmates, now grown men, discuss what did or didn’t happen.) The stories set in Georgetown take their time arousing and sustaining interest. McWatt’s prose draws on an ornate, well-stocked vocabulary, and you’re reminded he’s currently a professor in the English Department at UWI: “Liliana had been for years his only source of carnal pleasure…He had arranged her monthly stipend fourteen years ago…In recent years their assignations had diminished to a sad routine…Liliana glanced down at the limp flag of his withered penis, slumped disconsolately against the inner thigh of his left leg.” (“A Lovesong for Miss Lillian“). Saints Old boys from the 50s and 60s might find all this highly gripping stuff.

But what, you wonder, might sixth form students at St Stanislaus College 2005, holding fast to dreams on shaky stilts, take away after reading McWatt’s Suspended Sentences? They might be struck by the lyrical intensity of these sentences near the end of the book: “Over the years the country lurches from one calendrical totem of independent nationhood to another – celebrations of emancipation, Mashramani, the hallowed raising of the flag in memory of that first independence midnight – as we continue to bite each other like bugs in a stinking bed where for years, no warmblooded body of hope has come to lie…” (“The Celebration”). Plenty disheartening news and calendrical “omen” there to take any young reader’s breath away. Not much by way of lessons from the past for a new post-Independence order. More like the old school ‘plague on both your [political] houses’; then flight and abandonment.

Given our churning ethnic anxieties and our ever-shifting economic sands Suspended Sentences is not by any means the book about Guyana you simply must read. Nevertheless, there’s a darkly handsome cover, with a collage of Guyanese images; and the blemish-free typeset of Peepal Tree Press makes for a pleasant way to pass a Sunday afternoon, say, on a Berbice verandah or at an Essequibo hideaway. Any place where sound systems cannot reach you.

Impatient readers, still stuck with or pledged to Guyana, are best advised to bypass the Saints ol’ boys scaffolding. In short, if you prefer your reading pleasure straight, cut to the bacoo!

Book Reviewed:

Suspended Sentences: Mark Mc Watt: Peepal Tree Press,

England (2005)

 First posted March 24, 2000 on GuyanaCaribbeanpolitics.com                                                                                

Fabula Rasais Brian Chan’s second volume of poems. His first book, Thief With Leaf, won the Guyana prize in 1989. This collection is subtitled ‘a book’ and consists of 140 poems, some of them so short they strike the reader as apostrophes, “sketches of essences” as Chan puts it; or wallet snapshots of moods or domestic scenes as in To A Wife which begins: “Your obsession with your duty makes/you customs officer/to my love: I have nothing /to declare of it to you”.

The temptation is to flip through the snaps but that would be a mistake. Chan’s poems demand double takes or careful reading, for his tightly packed images have important things to say about the Guyana that is his homeland and the Canada that is his adopted home.

Guyanese, for instance, riven by racial suspicion, stirring and tasting the stew of majority/minority politics, might be intrigued by his Notions of a Nation, a poem that proffers 10 possible shapes. Here’s one definition of a nation:

                           A space other than the room we

                           Are sitting in, talking about the

                           Other we will never be but are.

And another:

                        A problem somehow to be solved

                          By our Achieving a Consensus

                          Then turning back to our unsolved lives

The poems are suffused with the notion that our differences are illusory. Transplanted to new Guiana worlds, enslaved and indentured, Africans and Indians are in essence kindred souls if only we would reach down and pull out of our entrails the corrosive myths and fears that set us apart. Chan’s poems are therefore dreams he would have us ‘read’ then awake from and recognise our interconnectedness. Nothing new about this, as readers of Wilson Harris might attest. The assertion will not find resonance with merchants of ethnic pride eager to sell us their readings of history, their war cries of cultural uniqueness. 

Some might point to Chan’s own ethnicity and smirk at the calibrated distance that lets him pick on absurdities, or stay away from disenchanted crowds burning tyres in the streets. Still, you can sense some of Martin Carter’s stoicism and anguish in his tight lines. Some of the poems come off as neat solipsistic tricks; so bent on not taking sides, they seem to offer only a sour turning inward. What they do reflect is impatience with what Chan sees as the same old jockeying for ethnic pride of place in a land of displaced peoples.

Surprisingly when he turns inward he shows us no individual fires of his own. The poem Desire suggests that even if one sheds group identity in Guyana personal ambition in Guyana might prove just as futile. Desire, he writes, “fuels itself/burning itself to ash/whose embers wait for the wind”.

You get the sense, though, that survival for this poet requires the freedom of the imagination to disengage from the gridlock of tensions and facile choices and join the world. Some of the titles and dedications offer clues to the alternative world Chan feels he must inhabit if his poetry is to thrive, not shrivel. It’s a world peopled with the jazz musicians Monk, Mingus, Sonny Stitt, as well as Sym-Ra Bhatti, Bernardo Bertolucci, friends in Europe, and “Medieval monks and other Modern men”. On the surface, cosmopolitan tastes.

It is tempting, then, to label his poems as self-insulated, escapist laments; easy to declare: he didn’t stick around like Martin Carter. But the poems are fuelled by a sense of Chan not having left home at all. He may be domiciled in Canada but as he reminds readers in his first collection of poems: “Chan, too much/of Guyana, is no longer ‘Guyanese’/though still in p.j.’s/long after teatime”.

If he must speak directly to ethnic conscripts anywhere getting ready to go to the polls or to the barricades he forgoes the dissolving metaphors, the dovetailing tendency of his lines for trajectories of clear statement. This from Vulgar Row might be his cautionary challenge to the comrades he never left behind:

                       Rather than devour each other to two tails

                         Like two whips, stand on opposite sides of a wall

                         And shout together

Book Reviewed:

Fabula Rasa:  Brian Chan: Peepal Tree Books, England(1994)

First posted on Sept 20, 2002 Guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com

 There are Indians and Indians. Good fiction – not mewling and puking newspaper prose – helps us understand and respect the differences between Indians in, say, Fiji, Trinidad and Jamaica. One could talk of Naipaul’s Hanuman House Indians and Roy Heath’s Georgetown Indians, knowing they came out of separate colonial crucibles, reflecting different formative experiences. This way one can ignore the cries one hears these days from unhappy Indians, many in the diaspora and affiliated with institutions of higher learning, who would have all Indians submerge their psychic differences, gather under some giant pan-Indian tarpaulin, as if to perform a set of intercontinental, self-cherishing rituals for scattered souls.

 Jamaica’s Indians are probably more Jamaican than Indian, when you think about it, though their representation in Jamaican literature is miniscule. Reading V.S. Naipaul’s Biswas, a Guyanese must strain sometimes for communal resonance or self-recognition; his Indians are not our Indians; then again Port of Spain, Shorthills, Arwacas in no way resemble the Courentyne with its backdams and rivers and giant blue skies. There are, of course, Wilson Harris’ Indians who swallow their Indianness and become difficult metaphors for the transcendental points his mythic novels are making. One is delighted, therefore, to engage real Indians in the realist fiction of Rooplall Monar’s Janjhat.

 The temptation is to approach this slender novel with the expectation that like Naipaul the author would tear away veils, show us the humanity in his characters; the private demons they wrestle with in their transplanted worlds; their loves, their fears and hatreds. Though the range in this book is narrower and the skills not as assured (at least back then: Monar has published much more since, including Tormented Wives, 1999)  Monar takes us behind the tattered bamboo flags, under the shiny saris, into the souls of his troubled Indians.

