"Fu tru a libi faya / "Truly, life must be f ' wi masra Gado" / tough for the Lord." ̶ Johanna Schouten-Elsenhout, "Virtue"
Vowed they would fix it, the flat tired nation, with memory wound stitched, fiefdom pulp beats. Now fine tempers bruise under their skin pecking orders, timers for youth oven access; the belt loose No, please! shielding. No lift tools, stems wait wilt. What foot stool custom helped them up there, coin chests saddled upon you? Dot titles sharpening names, blade fall, the old imperial drum role; things that matter less or more ̶ brace to jump the track rust of grail service. The wage estate's in shambles. Strip gangs burn cane reeds tender on strike dates. I run with you I clear ash swirling air strips for you.
Their frog throats swell, low copy high swallow. Here's a path for unexploded shells: spear tip the crab fist pounding up through mud; seize the scuttled shore before the tide plays out and longing dried in the sand holds, in the belly pincers.
Through thread veins, breath not ceding, run our conspiracy file ̶ did the barrels shipped back make it past the organ swellers? inside you tossed on beds of river weeping? Paddle, glide like Amerindian; take for your parting prow this hand, our midnight chart through forest quiet.
I sing paint dream you ̶ You there, stay the course! ̶ I follow ways you stream, you swat the Admin's crevice fingers. I wait with ointments, with oxygen tent, Enter keys. On heart shelves, our expectations lined up, I reach and dust spines of raptures chiming; not a grain slips by, Oh those glassed hours. -W.W.
ATTRACTING A BRIGHT ANGEL
with the hint of a horn to a quiet song, I know you at once, your body all wings of light lifted by its own music's waves of sure breathing, yet hovering between magnets of recognition and routine, desire and duty, ah-yes! and oh-well, your smile a mask of baffled power, of your admission of now-or-never, a chance you first deny through the exit to never, before turning back to charge our one heart's battery, your eyes' light over- flowing its chalice towards my hunger to be graced by the wingtips of your breath.
One morning a student announced that Xavier had been in a fight: he cut a boy with a box cutter, they took him to Lincoln Hospital; they gave him ten stitches to close the wound. Her heart scorched, Judy turned away, her face cringing in disbelief.
This could not be true. First of all the girl telling the story, Shanequa Washington,was pregnant, and had this habit of crooning to herself and rubbing her stomach. When she wasn't doing this she was recounting frightening incidents of life and near death on her block. The girl wanted attention, plain and simple. Sitting there relaying wild stories, and eating vanilla wafers as if they were candy ̶̶ how could anyone take her seriously?
When eventually Xavier returned to class Judy Weiner searched his face for clues to the incident, for signs of remorse or triumph ̶̶ anything! She walked over to where he sat. "How are you feeling this morning?" Sensing he was in no mood to talk she went back to her desk.
At least he was here, in the classroom; brooding and solitary, but here ̶ not out in the hallway running wild in a pack. As for all the talk of violent behavior, Xavier was too smart for that.
Two weeks after the alleged face-slashing incident Xavier disappeared. His guidance counselor sent his teachers a note informing them he'd been arrested on an undisclosed charge; he would be out for an undisclosed period. Judy Weiner wanted to know the circumstances. The counselor offered few details.
The day he returned ̶ wearing his black or gray clothes and bright sneakers ̶ it was as if he'd taken a short vacation. He walked up to her desk and handed her papers from the courthouse; no need for further explanation. Then he went to his desk and put his hooded head down in a way that said, Leave me alone.
She glanced at the court papers, then pushed them away. She was relieved and happy he was back. She had no wish to probe the circumstances of his arrest. He'd probably had enough of questioning. The important thing now was to get him back on task. "New software came in while you were away, " she said. He didn't answer.
At moments like this when he sat all coiled up, hard as granite, she felt helpless, unable to do anything for him; and afraid she'd set off some sim- mering outburst. She couldn't bear to see him like this, all folded in, shut away under his hood. She stared at him and waited. He didn't look fatigued or ashamed about something. She busied herself with paperwork of her own.