You get the impression, for instance, that when his older Indians are not talking about the Estate days, the greatness of “ahwe culture“, the importance of raising good Hindu sons and daughters and resisting the seductive power of those Christian Sunday schools, their thoughts turn not surprisingly to sex: to women – young, old, too old – their bubbies and wining behinds; and the stained wedding sheets as tests of doolahin chastity. Take away their Indianness and these obsessions are like those of any grey-haired ethnic group in Guyana.

 Monar’s larger concern would seem to be the human desire: transplanted through slavery and indentureship: forced now to deal with new post-colonial dilemmas – the ‘emancipated’ body, its sexual unease, its curious preferences, its ‘modern’ fear of failure. Sex, the great ethnic equalizer. Pointing Indian men to whore- houses in the city. Enticing young Hindu women to try new fashions and fabrics that reveal more than navels and midriffs.

 In Monar’s Indian world creoles are a non-interfering but unsettling presence; creole behavior serves to reinforce the values and norms of wary Indian generations. Big-Bye, the central character, “always admired girls who dressed fancy – pants, short dresses, lipstick, powder – but his mooma…oh, she was against that. ‘Not propa fo Hindu gal dress so…That fo black girl.”  Big-Bye’s mooma worries about the volatile state of his identity: “Sometime me going hear you eating black pudding and souse. You must see Hindi film, never mind you na understand the talking.” (p.66).

 Data, the girl he marries, lived with her parents in a logie “two hundred rods away from the Nigger Yard section of plantation Lusignan”; she likes to swim; she enjoys the sensation of her body submerged in a stream of lilies and moss; but “swimming is not proper for a young girl, her mother always warned.” Young Indian girls are frowned on for dancing with abandon at weddings, shaking their bubbies and behinds. “Only black man doam that.” (p.8)

 A minor theme is this novel is education as a way out of the canefields. The central character’s best friend ’succeeds’ but only because a punitive father keeps his nose to the grindstone of books and ‘eddication’; he becomes a clerk at Enmore Estate Pay Office. Big-Bye, newly married, accepts a life as a mule boy, liming after work at street corners on bright evenings, with visits to the cinema in Buxton on Saturday nights; then returning home to his wife, pulling up her nightdress even if she’s fast asleep. The author might have missed an opportunity to follow the parallel paths of the two friends as they drift apart in their constricted world.

 What Monar does with lighthearted fidelity is examine the anxieties of the young bride who must share living space with her mother-in-law. After weeks of learning the daily routines, the chores and family habits, and despite due respect and loyalty shown, Data feels estranged; her personal identity is all but invisible. She longs for some measure of freedom. “People in the street still referred to her as ‘doolahin’….she wanted people to know her by her name.” (p.76)

 Venturing out to the main road one day she is stopped at the door by the mother-in-law and berated for wearing clothes that show off her shapely hips and breasts. “Take out that monkey dress this minute”  the mother-in-law screams. Reassured that her husband doesn’t mind (“She’s no stupid woman. She’s a modern woman” her husband liked to muse) Data challenges her mother-in-law by stepping out again, this time in tight-fitting pants. And again she runs into generational fury. “Women like them does give the Hindu religion bad name. If them been want wear pants them shoulda turn fullah woman and black woman.” (p.88)

 The novel will move towards its resolution: the three central characters in a house (with its miniature dramas, not unlike the one Mohun Biswas struggles to escape from): a young bride, her husband, her mooma-in-law: the forces of ethnic conformity; the individual’s struggle for personal freedom, for riskier choices; and the creole world, causing disquiet and alarm simply by being there.

 Published in 1989 when – is it accurate to state? – feminism and cultural relativism were not yet full-bodied preoccupations, with a stridency of message and a ripeness of appeal, Janjhat succeeds in striking so many chords at the heart of Guyana’s ongoing ethnic and gender antagonisms. No group exonerating sermons here. Characters bare their fears and longing almost without authorial permission.

 Monar shades in their trembling humanity without pleading some case for the Indian right to exist in a polarized land, since they have always been proprietors of a landscape their forefathers with cutlass, file and fading memories claimed as their stake in the Guyana  here and now. There’s an inward-turning innocence, too, about this humanity; a polite reserve and a substratum of unexamined fear that makes it vulnerable to the tribal animus, the predatory impulses plaguing our land today.

 Janjhathas been praised elsewhere for its preferred use of Guyanese Creole, for its apparent validation of a community whose canal and canefield lives are considered underrepresented in Guyanese fiction, for its depiction of Indians whose dignity and right to exist have been violated at painful periods of our history. Like Oonya Kempadoo’s stylish and more accomplished Buxton Spice, Monar’s novel runs the risk of being co-opted by advocacy groups and touted for its sexual frankness, or its affirmative message.

 In some respects Monar’s Indians are Naipaul’s Indians and Roy Heath’s Indians, for his novel is really about individuals who elect to shape their own destinies while fighting off the johncrows of history swooping at their genitals, peck-pecking at their courage, their hunger for new worlds, untraditional roles, bright possibilities.

At another level, where generations clash, where sexual longing makes us search for salvation in forbidden places, we can hear in the chests of the characters our own shallow breathing, see in theirs our own time-worn faces. In a hop, skip and leap of the imagination we might even recognize our own stupid prejudices and fears in the marginal lives of Monar’s Indians.

 Book Reviewed:

Janjhat:  Rooplall Monar: Peepal Tree Press/Demerara Publishers, 1989

First published August 08, 2003 at GuyanaCaribbeanpolitics.com

 Such was our hunger for new writing, for something contemporary in C/bean fiction, that when Buxton Spice was published in 1998 its author was embraced and showered with superlatives (“rich” “superb” “hypnotic dialogue”). Her second novel faced the unenviable task of living up to all that high praise. Now that the book is out, is Oonya Kempadoo still a writer to watch?  Is hers still an “extraordinary” talent? In many ways, yes and yes. 

 The rush to embrace her has led to somewhat hasty comparisons – with other ‘women’ writers, Jamaica Kincaid, for instance, when her first book Lucy (1991) was published. My hasty comparison was with a young, aspiring Vidia Naipaul who gave us “rich” and “superb” first books of fiction (Mystic Masseur, 1957, Miguel Street, 1959) before his burgeoning talent produced his masterpiece A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). So, is there a masterpiece percolating inside Oonya Kempadoo? On the strength of her second coming, Tide Running, one must wait and see.

 Two things set her apart from the old masters. First, she writes about sex almost as if it never existed until her talent discovered it. Secondly, her remarkably unselfconscious way with our language. Kempadoo has placed her signature on our ‘nation language’ without getting too polemical about it. Mix up her paragraphs in a bag of paragraphs by C/bean authors and you can identify the Kempadoo style: “When my bumsey bump on the sand I feel it stirring ‘gainst my skin. Squingy totee rolling and lolloping like a lump’a sea sponge. Lower down, water shorten me two legs, they snaking.” p. 189

You could say, too, that the Kempadoo ‘bumsey’ is her fictional trademark. It was everywhere in Buxton Spice which dealt with sexual awakening among pre-adolescents in a village in Guyana. It allowed her prose to introduce to world readers exotic-sounding terms for men and women ‘doing it’. In Tide Running she takes it a step forward, describing sexual attraction between an adolescent in Trinidad and a married woman. One suspects the ‘bumsey’ will be central to her masterpiece when she’s prose-ready to deliver it.

 Tide Running is also a development on Buxton Spice in terms of character and plot. In her first novel nothing much happened; it was a collage of people, atmosphere and heated intercourse set against a backdrop of menacing politics in Guyana. As sketchy in portraiture as, say, Miguel Street, though the sharp insight that makes Naipaul’s characters distinct and memorable wasn’t there.

Tide Running moves into new areas of sexual tension: on the beach between American tourists and “renk gigolo fellas”; in the luxury home between the unfaithful wife and the central character. The narrator’s voice has grown up from pre-adolescence to characters wanting to be representative of Trinidad’s young people. One is tempted to declare, as the book jacket does, that this novel “portrays the predicament of young society looking to America for its fantasies and its heroes”. Or that it explores “issues of culture, race and class” in Trinidad. But Tide Running is still too reed-slender to carry such heft.

What happens in the book can be summed up swiftly. Two young men (Cliff and Ossie) are growing up in a “bad place” in Tobago called Plymuth (“most’a the time me and Ossie spends riding them two small bikes Mudda did give us for Christmas” p. 22); they like liming, “sexing plenty girls” and they seem to “lack any ambition”. They meet a liberal-minded couple Bella and Peter (a Dominican woman and an Englishman) who live in a “flim-style” luxury villa. The couple invites Cliff into their home; he becomes a regular visitor, hanging out with them, sliding deeper into their intimate lives; at some point Cliff suspects the Englishman is slyly allowing his wife the space and opportunity to sleep with him. (Enter ‘the bumsey’.) This entanglement of marital love and extramarital desire, plus the erosion of trust as money goes missing lead to ‘complications’ that may or may not be believable.

 A substantial improvement on her first book, you might say. Kempadoo’s strength remains her descriptive power, her poet’s eye for sharp C/bean detail: “White take she complexion too, she dark and smooth skin. Both’a them slim and she tall too . You can’t tell how old she is, the way how she walk kang-a-lang flapping she big foot so, or running race with the li’l boy on the jetty.  Neither the mister, but he is a oldie-youngie. Looks young-young sometimes, and old other times. He have a big gluga-pipe sticking out on he neck and a big biscuit chest, for such a slim fella.” p. 19). You could swim in that pool of words all day and feel at home.

 In a way that might seem ‘modern’ Kempadoo relaxes control and lets her characters talk their talk on page after page, hoping they’d convey a sense of everyday life on the streets, in the court room. ‘Contemporary’ references are plentiful – to Nike, Oprah Winfrey, “Bold and Beautiful”, Michael Jordan, Eddy Grant, Stella’s groove – but these are for the most part time markers with little irony or satire intended. There may not be sufficient density of text for (post-colonial) theorists to sink their ‘meanings’ into; but to describe Tide Running as “a microcosm of contemporary West Indian life” is perhaps spreading adulation too thickly and gratuitously.

 One hears so often the lament that reading habits in our region have given way to passive viewing habits, that reading a good book has been replaced by studying the TV guide. Caribbean classics like Biswas and Palace of The Peacock have achieved their right of place as material for exams questions in secondary classrooms, as texts for deconstruction at tertiary institutions. A new generation of public readers might well be encouraged to whet reading appetites on the novels of Oonya Kempadoo.  

 That longing for guidance in matters of marriage, morals and sex has always been with us. Back in the days readers young and old poured furtively through the pages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (from England) and Peyton Place (from America); or fell back on grubby yellow-edged paperbacks, and the advice columns of Ann Landers. Today’s readers need look no further than Kempadoo’s novels for ‘experiences’ relevant to their day to day concerns.

 The temptation for our highly decorated author (“Premio Casa de las Americas”, 2002, “Orange Prize for Fiction Nominee”, 2003.)  is to succumb to the gush of critical acclaim; to believe the worshipful words of well-wishers who welcome her as a ‘woman’ author, or an ‘Indo-Caribbean’ author; to take on those nah-nahsayers who push her talent aside with the sniffy observation that the Kempadoo novel is little more than a skinny, fast-tempo ‘bumsey’ ride. She may be all that and none of the above. I for one can hardly wait for her third book. One can sense the Kempadoo ‘masterpiece’ not far behind.

 Book Reviewed:

Tide Running:  Oonya Kempadoo: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001, 2003

First posted February 22, 2002at GuyanaCaribbeanpolitics.com

 Apparently in the year of its British publication (1991) The Shadow Bride was shortlisted but did not win the Booker prize for fiction. It would have been a sweet triumph for its author who was born in Guyana in 1926, and migrated to Britain in the 1950s. He has lived there ever since, and has written nine books all amazingly rooted in his memories of Guyana. Not just Georgetown, Guyana. His characters struggle with their destinies in the old Mackenzie, up the Morawhanna, along the Essequibo coast.

 The Shadow Bride is ideal for any Guyanese wanting a book to read on those long flights home from London or New York. You get a sense of traveling back through time to a Guiana as emotionally turbulent and fractious as today’s, though Heath’s mannered prose could wrap you up in its sentence flow or eventually put you to sleep.

 His prose style comes from the difficult but formative colonial period when education mattered; it has an old schoolmaster’s respect for the English sentence; it has been described as “plodding and tedious”, but it’s a period prose with a distinctive charm and correctness. In other same-period writers like Wilson Harris that prose can congeal your senses with swirling imagery and abstractions. (At times you feel the rhythms of Harris’ prose working away inside your psyche like fingers kneading dough for pastries.)

But in these post-Independence days, given the crude enunciations that pass like gas for intelligent discourse on the nation’s TV channels, and the self-congratulating rubbish one comes across in the diaspora press, you could be forgiven a faint nostalgia for Heath’s English, with its ordered good sense, nuanced insights and quiet observations.

 A “modern” Guyanese prose style (with its appropriate ‘modern’ interest in sex) can be found in Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton Spice. There the measured language of Heath gets crushed, heated and reshaped into scintillating, edgy sentences: “…the silver tops of the coconut trees talk to me. They swish and sway and whisper with scratchy voices. Their sharp edges glittering on big-moon night.” (Buxton Spice, 146). Roy Heath writes a meticulously correct prose that requires patience, a leash on our craving for narrative rush and distillation: “The sun had long passed its zenith and cast louvred shadows beyond the palings along a path cleared by the watchers at the gate.” (The Shadow Bride, 40)  From “the old school”, you might say, with “Chapters” and a writerly attention to local detail.

 But back to The Shadow Bride.  It is also an “East Indian” novel, in the sense that its main concern is the vicissitudes of an East Indian family, though Heath half-strips them of their Indianness and shows us vulnerable human transplants whose struggles with colonial conditions, though less spectacular, was just as traumatic as the African creole’s. It questions the fond assumption that East Indians as a monolithic entity or as individuals were somehow insulated by religious belief and cultural practice, and therefore suffered considerably less psychic damage in the colonial era.

 Making this point was certainly not the author’s purpose in writing the novel; but for readers who like to raid fiction in search of sociological analysis and cultural truths this book might prove a resourceful data trough.

 The Shadow Bride is fascinating and instructive in other ways, not the least in that drama of loyalty and responsibility played out between an East Indian mother and her son. Betta Singh, the son (a bright boy who should have gone to Queens College, but was tutored privately instead) comes home after completing medical studies in Dublin.  His mother, Mrs. Singh, has a simple plan for him: set up private practice in Georgetown, and win for the Singh family respectability and pride.  

 Betta Singh has other ideas. He hears stories of the ravages of malaria on the sugar estates. Burning with an idealism (and here one is tempted to draw parallels with a young Cheddi Jagan returning home as a dentist) he decides to take his practice where his skills are most needed; he takes a post as government medical officer for the indentured laborers on the sugar estates. 