What was behind this behavior? Surely it made more sense to open up, talk about what bothered him. All he had to say was, Okay, things got a little messed up back there, but I'm ready to move on. That would be sufficient. She'd be willing to accept that; she' was ready to move on.
She made one last attempt. "Xavier are you alright…ready for work today?" Anticipating the same stony silence, she looked away.
His shoulders lifted a little; slowly his face came up, his eyes still shut; his hands peeled the hood from his head; and she was stunned. He had shaven his hair off. His head was now one shiny skull.
Words leaping from her heart got stuck in her throat. She walked over to where he sat; he was stretching his arms in an exaggerated gesture of shaking off the vines and weeds that had trapped him down there. Her eyes could not leave his skull.
"What happened to your hair?" she rubbed his head, mouth open in playful innocence and surprise. Never in her teaching life had she felt so close to a student.
She could hardly imagine his young man's body; it was always covered in trendy clothes, somewhat rough-textured and gloomy, as if his young manhood disdained light materials and colours. But here, now, he had bared a part of himself to her ̶ his skull, with its lacquered glow, something she wasn't supposed to see, much less touch; like some kind of atonement he'd chosen to make for his mistakes.
So he was ready to make amends; he was ready to move on; only she hadn't thought he'd do it this way, shaving his head, saying to the world, I'm starting over.
But now her attention was making him self-conscious. He moved his head, leaning away from her.
"You play any instrument, Miss Weiner?" His eyes looked dull, the question seemed to pop out of nowhere.
"Do I what?" What was he talking about?
"You know, like the piano or something?"
"I'd always wanted to play the harp, but no, I don't play anything…".
"The harp… what's that?"
She moved back to her desk. She had no idea where he was taking her with this new interest; there was no mockery in his voice.
"You know, it's got strings, and it's like a giant bow, and you sit and pluck at the strings."
"Oh, I know what you talking about." He laughed his young man's savvy laugh. "I could see you playing something like that."
"Why, thank you, Xavier."
Some days these Special Ed. kids took a lot out of you, left you a shell of your self at the end of the week, your nerves in tatters. Deep in her bowels that morning she felt she'd got something back from Xavier to restore her. What- ever the world might think, Xavier was pure of heart; wild-spirited and careless with his life, but pure of heart. She was bound to him, bound to his anger and suffering.
(from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D. Williams, 2001)
When he entered the University of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica) in
September 1968, his name was Michael Hutchinson; from a privileged white
family, a former student of Harrison College, Barbados, one of the island’s elite
high schools. When he returned nine years later to his island home he had
changed. He was Ras Ikael Tafari, lush beard wearer of his new faith; and fierce
believer in the prophetic eminence of Haile Selassie I.
He would join the faculty of Social Sciences UWI (Cave Hill, Barbados) as
lecturer. From his campus base he would become active in Pan African affairs, joining the Pan African Commission in 1997. In 2004 he was appointed its director. He died in May 2008.
Had he chosen a different island campus (say, St Augustine, Trinidad) or Faculty (Medicine) he might have been sufficiently insulated from events and tempta-
tions during the Walter Rodney street upheavals in ‘68. So volcanic was that
event it would take many years for the fallout of cultural values and
assumptions to resettle.
A rearrangement of social boundaries between blacks, browns and whites was in full swing in the island in the early 70s. Many
students, carrying the heaviness of parental expectations, elected
to rise above the turmoil. They stayed focused on tertiary aspirations,
arguing, This is not my island; no need to get involved. It seemed a
rational, commensense approach. It was adopted by, for instance,
many Indians from Trinidad, many blacks from the Bahamas. Ikael’s immersion in the Nyabinghi faith ̶ or how he became
“radicalized” ̶ was gradual. The first signs of inner transformation
were the changes in his features: from a clean-face innocence to
facial hairness and marijuana’d eyes; his general appearance
roughened-up as if to blur his distinctive island origins.
His language and modes of communing slowly altered. The tools of academic
discourse were put aside or interspersed with the messianic I-Words of Rasta
I-Manity. At times a self-conscious smile played on his face seeming to question
what he was doing; how he was entering himself, seizing the moment on the
island.