 His mother is appalled: Betta Singh, her only surviving child, is throwing away his prospects “by working among the poorest of the Indian poor”. She is a strong, wealthy woman, sustained by her Hindu faith, but she feels a need to keep her son close to home and hearth. “Since your father’s death, I’ve had to face the world alone” she pleads. But Betta Singh’s “thrust towards independence” would not be stalled. “You are from India,” he reminds his mother, “and I was born here.”

Betta Singh’s moving away, and his decision later to marry a non-Hindu woman, leads to bitterness and deeper estrangement. (Husbandless, and now losing her son, Mrs. Singh turns to a Hindu priest for counseling; he moves into her home, first as a “spiritual partner”, then “as their intimacy grew, as her bed mate”.)

 His G.M.O. travels through the sugar estates – Uitvlugt, Leonora, Anna Catherina - bring the son face to face with destitute state of the workers. He sees the women bent double in the flooded rice fields, in “postures of work, postures of prayer, of despair and affection, postures of remorse, of envy, of humiliation and tyranny, of incredulousness, of astonishment and dying.”  He has battles with callous plantation managers over issues beyond the need for quinine to fight malaria. Doubt and self-questioning grip him: “Was he, like Dr Giglioli more gifted for research than general practice?”  At thirty, and wanting a woman’s love, should he marry before it’s too late and make as many children to “justify his existence to his ancestors”?

 The fortunes of mother and son will follow separate paths, each making decisions that bear no relation to that original ground of family legacy and hope. Tragic circumstances eventually bring them full circle; they return to each other and reconciliation seems possible. But what pulled them apart and that interfering landscape have changed them forever as individuals. Heath reveals a ‘modern’ storyteller’s feel for the family saga with its generation gaps, its defining incidents and ironies.

 The novel is filled to overflowing with colonial real life: its supporting cast of Creoles, Muslims, Hindus and Europeans, its subplots and old days description add colour and tension to the canvas of a 1920s Guyana

 The drama of allegiances played out in The Shadow Bride between a controlling mother and her own-way son could be read as a metaphor for that other struggle over displaced souls, between Mother India and Guyana’s East Indians. But the book has other layers of meaning.

 Returning home and making life choices are issues still worked out today by so many of Guyana’s Betta Singhs and Walter Rodneys. The Shadow Bride helps us understand how difficult these choices still are, the sacrifices made (in blood, sweat and meagre salaries); the conflicting loyalties, patria ou familia; and those heart-mauling encounters with tigers of the unpredictable.

 On any flight into or out of Guyana The Shadow Bride would make a fine companion. You might want, next, to move back to Heath’s earlier novels, reissued in The Armstrong Trilogy (1994), even if you’re not from his generation and don’t care much for flying. Understanding the past is so necessary to growth and wholeness, people like to say. First generation novelists like Roy Heath are important to Guyana; they lived through that past; they had the émigré resilience and grit, the imaginative power to preserve chapters of our past before they vanish into history’s footnotes.

 The Shadow Bride does this without sentimentalizing recent history. One hopes the book has found a place on secondary and tertiary school reading lists. It stays faithful to the truth of our human complexity in a prose style that for all its quaintness is set to endure.

 Book Reviewed:

THE SHADOW BRIDE: Roy Heath: Persea Books (1996)

First posted January 26, 2003: Guyanacaribbeanpolitics.com

 Poems of Successionis the only copy I own of Martin Carter’s poems. I don’t plan to buy more recent publications, though they might contain excellent poems missing from this collection. Succession was printed as “the first almost complete collection of the poetry of Martin Carter” and contained poems he wrote between 1951 and 1975. It’s fairly representative of his work, and when he died in 1997 I pulled it out (distressed by the erosion on the book’s spine) and read the poems as a private tribute.

 I’ve been reading them more earnestly since, dipping into the pages whenever there are headlines of “dark times” in the city; or reports of  the “awful sorrow” in coastal villages with names like Friendship, Better Hope; the shuttered houses, the flight of Indians in fear for their lives, the gunning down of police ranks – those painful, malignant things that poison our wellbeing, creating in so many “a bafflement of speech”.

Martin Carter was for me the mapmaker of Demerara’s cities, the way Wilson Harris cartographed the rivers of our soul’s hinterland. Growing up in Georgetown in those globally turbulent 60s, knowing there was a poet who lived in Lamaha Street, across from the train line, who wrote poems about “the leaves of the canna lily near the pavement”; then discovering his Black Friday 1962, that dark time in our history  “when the sun and streets exploded”, and some ran “this way”, while I ran “that way” and Carter was with us all; all this made me feel captured in history, as on film for a time capsule. My life became meaningful. The poet, my hero.

 Reading him closely, thereafter, I was haunted by his images of the city; then found myself resisting much of their appeal. I didn’t question his heart’s authority. He’d written:

                    I know this city much as well as you do,

                   The ways leading to brothels and those dooms

                    Dwelling in them, as in our lives they dwell.   (from After One Year) 

Those dooms dwelling in our lives? Somehow that line struck a dissonant note. It was time, I felt then, to discover my city, my Georgetown.

This meant relinquishing the branch one shared with him, his poet’s high perch from which one viewed through his anguished lens the making of so much history in Georgetown. For although Carter was the kind eagle, “the heart’s life”, soaring in that vast blue Georgetown sky, you felt the perch was, perhaps, too lofty. It made for generalizations that sounded facile and high-flown.

                      In every human city in this world

                      Men murder men, as men must murder men,

                     To build their shining governments of the damned.
(from  After One Year)

 
Those lines had the sweep of some powerful universal truth back then; they left you somehow a little uneasy with the poet’s spectatorial perch, as if Carter was missing grainier insights into our blighted villages, our city streets. (I still hold on to these lines, written in 1972, but with a ring of authenticity for any Lagos or Kuala Lumpur of today:

                        In a small city at dusk

                        It is difficult to distinguish

                        Bird from bat.  Both fly fast:

                        One away from the dark

                        And one toward the dark.
                                                                             (from  In A Small City At Dusk)

 What is alarming (it pains me to admit) is that his poems are losing their significance for me with each passing day. Beneath the much praised craftsmanship, little that resonates remains. The anti-colonial Freedom poems, for instance, I bypass; likewise the Death of a Comrade poems that so enamored academics back in the seventies.  The University of Hunger invites me up on that transcending perch, that view of the eternal verities of the world.  It’s terrible to admit, but I’ve been there! And in any event the world is a more jumbled place these days, some new nations locked-up in narcotic activity, or collapsed in gun-infested swamps. (“The unwanted unwanting the world“, Carter once wrote.)

 Does this mean that for me Martin Carter has become irrelevant? Am I a romantic longing for the pre-Independence days when the railway embankments trembled only from the passing of trains, and hope was “a blade of fury”. Is it fair ask his poems to pierce the new darkness, help us understand the post-colonial time: the city’s uncaring smut, its “festival of guns”? Why hasn’t his quietly built achievement inspired some new talent, some less soaring but equally kind eagle, refracting our capital city where one-eyed sophistry, brazen banditry, the gaping wounds of racial harm would make us strangers again, harden our heavy hearts again?

 Truth to tell, back in my youthful longings of the 60s he was always twinned in my psyche with Wilson Harris, the one examining the fissures in our city, the other pouring over prints of our interiors, appeasing our hunger for larger identities to transcend our origins. You felt at the birth of our Independencethat with these two national treasures, their powerful imaginations enriching nascent souls in classrooms, our humanity would triumph in Guyana. Making their profound kinship with the landscape ours, our nation couldn’t lose its way in the world.

 Perhaps it is a measure of my current despair.  There are lines from Cartman of Dayclean which, like an old stain, refuse to go away:

                             hidden cartman fumbling for a star

                             brooding city like a mound of coal

                             till journey done, till prostrate coughing hour

                             with sudden welcome take him to his dream

                              with sudden farewell send him to his grave.

Haunting, eagle-eyed lines, sharp and portentous.  Is that how he really saw human existence in Guyana?

 Carter didn’t find much to celebrate in his later poems, unless there’s a volume I haven’t read (and, sad to admit, will not acquire). Those short, ruminative pieces written in the 70s (selections from The When Time) with titles like “Before the Question” “If It Were Given” “As When I Was” I find not particularly compelling. Carter seems at this stage to be fiddling elliptically with his talent, the way a man past his prime scratches his balls now and then.  (There are researching scholars out there who will respectfully disagree.)

 What remains, then, on the pages of Poems of Succession are mere intimations of what Guyana could become as a nation.  That instantaneous generosity shown to strangers, a people’s readiness to be each other’s friends. You have to listen hard to find it in the clamorous march of Carter’s Comrade poems. It stayed intact, surfacing through the cracks and divides of the Burnham/Jagan years; it almost disappeared during the armed-forced socialist union of the Comrade years.  I mean, those layers of forbearance, overriding fear and distrust, that got us this far as a nation, that get us through the coastal travails each day.

 I heard it in the music that woke the nation to fresh mornings of labour and hope back in the days of radio; you hear it in that amazing old Guyanese composition “Happy Holidays” which defines our spirit at Christmas. A readiness for friendship that wards off periodic cries for partition; a kindness of heart that sutures communal wounds, offering hope again.

 With luck it will see us through the current slime of lawlessness in Demerara’s towns and villages.  It was always the fertile ground for a new synthesis. Still is, once we’ve found ways to ease debilitating poverty, drain our little gun-infested swamp.

 Book Reviewed:

Poems of Succession:  Martin Carter, New Beacon Books 1977.

And I have seen some creatures rise from holes

And claw a triumph like a citizen

And reign until the tide.

                                           - Martin Carter                                             (Black Friday 1962)

 In this case the novels are For the Love of My Name (2003) by Lakshmi Persaud and Tomorrow is Another Day by Narmala Shewcharan (1994). They look at the political situation in Guyanaduring the ideology-stricken years from the late 60s to the 80s. The first book is so overweeningly conceived one pays attention only to illustrate to aspiring writers what could go wrong when someone however well-intentioned attempts to make fiction out of human misery.

Persaud’s For the Love of My Name suggests she might be unaware of the range of literary tools available to writers. She chooses allegory. She invents a fictional place, Maya. It’s a generic dictatorship, a place divided simply into country Mayans and urban Mayans. There is a layer of moral simplicities – the country Mayans are hard-working, long-suffering innocents, the Urban Mayans evil and oppressive folk. On top of that, lending the book some seriousness, is a patina of psychological theory, a theory of ‘masks’.

 The oppressors wear “purple masks of different hues”. The wearers, rewarded for their loyalty, soon form a “Cult of Masks”, and when their behaviour degenerates into thuggery they are known as “the Masked Ones”. For our reading pleasure Persaud gives the theory a writerly twist: “Later, I saw that as these masks became worn, losing their pristine freshness, as their smoothness wore off, as the surface colour, the art began to fade, the underlying construct, the framework of terror beneath came to life in all its starkness, its gut energies.” (p.50)

 It is hard to sustain much interest in characters wallowing in this conceit. On a fairy tale level it might work but in a novel purporting to examine human conduct (or reflection on that conduct) the device feels limited and contrived. Perhaps Persaud has in mind an uncritical Guyanese readership given to bouts of wailing at its ethnic walls; or world readers (and academics) eager for ‘data’, however scabrously written, on postcolonial nation-building. 

 A list of Maya’s social ills develops in chapter after chapter of weighty talk, all of which would be familiar to Guyanese: food shortage, trade in contraband goods, official corruption, stuffed ballot boxes, a ‘conspiracy of silence’ among regional govts, universities and NGOs, the banning of news print, racial distrust and antipathy. If to Guyanese ears all this sounds like so much background music Persaud doesn’t mind replaying it. For the Love of My Name is determined to make a generic statement about generic tyranny; it is, as the publisher’s blurb claims, a novel “whose echoes resonate across the killing fields of Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor“. Killing fields? Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor? Guyana?

 There are multiple narrative voices, all embroidered by Persaud’s lush sentences, few of which sound credible. It’s the author’s even-handed attempt at a moral kaleidoscope. As if to share blame all around we hear the confessional ‘voices’ of Maya’s President (setting the record straight), the President’s sister (offering close family insights on the President), a Marxist opposition leader (indicting CIA machinations, defending Marxism). Other voices are hard to identify but their function, it seems, is to fatten the book with much opinionated talk, much heart-wrung reflectiveness. 

 Performing what is essentially a ventriloquist act Persaud sometimes asks her ‘voices’ to present highly articulate discourse even in private conversation. Here is Lionel Gomes, a Minister of Finance, speaking with Maya’s President: “But, you say, the cabinet is in a hurry. If so, they are hastening the fall of the Government, like something possessed, unable to stop the rush over the cliff. When the Government comes to this precipitous end – but my metaphor is wrong, when the fall comes there will be no mighty crash. No! You wouldn’t hear a sound, because there would be nothing there – puffs of hot air.” (p. 145)

 Kamelia, a strike activist, rallies her fellow workers and exhorts them to stand fast in language borrowed from a 15^th century Joan of Arc: “To the bridge, the bridge, to the bridge,” she cries so fiercely that they do her bidding. (p. 26). She is cut to pieces by a police-operated tractor at which point Persaud’s prose switches genre and becomes a script for a TV movie shoot: “The circling corbeaux are descending. They smell blood spurting. The blade is splashing red. It pitches, trickles, then congeals. Two pieces of a body entangle. The blade takes them. A twisted ankle, a swollen foot constricts movement forward for it hangs before the closed gates like a cross bar.” (p.32) How the novel ends every Guyanese would guess correctly, though Persaud signs off with her own embellishment, borrowing a line from a familiar song: Where are the clowns? Send in the clowns.

 After 200 pages – the writing at times lyrical, more often leaden with allegorical gravamen – the reader begins to sense a blurring sameness of tone (the made-up names often repeated remind you how calculated the whole book is). A feeling of fatigue sets in. To read 49 chapters of bloated prose simply to discover there are good vs. evil conflicts in the world, that greedy despots ride roughshod over virgin nations, that people commit senseless acts then find the best words to vindicate them – all this is far from galvanizing news. It is tempting to conclude that For the Love of My Name is Persaud’s elaborate, prose-purple masque for her disenchantment with everyone and everything in Guyana during the time she lived and worked there.

 Victims of state-inspired violence and displacement have been on the move across the globe for decades. Television images – from Myanmar, Haiti, Sudan– engage our faraway sympathies but do not satisfy a longing to understand ‘man’s inhumanity’. Works of fiction, if they attempt to go beyond sensational reportage, if they wish to engage us at that inner core where we feel interconnected and responsible for each other, need be careful not to grind down the spirit with overwrought accounts of what the reader already knows. 

 One ends up feeling sympathy for Persaud’s characters. The bovine positions they must assume on the page, the puppet language they speak and breathe!