≈ ≈
My whole life changed…when I went to Jamaica,” he would say later. In many
ways those were extraordinary post-Walter Rodney days. Youth culture had
been at the forefront of rebellious activity in European capitals (Paris in ’68).
Some of that youth optimism carried over to the 70s in Jamaica where praises to
‘de youth dem’ formed part of an ascendant reggae romanticism.
At the same time a unique confluence of brilliant teachers, students, pioneers
in thought and creativity had emerged in Kingston; young men and women in
the prime of their intellectual & creative life: among them Vaughn Lewis,
Kamau Brathwaite, Rex Nettleford (professors); Owen Arthur, Bruce Golding,
Ralph Gonsalves (students) Bob Marley, U Roy, Count Ossie (music pioneers).
With minds & talents functioning at their highest capacity, the campus was
bright with ideas for changing the course of Caribbean history and politics. Few
were aware of the roles and destinies they would later be asked to fill.
Among his friends Ikael encouraged a kind of introspective “reasoning”, a variant
of Walter Rodney’s “groundings” with the underclass. They were in effect inter-
personal (I & I) “conversations”; confessional at the beginning, speculative
often; filled with disruptive insight and hypothesis.
Listening. you sensed his anxiety about his blue-eyed identity, the “sins” of his
privileged upbringing. He worried, too, about his postgraduate role in an
intellectually unaccommodating region – how would he fit back in? Jamaica offered a laboratory for experiment and redefinition. After Rodney, “conscious”
students pursued the wayward possibilities for (self) discovery by venturing
outside, into the wards and valleys of Kingston.
His conversations gave early indications of what he would later become: the
good shepherd of the Nyabinghi, its philosopher-scribe. Not just giving
intellectual validation to the faith, or working in an advocacy role (as trade
union rep, or academic housekeeper). He believed the Ras had the power to
transform & rebuild the region’s human resources after the depredations of
plantation. “Rastafari is the most important consciousness to have arisen in the
20thcentury.” he’d said. The House of Nyabinghi would be his psychic fortress.
Tiny ironies caught our student attention. Though the island “masses” listened
to the proactive message in Bob Marley’s Get up, Stand up, and wept when
they remembered Zion, their hearts ̶ believing deliverance would come from
above, not from abroad ̶ felt comforted singing along to the frustration and
hope in Max Romeo’s Let the Power Fall on I.
Our minds turned often to issues of island sexuality. How to explain the nexus of
the unreflecting, carnal male, the luscious women, batty bwoy repugnance? There were readily available theories linking behaviours to ‘persistent poverty’,
ignorance, unemployable rude energies, the groiny power of the powerless; or
the island’s peculiar legacy from the plantation, its testosterone blessing
and curse.
Whatever the cause, Ikael was confident self-destructive practices and norms could be changed, communities rehabilitated; change would begin when
islanders looked to Africa and embraced the transforming values and majesty of
the Ras.
≈ ≈
In 2003 there was news he had launched a book, Rastafari in Transition: Politics
of Cultural Confrontation in Africa and the Caribbean (1966-1988) Volume 1. He talked about the unfinished nature of “my work”; the dry interest shown by
an old-thinking UWI academy. He issued apocalyptic warnings: “We are in the
last hour of time. Look at Daniel 1, read from verse 36.”
Then came his appointment in 2004 as Director of the Commission for Pan
African Affairs ̶ “I have waited a long time in my life for the opportunity to
make this contribution.” ̶ and the trust placed in him by the Barbados Govt.
The appointment was met with disquiet even in Rastafarian circles. Angry
messages questioned whether a white Barbadian face was “truly representative”
of Pan African affairs in Barbados. (In 2008 it was reported he’d been “fired”
from the position.)
Ikael spoke of death back then with the coolness of indestructible youth, as if the
lining of his lion heart would ward off the encroachment of mundane infections.
(Statins and cholesterol were not yet a conspicuous part of the vocabulary of
physical wellbeing.) Belief in the power of Jah, in the moral universe of the Ras
would form a natural mystic firewall, unbreachable by the diseases of Babylon.