 Since literary imagination fails human suffering in this novel – the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante attempted something similar and more technically accomplished in Three Trapped Tigers (1967) – we must wait for the turbulence of those grim years in Guyana’s history – that strip of history immediately after Independence through which fledgling nations often stumble and come to grief – to be explored with less embittered intelligence. Wait, that is, not for some single definitive text. For as many versions and genres and (im)partial testimonies as can be assembled over time in a constellation of truth-searching (“bringing difficult news from the past”, as Wilson Harris puts it).

 Tomorrow is Another Day is a first novel by Sharmala Shewcharan, a former journalist in Guyana. Her book is set in the same turbulent period, the 60s to the 80s, but her ambitions are tempered by her untried first-novel skills. It opens on an interesting premise. A young man, Jagru Persaud, decides to switch allegiance and join the ranks of the ruling Govt. Party. This decision raises anxieties among family and friends and hints at betrayal of his race, abandonment of his party comrades.

 He has taken this decision because, as he says, “it was a matter of survival”. His wife is “a monument of silence” but his mother, retired from the cane fields, supports his decision. Shewcharan in the opening pages introduces the central theme of the book: survival – the difficult choices ordinary Guyanese faced back in those harsh, strangled days. She writes about the folk she knows best, the Indians in Guyana, but her touch is light on the ethnicity of their dilemma. As we follow Jagru Persaud we empathize with his growing sense of isolation, his fear he might have made an ethnically incorrect decision.

 Once he becomes part of the govt. elite complications develop. Shewcharan rushes Jagru Persaud quickly towards his first test of character. Slated to speak at a rally of the ruling party, and with the PM in attendance, he gives an impressive performance, “saying the right things”. But while he’s welcomed aboard the ship of state his never-asleep intelligence alerts him to perils ahead: “It was all coming apart. There were too many ministries and too many state corporations filled with talentless party bureaucrats, and over the year productivity had declined and corruption and inefficiency had grown.” (p. 51)

 Shewcharan presents Jagru Persaud as a fairly decent man, unsure of his status but eager to put his university skills in service to the nation. When he asks a party official what he’s expected to do in his new post at the Secretariat he’s told: “Relax. Enjoy life. When they want you to do something they’ll tell you.”  His still undefined but well-paid post brings with it perks and privileges. It presents a challenge to his integrity, how willing he is to exploit new ‘connections’ to get his daughter into a top school.

 Shewcharan writes a simple, unadorned prose. Unlike Lakshmi Persaud she shows no wish to be stylishly evocative. The ruling Party leader in the book is referred to as PM Rouche. (In Lakshmi Persaud’s novel he is given a grand- standing name: Robert “Maximus” Devonish). She hints deftly at how social relations can be distorted in times of repressive rule. One character laments: “Weddings going out of style. Nobody wants the police prying in their pots to see what contraband they’re using to feed the guests.”  There are amusing (Guyanese) moments as when Jagru Persaud on his first day in office hears the phone ring and wonders who could be calling. It’s his mother; she was just “trying out the phone”.

 After a promising start the novel loses substance and focus.  Much of Shewcharan’s first-novel unsureness of hand becomes apparent. Clichés and sentimental passages take over the narrative; the book fragments into filmsy scenes that rush toward a resolution of regret. Survival for Jagru Persaud remains a political issue (there’s a campaign to clean up corruption in his office; despite the paranoia this engenders he remains relatively unscathed; then out of the blue he’s given a title and authority in the Secretariat) but Shewcharan throws up a new dimension, switching the focus to his personal life and asking: will his marriage survive?

 Jagru Persaud is attracted to another woman; his wife is suspicious and resentful; his wife allows herself to be seduced by a good friend of her husband. The novel slips into melodrama and the central character’s political survival is no longer its main artery. (Never fully sure of himself he settles into a self-questioning passivity and near the end he’s accused of ’spying’ for the party he left.) A secondary, female character, Chandi, struggling to raise her five children alone, is given some subplot life but not much range to develop.

 Tomorrow is Another Day was intended to tell a story about the unexpected consequences of desperate choices in desperate times. The authorial voice is tranquil and Shewcharan shows an understanding of how civil society breaks down in hard times: the ulcerous uncertainties, the same-topic conversations, dark crimes. The novel promises more than it finally delivers but, published ten years ago, and taken in tandem with Persaud’s For the Love of My Name, it offers a benchmark that helps us measure how far Guyana has come under new management in its 2^nd phase of nation-building.

 Books Reviewed:

For the Love of My Name: Lakshmi Persaud: Peepal Tree Press, England (2000, 2003)

Tomorrow is Another Day: Narmala Shewcharan: Peepal Tree Press, England (1994)

                                                                                                                                  -

Back in the days of British Guiana when tolerance, if not trust, plus false modesty and muted animus helped the colonized races get along, mixed-race individuals moved like shadows among us. For anyone curious about their ‘role’ in pre-Independent Guyana Jan Carew’s early novel The Wild Coast provides a useful window. Carew himself (b. 1925) is of mixed race so it’s safe to assume he knew what he was writing about. The book is out of print now and its author has moved on to become a distinguished Professor; he has written many important works, fiction and non-fiction, on issues of Pan African cultures.

 Since The Wild Coast is a work of fiction one must be careful not to read it for sociological insights. Carew seemed more interested in showing publishers that a colonized people, or their representatives, could think about themselves and write good narrative fiction. There are strong colourful characters, many situations of personal conflict, those cultural paradoxes one comes across in colonial settings, plus “vivid” scenes, settings and prose.

 Writing

His mixed-race central character is a boy. What concerns him is not his “mixture”. Choices in British Guiana then were simpler: towards a legitimizing colonial “whiteness” or the downgraded creole “blackness”. Readers hoping this would turn out to be a book about the growth of consciousness, or the anguish of a divided self might be disappointed. What Carew gives us is more of a coming of age tale, from boyhood through a man-child phase to what the author describes as his “pristine manhood”. That path towards manhood is determined primarily by his experiences in the black creole world.

 Hector, the boy, lives a sheltered life in the city but at age nine he yearns for a life that is more adventurous. He envies the life of a black boy, Togo, his freedom to play with the tenement children, his “cunning and enterprise”. In contrast Hector is described as sickly and like his mother “secretive and locked inside himself”. On his first boyish adventure he roams the streets of the city, taking a giant step into the creole world. He meets a vagrant named Mr. Dodo – “an old black man with big alligator eyes” – who just happened to know about Hector’s family history.

 Hector’s grandfather, he tells the boy, was Busha Bradshaw, a man with a weakness (or an appetite) for women and liquor. Hector’s father, Mazaruni Bradshaw, made a fortune in the diamond fields and owns a store in Camp Street. He, too, has a weakness for women and liquor. Mr. Dodo ends this scene by expressing the hope Hector would be a “better man” than his father.

At this point one anticipates a book about the moral and spiritual development of a mixed-race boy whose father, when he finds out about Hector’s venture into city streets, beats him badly for his disobedience, and wonders if he “had spawned a cipher and not a son”.

 To aid his self-development Carew dispatches the boy to the wild coast, the Courentyne. Not the Courentyne of East Indians, rice fields and Hindu rituals. He is sent by his father (as punishment for his adventure in the city) to a creole village named Tarlogie. There Hector will continue his forays into the black creole world. He would spend five years in Tarlogie and receive private tutoring, pass important exams, and grow to manhood. Returning to the city his choices are clearer: a university future abroad, or off to the diamond fields like his father – burdened with the “freedom” to do as he pleases.

 Tarlogie is a dismal place. It is an environment “ruled by a cruel sun”, known for its swamp, forest, mud, the occasional drought and floods, plus all the marks of post-slavery hardship. But Hector’s father has an estate there, a “big house” set apart from the villagers’ huts on stilts, with servants and a black matriarch who “was working for the family before your papa born”. She knows “all the family secrets”, like the Bradshaw “mad blood” and the Bradshaw profligate way with women. She knows, too, the identity of his mother whom Hector never knew.

 Hector is perceived as “master of the village” and he conforms to villagers’ perception by acting like his father, with Bradshaw “reserve” if not aloofness. Not for one moment does he forget his position of privilege and fortune. Eventually he will experience “wild urges” and impulses and in fulfilling these he will make the transition from man-child to manhood.

 His first big act of wildness is with Elsa, “a samba woman”, who just happened to be the former mistress of his father. (She grew tired of the relationship and told him one day in a fit of creole candor: “I scraping you off!”) Young Hector is unaware of her past. He doesn’t actively pursue her. In fact, he is at once “repelled and excited” by her and he allows himself to be seduced. (He “sucks at her nipple” and Elsa eventually “drains the sap out of him”.)  

 This encounter and the second (for Hector goes back for seconds) gives young author Carew the chance to demonstrate his descriptive powers (A different author, say, Naipaul, depicting life in a rural setting, say, Green Vale, might have opted for more precise brushstrokes).  Here Tarlogie is presented as simply a place governed by ‘the unruly forces of nature’. Carew writes passages that back then might have been considered “colorful” if not steamy: “Elsa wrapped her legs around him and her animal smell attracted and repelled him in the same way it had done the first time he had laboured with her. She kissed him, using her tongue like a serpent’s and he knew that he did not want to escape her anymore.” (p.165)

 (It should be pointed out here that Carew’s prose is drenched with animal images: an old man has a “raccoon laugh”, “labaria eyes”; a woman “sobbed and whimpered like a sick baboon”. Other characters have “eyes like swamp water” or are “serpent-tongued”. Living with a woman, one character says, “is like walking cross a swamp full of alligators, you might get through with couple bite; you might even get through without nothing happening at all; on the other hand you might even end up piece meal in some alligator stomach.” p.83). In this novel the ungovernable forces of the colonial landscape touch every human act and feature.)

 Hector learns to hunt geese. In another wild moment he comes upon the plight of a jaguar surrounded by wild hogs, a victim of “a flurry of bristles and dripping tusks”. He feels a rush of the Bradshaw “mad blood” and attempts to save the jaguar. This desire to shield the innocent surfaces again when superstitious villagers attack Dela, his father’s Amerindian mistress, whom they perceive as responsible for the sudden death of the long-serving black matriarch. Hector steps forward and shouts, “Leave her alone”. The villagers back away.

 Central to his growing up is his contact with Africa, in the form of the shango rituals that survive on the wild coast. Hector is drawn to a wind-dance ceremony out of “curiosity”, we are told, about his “roots”. Carew’s description of this ceremony is consciously crafted and detailed: an altar for sacrifice, a ram goat, a sword dance, the beheading of the ram goat, the “slow monotonous beat” of drums, the head of a fowlcock bitten off and spat in a fire, chants of the high priest, dancing girls.

 And Hector’s reaction to all this? “Hector found himself laughing, shouting, sobbing. He broke away from the ceremony and headed for the swamp.” One isn’t sure what to make of all that laughing, shouting and sobbing. What Hector does next after he “breaks away” is far more interesting. The ceremony sends him through the swamp to the door of “the samba woman”, Elsa – she lives at “Maiden’s Head” – where after some cajoling he finds himself at her breasts “labouring with her” one more time.

 Hard to tell how readers today with sharpened ethnic sensibilities would react to Carew’s novel if it were available. Young Amerindians, more omnipresent and socially active, might wince at the depiction of the sole Amerindian woman in the novel, Dela. She is brought to the city as a replacement for Mazaruni Bradshaw’s concubine, a role she accepts with little fuss. At seventeen she is described as wearing “the disciplined inscrutability of her people”. She has “the gift of quietness” and is “clever” at not understanding a word of English when it suits her. East Indians are few in this book. The most prominent is Laljee, a chauffeur to Mazaruni Bradshaw, a man of “oriental patience”, whose “oriental breadth of vision enabled him to regard his master’s interests and his own as one”. (Laljee is quietly saving his money for the day he can invest in a salt goods shop.)

 Staying close to the conventions of realist fiction (which his mixed-race author and contemporary Wilson Harris eschewed) Carew gives readers an ample spread of colorful peripheral characters, plot twists, the neat pairing off of interlocked souls (a childless woman lives for 25 years with an abusive man who has swollen testicles; finally she kills him) amusing colonial juxtapositions (as when two characters discuss the merits of Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn while just outside one can see “a donkey cart bumping along the public road with clay pots full of water. Behind it women… carrying earthenware jars on their heads.”)

 This issue of the divided self has been dealt with by other mixed-race Guyanese authors, notably Mittelholzer, but perhaps not with the same sharp-focussed directness. In another setting, say, Jamaica, and with the prose management of a different mixed-race author, say the late John Hearne, Hector’s journey to manhood might have ended with his crossing class privileged and income boundaries, subsuming his “redness” in the adopted faith of born-again Rastafari.  Or maybe not.

 In any event The Wild Coast is very much a piece of social drama representing a specific time, place and authorial ambition. It has the confident realist prose of an author who knew what Guyanese thought and felt about each other at that time. At the end Hector, grown up but not necessarily mature, takes his father (in the grip of the Bradshaw “madness”) back to the city. The Tarlogie villagers prepare to carry on their dreary folk lives.

 The Wild Coast is a story about that slowly vanishing Guiana past. You could argue it’s a book about perceptions, prejudices, scorn, deprivations, shifty loyalties, dark little secrets and selfish desires among colonized peoples, not yet ready for civil discourse and full nationhood. Some of these “perceptions” and “dark secrets” impair our vision even to this day.

 Book Reviewed:

The Wild Coast:  Jan Carew (Secker & Warburg: 1958)

Two not so recently published works of fiction tell us a great deal about the preoccupation these days of Guyanese writers and citizens at home and abroad. Cyril Dabydeen’s Berbice Crossing (1996) is a collection of short stories. Moses Nagamootoo’s Hendree’s Cure (2000) isn’t sure what it wants to be so the publisher has subtitled it, “Scenes from Madrasi Life in a New World”. Both books have been published by Peepal Tree Press in England which prides itself in bringing to world readers “the best in contemporary Caribbean writing”.

 Cyril Dabydeen is the more prolific of the two writers, meaning he keeps busy writing. From all accounts, he has published more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction and written scores of book reviews and articles. Moses Nagamootoo was a Minister in the Guyana Government and this is his first venture into fiction.

 This is more than a parable of ethnic identity. Dabydeen’s point might be that the Guyanese male psyche is prone to grandiose musings. Our men are straggly-haired dreamers, our women more down-to-earth realists. The story despite its prefab structure gets your attention, and the point is worth considering.

 The other stories don’t always live up to the expectations of the first. As in any collection one or two are slight (“Canary Joe”); the title story is determined to achieve multicultural significance. Another, “The Albino” (about a solution to Guyana’s electoral politics, running a candidate whose indeterminate racial background might appeal to the major ethnic groups) is pure Suffrage of Elvira in its comic ambition and almost succeeds; the imaginative shaping of material, an economy of line elude Dabydeen.

 The central problem seems to be language. Writing fiction, one suspects, doesn’t come easily to Dabydeen the way it did to Naipaul or Sam Selvon or our own Rooplall Monar, all of whom worked the short story genre and could be considered natural-born story tellers. Dabydeen tends to strain for his effects and often tumbles back into banal sentences. Good ideas get lost in a lyrical spillage of words.