It is tempting to consider his state of mind in his last hour on earth. From all
accounts he had gone to Trinidad to deliver a lecture on African Liberation. At
some point he complained of feeling unwell and returned to his hotel. He was
found unconscious in his room, and pronounced dead at the hospital (apparently
of heart attack.) It is difficult, then, to imagine the conversation with himself as
he waited for that gathered cardiac storm to pass; as he slipped from “conscious-
ness” into that silent zone (or Zion) of the hereafter.
He was an extraordinary individual in a time of extraordinary events. He dared as
student to leap into realities outside theory & textbook, mastering the
knowledge he found there. He seemed determined to redirect the narrative of
his life, to construct a new persona fusing elements from the African continent
and his disassembled island psyche.
Those who joined his conversations will remember the way he showed up after
days of island trod, looking loose, street-weathered, the blue eyes ablaze with
new I-World “visions”; his metamorphosis in fevered progress. Sceptical as some
of us remained, the conversations helped adjust our thinking about the world.
His evolving faith-based sureness of self threw light on roads not taken, the
labours of One Love gone now.
It was good and pleasant to know him. In those seminal student years he was Lion
of the void. Yes, I.
(A version of this post appeared elsewhere in 2008)
"…age vexes age..." ̶ Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
They want you on stage, old school vine, brick role till dust; comrade with angina in the village square, dying for a champion's green mansion; to smile again, crowd pleased, as the motorcade (Havana pipe fitters) horns past. They'd like you to serve, lithe wine girl, scented for taste ̶ egret at standby; entry positions cheeks assume on carpets; for murder hiring hands, quality assurance.
Sunscreen Times, you want bacchanal?
Contractor claws gouge hill face, Solar Control stations coming. That sewage welling up in back yard pits? tip of oil lakes underground ̶̶ bet! ̶ bubbles to take breath away. While seine pullers sort pleading catch, bass licks and dhantals jerk knees. With no slide rules, fellas consider guns smoking ̶ Excuse me, where the fire hosing dragons?
Up escalators tripped ashore the other day courtesy of fat pay rollers in Chinese deck chairs making valued customers of every bowlegged tree climber whose splayed toes scratch fear at the foot of the stair; our first shopping mall floors gleaming door man screaming, You can't come in here like that.
The sun's melting pace quickens Day-O! Transport touts squeeze in more wet prunes or, stripped to the waist, pole stroke pink face rafters with pony tails; tulips for hard dough. In bamboo halls the forest children sing till hearts burst strumming all that's metered in us. And now, ready to order, the dead who weave our north south hammocks signal.
Faith and I used to park by the airport, hug; wait, watch the evening flight take off. The up roar of the beast head lift of skirt sky boosters boarding the body; the spending spree on runway thighs ̶ Haya! Vaya! Sapodilla ̶ our crack, our thunder. And so much sun! how alien, much less shut cold, could home fires possibly feel out there? Green light, two one ̶ away, you! > limbs great wide, wind tango.
- W.W.
PATH
The higher you rise, the more sheer the air, the more calls the sand swearing its sliding is surer than your need to become the sky of your first calling beyond settling for Earth's core's pull or for her grasses' siren songs of Springs whose purpose is to propose their passing promises the final real thing.
But how sure of this other first call are you? What is it? This becoming; this summing-up surrender of name and clock and clothes, though they keep clinging to your bones even after bones exchange their loud tilt for the balanced nude spine of silence. It is here time's thorns rise to the rose of breath's timeless song.
At the start of the new week Mrs. Caratini would enter the room and spend ten or fifteen minutes with Judy Weiner, exchanging weekend gossip. The students were told to boot up the computers and start work on their journals. Mrs. Contreras, the teacher's aide, kept them on task, while Judy Weiner fixed her hair and applied makeup using the tiny mirror in the teacher's locker; then she joined Mrs. Caratini who sat in a student's chair, legs crossed, filing her nails.
They spoke as if it hardly mattered if students overheard, though Mrs. Caratini lowered her voice when inserting the word fucking. They believed their conversation had no meaning for students in the room and required little privacy.
In fact, no one paid them any attention, except Xavier.