 In “Across the River and Into the Tree” two young lovers find the courage to run away from an old patriarch and the old ways of pressured marriage. Dabydeen develops their across-river longing for each other but the story founders on sentimental clichés with the fall of the tree and the collapse of an older patriarch: “He dead…Haroon repeated the word, like a refrain. Outside, the wind kept hurling; thunder cracked and everyone started to run away from the bridge, the river, the spreadeagled tree…”

 A static quality sometimes prevents the stories from going anywhere interesting. The narrative stalls and Dabydeen appears to be doing verbal push-ups on the page. In “Go Tell Crosbie” he sets up the tension between mixed-race young Bibi who is being pressured to yield to the lust of Overseer Simpson (“a white man, a man with power”). Tense dialogue gives one a sense of the pain and indecision Bibi feels, but when finally they meet – “in the wilderness of the racing bush”(?) – third-persona Dabydeen cannot resist a rhetorical flourish: “All the indentured, all the enslaved, all you who have crossed the dreaded Middle Passage in the holds of ships… will you witness?”

 Vidia Naipaul in a recent book A Way in the World reminds us of our complex humanity – ‘the mystery of our inheritance’ – when he writes: “Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings… We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited.  Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.” In the title story Dabydeen attempts to examine his ’strangeness of being’ as he makes his way in the world. He goes back as far as his grandmother and his aunt in rural Guyana. He uses multiple space breaks and the metaphor of swimming to suggest a journey from his childhood background to his new alien residency, a process of psychic disconnection and reconnection.

 We get a sense of the author’s struggle with memory and consciousness (at some point it gets transformed into a generalized immigrant struggle). Using his poetic talent he labors mightily to give the story weight and resonance. “Where was I? Moving East? Making up for lost time in this Middle Passage, my own caravel, a slave-ship, carrying me along without astrolabe or quadrant. Only my heart’s instinct, without tide or stars.”

 It is a bold, necessary effort of any Caribbean writer, to grapple with ’strangeness’ in any new context, whether Toronto or New York. The older Windrush writers didn’t make an all-consuming mission of it, but back then race, ethnicity and culture were not the huge national preoccupations they are today.

 Dabydeen is a professor at a Canadian college. He has ‘worked in human rights and race relations’. Moving to Canada he has acquired an “Asian and Caribbean identity”. This might explain why much of this collection seems so determinedly upscale in its aesthetic appeal. His characters lose their individual humanity and become representative of this or that cultural quirk, regional obsession. Needless to say, there is a vocabulary of hyperinflated discourse (“cultural hybridity” “alienation” “binary categories”) waiting to snap up fiction like this. But even within academe readers might groan at the highly self-conscious artifice they must chew through to get to Dabydeen’s meanings.

 Moses Nagamootoo’s Hendree’s Cure is a curious hybrid of a book that “goes back” too. The story is sandwiched between a Foreword and a Prologue, then an Epilogue and a Glossary of Terms. The subject is the Madrasis of Guyana and there is the assumption that a context of ‘culture’ is necessary even for the Guyanese reader.

 Nagamootoo displays his seriousness of purpose right from the start. A female character, Koolain, is introduced in startling sensuous detail. “She was a tough-talking weeder, who smelled just as tough: a mixture of bagasse, trench water and tobacco…He knew that men had desired her – and she was desirable with long hair reaching her broad hips, silver rings in her nose and hefty bangles adorning her ankles.”  For anyone curious about physical attraction among the Guyanese working class on a sugar estate in 1914 this is a revealing passage.

 Hendree’s Cure shifts the reader’s focus between documentary and fiction. One is reminded of the kind of literature the Soviets demanded of their writers back in the USSR, an historically-rooted representation of the working class: ’socialist realism’. Nagamootoo (leaping nonchalantly over decades in the first chapter) supplies need-to-know information to shore up his narrative skills: “In the years 1953 and 1959 the village saw immense transformation. A large Hindu petty-bourgeois class flourished on rice growing and cattle-rearing, while the Madrasis expanded their fishing enterprises, Naga not least among them. Several local capitalists had emerged in wholesaling businesses, trucking and building contracting. The village was producing its first intelligentsia from high school graduates.”  (Naga is the offspring of Koolain so sensationally described earlier.)

 A social context is provided for us to follow the growth of his characters. There is also a cultural context, overt references to Hindu rituals, songs and scriptures. And a political context, mention of Ghana’s independence in 1957 and the Jagan/ Burnham split after 1953. At some point the reader begins to suspect that Hendree’s Cure is a book about the heroic struggles of the working class, a book about a once oppressed or ignored or marginalized minority, in this case the Madrasis. Proper reverence and ideological perspective would seem therefore (pre)required.

 Death among the Madrasis, for instance, is presented in terms of ‘the colonial struggle’. “When a canecutter died, his death was invariably blamed on the colonial vampire, the expatriate British sugar barons. Villagers would comment with certainty: “Bookers done wid he.” Love and desire is placed within cultural parameters. A young woman, Aydoo, is attracted to Hendree as he plays drums. Imagine this: “She stared at her master drummer, she vigorously clapped her bony hands until they felt as warm as they did in the mornings when she tossed hot roti from her tawa and clapped it in the air…Aydoo closed her eyes and pictured herself as a drum being caressed by the fingers of the drummer. Her small breasts heaved with desire, and she felt pain in her nipples. Desire drummed in her heart.”

 And someone in politics is bound to accuse (Minister) Nagamootoo of settling old scores. In this book poor Lionel Luckhoo is summarily dissed: “He was pitched in battle against the young Cheddi Jagan, the working people’s hero. In politics, Lionel Luckhoo was a failure, despised among the poor, barefooted people as a lackey of the colonial establishment. He was much more successful as a classy turfite, with appetite for good racing.”

 The publisher’s back cover praises Hendree’s Cure for its faithfulness to Madrasi culture and its author’s use of “pungent and elegant creole”. One can’t be sure what this means. Pungent? As in: “You betta pray dat a shark eat you rass in de water because if you come up hey, ah gon ram de line pole up you behind.” ? (The Madrasis like many Guyanese – and many Jamaicans, of course in a different context – seemed fond of the word “rass”.)  And elegant?  “Ah don’t know why Gad didn’t mek man’s seed fu hang up every time man lef house. Only dat gon satisfy dem blasted jealous women.” ?

 Who Hendree was and what malady his ‘cure’ was meant for seems unimportant in this scheme of things. For Hendree’s Cure the reader must be prepared to demonstrate extraordinary patience and cultural reverence. The prologue and epilogue offer supportive history. How significant the book is for the Guyanese working class today is another matter. If, however, you were hoping for a book with tolerable layers of ’social realism’, not ’socialist realism’, a book that moves you to think about the future, not dwell on the past, if you prefer your fiction and culture served in separate bowls, then Hendree’s Cure will drive you faithfully to repeated steuuups. So, too, will Dabydeen’s Berbice Crossing, though for different reasons.

 These examples of recent fiction from Guyana seem fraught with the problems that beset our post-independence politics. But for our dwindling reading class and any aspiring young writer all is not lost. There are always the old masters: Mittelholzer, Carew, Wilson Harris. Enduring models: The Kaywana Trilogy, The Guyana Quartet.

 Books Reviewed:

 Berbice Crossing and other stories:  Cyril Dabydeen: Peepal Tree Press, England (1996)                                                                                                                      

Hendree’s Cure: Moses Nagamootoo: Peepal Tree Press, England (2000)