He had a late afternoon job that sent him home after midnight. Some mornings he'd arrive and promptly put his head down on the desk. Since Miss Weiner was never ready to start the bell, he saw nothing wrong in catching up on lost sleep for the first 10 minutes.
He referred to Miss Weiner and Mrs. Caratini as Bologna & Cheese. Without wanting to, he overheard much of what they said. At times he dozed off only to be roused by Miss Weiner speaking in her slow refined way, explaining some mishap. Things always seemed to happen to Miss Weiner. She left her keys in the teachers' bathroom; a car rear-ended her car and the insurance people were refusing to cover the entire cost of repairs; her mother wasn't feeling too well lately. On and on, one sad story after the next.
Sometimes he'd groan in frustration and mumble to himself, Get a grip, bitch, get a grip! At other times he followed the conversation ̶ when, for instance, Miss Weiner was telling Mrs. Caratini about the Jewish cocaine gangs at the turn of the century, and how she understood what was happening to kids who were pulled into the drug business in the Bronx.
But Xavier saved his contempt for Mrs. Caratini ̶̶ a conceited little bitch with a skinny butt. Always going on about herself. And talking shit. He couldn't understand why a sophisticated person like Miss Weiner would have as a friend someone as stupid as Mrs. Caratini; always, Oh, let me tell you, last night I made myself a huge salad, it was like huge, and I ate it all by myself…Did I tell you, I went to a model home Open House last Sunday? Just off the Grand Central, past the airport? Anyway they had these model homes, two bed- rooms, three bedrooms, kitchen, bath, really gorgeous houses. They were asking 170 up. I tell, you prices are literally going through the roof these days.
On and on with this boring shit. And Miss Weiner just sat there sucking it up. When he'd had enough Xavier would stretch his arms and make a roaring sound, like a rested lion stirring itself; signaling he was ready to work. He'd been ready all along, he implied, but these two teachers sitting there jawing away didn't seem eager to start. This tactic always worked. Mrs. Caratini would throw him a frantic, worried look; then she'd glance at her watch, gather her keys and leave the room.
And Mrs. Weiner would declare in a cheery voice, "So are we ready to work today?… Xavier, how're you feeling?
Always she deferred to him with a curious tenderness, at times treating him as if he were the scion of a very important person whom she'd been asked to tutor.
"No eating over the computers. You know the rules, Xavier." "Calm down. You see any crumbs on the keyboard?"
"Xavier… you're squinting."
"So."
"Maybe you should get your eyes examined."
"I have glasses."
"You own a pair of glasses…? So why don't you put them on?"
"Don't need them. I can see alright."
"Xavier, if you don't wear the glasses prescribed for you, your vision will slowly deteriorate…to the point where, well, as you get older you'll need them all the time."
"It don't matter. Don't plan to live that long anyway."
"Please, don't talk like that."
"Why? Ain't nothing you can do 'bout it"
(from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
A newspaper columnist in British Guiana writing a Sunday column (February 1922) makes the following statement: “Georgetonians are of two kinds: those who live in Queenstown and their unfortunate neighbours who inhabit the remaining part of our garden city.” That newspaper columnist is a fictional character, and the statement sets the stage for Roy Heath’s first novel From the Heat of the Day (1979).
The Queenstown part of the city was apparently not fully developed at the time. From a home on Anira Street you could hear the “incessant roaring of the waves at floodtide” coming all the way from the seawall. Heath describes the area as “the unblemished district with its tall houses and blossoms on year end, and painted palings like flattened spears embracing yards darkened by thick branches of fruit trees.”
Residents hired gardeners to tend all __________________________ those blosoms. New Garden street was remarkable for its fine houses with large FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY gardens in front of them, "in which they by flourished roses and dahlias, their stalks ROY HEATH maintained by a staff to which they were Persea Books, New York, tied". A pipeline sewage system was set 1994, 150 pgs up in the early twenties foreseeing dignity _____________________________ for the fortunate (and the end of posies under the bed). Who could resist the dream of moving one day to the good life in Queenstown?
Over decades, and rapidly since the 1990s, the beauty and social mores of the city have deteriorated. Parcels of dilapidation and vacant grassy lots remain; clogged drains and ocean threat defy permanent solution. New fire-proof struc- tures tower over old places (neglected, and now eyesores); and new migrant and vagrant occupiers have established a kind of pell-mell opportunity ethos – a modus vivendi that tends to discourage the best in people.
On Peter Rose Street, jostling with once elegant homes, there’s an Auto business, cars or vans packed tightly in a paved yard, with streamers flapping in the wind across the road. Of interest, too, is a mosque, and a house turned into an office for taxi service; and a fruit vendor’s shack set up at the entrance of an Oronoque Street home.
You could argue these are buoyant signs of post-Independence development in the city; a messy kind of free for all residential zoning that disdains vestiges of colonial order and respectability, even as a new moneyed and political class finds finer prospects of manicured grass elsewhere.
Today minivans take short cuts through Queenstown’s narrow, quiet streets, honking to get the attention of evening strollers. And Bastiani (“the under- taker” in Heath’s novel) and the smell of horse manure from the shed housing his funeral carriages have long gone; his Forshaw Street business has been replaced by a more upbeat entrepreneur selling bridal accessories.
But colonial Queenstown was where Roy Heath situated his main characters, Armstrong and his wife Gladys, in his novel From the Heat of the Day;the 1920s Queenstown, its alleyways well-maintained by “men spraying the gutter- water with cisterns of oil”. Heath examines what happens when their marriage falls apart in the Forshaw Street property they occupy.
≈ ↨ ≈
After two years and two children, the flush of cohabitation worn off, a rift develops in their relationship. Gladys Armstrong, a woman of healthy appetite, gentle, pledged “to breed and obey”, cannot understand what she’s doing wrong. She must cope all of a sudden with “a wave of irritability" sweeping over her husband, "that seemed to have no cause” .
Her husband is doing very well by colonial standards; he has gained promotion to Post Master at the Georgetown post office. But he wraps himself up in uncom- promising “silences”; and her attempts at conversation are cut short by reminders, for instance, that he is "reading”; a hint at his interest in personal development through knowledge.
Beneath the newly-married love routines, Heath suggests their union was anchored in sexual passion. Gladys Armstrong recalls “the sweetness of cop- ulation which became for her the heart of their marriage”. What she finds hard to take now is her husband's growing indifference, the cold bed at night.
Heath offers her no religious faith for solace and strength; she doesn’t consider returning to her father’s home. She chooses a long-suffering wait for her husband’s self-isolation to end, absorbing his “outbursts” and irritability.
Armstrong is somewhat mystified at the downturn of his marriage. Alert to his wife's inadequacies, he finds fault with her “passivity”; he notices “her thighs becoming thick, and her breasts flabby”. Libidinal urgencies overwhelm his thinking, and most nights he stumbles home sullen and inebriated; sometimes he slips into the servant’s room.
Armstrong's conversations with himself stir doubt and self-pity. He wonders if he had married above his station. He had plucked Gladys from a well-to-do household respected for its piano playing, embroidery and sketching. Maybe he should have settled for a woman from his village in Agricola, “one of them big- batty women with powerful build who kian’ tell a piano from a violin.” He suspects he’s being constantly “judged” by his wife’s family, viewed as some- one lacking an acceptable “background”.
To deepen his dilemma, the colony is plunged into economic turmoil. The collapse of the sugar market spreads fear among workers. There’s talk of “retrenchment” (a word as frightening then as “recession” today) among Civil Service employees. Armstrong hangs on, but his job security eventually falls victim to budget cuts. Gladys responds with belt-tightening courage, holding fast to her vows of love till death; and hoping her patience and sacrifices would salve Armstrong's closed-off inner seething.
Just when you wonder how long she can remain emotionally cut off from her husband, Gladys Armstrong dies; and Heath's prose seizes the moment to turn damp and maudlin. Pages dwell on and depict scenes of the husband’s grieving disbelief: “the tears trickled through his fingers, down his chin to fall on to his shirt.” Images of his remorse pile up, and after the funeral, “desolation in his heart”.
[Roadway to Queenstown, Guyana 2009]
≈ ↨ ≈
Heath is not a stern moralist, but the school-teacher side of him sometimes nudges his narrator to offer "lessons" from tragedy. Readers might empathize with Gladys, or feel dismay at her unwearied virtuous waiting. And Armstrong comes across as a curiously tormented, though not wholly unfeeling family man; certainly a notch or two above other men in the colony who in similar situations might have ceased quickly to care.
Heath suggests, too, that marriage (of the average, or below average couple) in the colonial 20s was often no more than a simple self-serving arrangement based on mutually accommodating roles and expectations, which did not include the possibility of change. As Gladys mused: “Things were just so. There was a sky and an earth; there was the wind and the sun; and there was marriage.”
Readers today might hope to find some causal insights in the novel, though there was little public understanding then (and little now) of human impulse and intimacy. Heath chose simply to present the unraveling of a 1920s union in stages: withdrawal, drinking, outbursts; stifled goodness, the misery of the cold bed; the male impulse to roam outside the roost. Children, like molasses from sweet cane, were often byproducts of unbridled passion, lucky to be cherished in extended family folk ways.
From the Heat of the Day is the first in a trilogy of novels. Old Georgetown neighborhoods are faithfully restored in Heath’s patient (at times, plodding) prose. Readers can follow the tribulations of the Armstrong children and their grief and guilt-burdened father in the follow-up novels, One Generation and Genetha.
Heath’s 1920s Guiana is in essence an imagined world, but many of the issues explored in From the Heat of the Day could throw light on marital (and extra- marital) relations in Guyana today ̶ if you pay attention to distress signals that sometimes breach community walls; if you listen to male talk about copulation. – Wyck Williams
(A version of this review article was posted elsewhere in 2008)
Man, the first light snap feeling, the slip run away, flogged rags on your back, a band going your way. Bare bronze bad in flight, your hip beads low riding vuvuzelas you hear, myths shak shak bones raise; crow shadows you fear. Yuh done dead already? might as well kilkitay.
These flag days, illusion the reigning monarch, players make sea salty moves on tracks duty free; chance a pirogue from a fine bone poet's prize catch. Bodies booboolooping ruffle the old cane rows; sky blaze braising ebony glow genome flow deformed on the merchant ship scales.
Staked out for strip data voyeurs and passeurs frame rivers on mobiles, decline the coarse rump up way ̶ watching the sugar; would kneel at carmine lips thrust me! jumpers in white robes; would screen touch you here, in heat waylay there; on fire pour altar wine, very suitable family fear.
Under sun feel drum fantasias, steel sutures for repair. World weary? one last lap, Mardi, Dingolay. Chip tunnels on bass line, love sweat salt away. Knock iron ̶ night slits tight ̶ Ash bells warn ̶ wire wing feathers fall break the day. – W.W.
DREAM-REAL WOMAN
I surprise myself by dreaming up a bold and open woman with no flags to wave but with a thousand questions to sprout.
̶ and I thank her for her refusal to be bothered by how her boldness looks to the fear-shifting eyes in household mouseholes
̶ and bless her beauty she is the first to celebrate, without apology polishing its temple's walls into outer mirrors of the flame that burns within ̶ and share with her the sadness of her strength that strides the Earth as one shepherd of the blind
and must take pause to wash its own eyes with their salty rivers that erode rust ̶ or with Heaven's rain that stings them into stars.
"What happened to you? I tried calling you last night," Mrs. Caratini said. She'd been waiting in the main office near the time clock for Judy Weiner. And much to her relief, here she was, looking pale, a little tired, confirming her suspicions something had happened.
Mrs. Caratini (Math) was Judy's closest friend in the building. They were the same age, twenty-nine, but Mrs. Caratini looked younger, and walked with frisky quick steps; and seemed always ready for fun.
Mrs. Caratini had been married, and she liked telling the story of her marriage. She'd flown out to Las Vegas with her boyfriend during spring break; and there, one evening, as they strolled on a crowded sidewalk, he suggested they get married; on the spot, right there. Why not, she responded, giggling.
Back in New York her husband ̶ an Italian businessman, ten years older, good-looking, "with a nose for money", she said ̶ turned into a testy, unbelievably coarse man. Mrs. Caratini didn't wait for things to settle down, for problems to work themselves out. One day she was married, the next day, boom! it was over; she was single again, just like that.
For Mrs. Caratini to emerge unscathed from what seemed a moment of naive reckless decision, only to resume her life ̶ a fearless soul, full of carefree chatter and lean-bodied energy ̶ seemed to Judy a feat just short of miraculous. If she, Judy, were to attach herself to this woman, who was already exploring new possibilities, some of those transcendent qualities might rub off; her life might be changed.
Sensing patches of emptiness in a colleague's life Mrs. Caratini was only too willing to take Judy Weiner under her wing. "You need to get out more, make yourself available," she kept saying. "Some work on the hips, a little toning of the thighs, fix your hair, you'll be fine."
Judy Weiner, in some ways more sensitive and intelligent, began to question all the things she'd always believed, like her obligation to her ailing mother (meaning, Judy was stuck in the house a lot). She deferred to the other woman's experience, the neat dramatic entrance and exit from marriage. Mrs. Caratini (everyone in the building, for reasons unknown, continued to refer to her as Mrs.Caratini) had gone through so much, in such a short period of time, she just might have the answers that eluded Judy Weiner all these years.
So began, in a flurry of hope and desire, their joint excursions to Manhattan nightclubs, on weekends, wearing tight fitting or revealing clothes. Mrs. Caratini, who had a preference for leather outfits, assured Judy there were guys out there, they were sure to find someone; not Italian guys who prefer women with long hair, and in any case weren't worth the effort, Trust me on that! Yes, nice Jewish guys, if Judy preferred; not your regular Orthodox, but nice. And those new Wall street millionaires, looking for the perfect mate, they weren't too intellectual, but you can't have everything, can you? And there was always the stranger from nowhere who might turn out to be the one, who knows?
At some point, just as Judy was ready to give up, thinking the Manhattan project ill-advised and irresponsible (she had to leave her ailing mother alone for hours) she met someone she liked.
His name was Mike; he was fortyish, built like a warm cuddly bear; he had a salt and pepper beard, chubby arms and soft hands; and he was half-Italian, which surprised Mrs. Caratini who thought she could spot even half an Italian a block away. He had a sense of humour, a gentle manner and he held a fairly decent conversation. And he was a Pet Shop owner.
They'd stroll about Manhattan sidewalks; take in a movie; enjoy dinner at a restaurant, talking all the time. He talked about his pet shop; ever since he he was a kid he had this love of animals. Judy listened with keen glowing wonder. He helped run a little league baseball team out in Queens; and he was still single because, well, to tell the truth, he hadn't given any serious thought to settling down.
They met again the following weekends, another movie, another restaurant. One Sunday afternoon he drove out to her home to visit, bringing her a Tibetan dog. He said it had been house-broken. Judy was overwhelmed. No one had ever given her a dog before. "This is a big signal, Judy, biggg signal," Ms Caratini said, visibly more thrilled by the gesture than Judy. " Now here's what you need to do. You play him for awhile, don't make him think you're needy. Just keep him interested, see what happens. He gave you a dog, Judy, a dog! Now me, I'm the shallow type. I return all presents. Give me money. My ex-husband used to buy me jewelry. I'd toss it in a box. Whatever he gave me. Into the box. Give me money."
Soon after that visit with the gift of the dog, Mike suddenly stopped calling; he just dropped out of sight. Judy was baffled. She imagined him disabled and hospitalized; maybe he was out of town.
She called the pet shop. A young woman, who spoke as if she was Mike's assistant, told her in an odd knowing tone that she'd give Mike the message. She said Mike was busy; there was a lot of shop business to deal with right now. She added, as if she knew more than she should about Judy's relationship with her boss, that Mike would get in touch with her as soon as he'd gotten over the hump.
"Gotten over what? the hump? What did she mean by that?" Mrs. Caratini couldn't keep her voice down. "She's got some nerve talking to you that way, the bitch! and as for Mike, he's a fucking idiot, disappearing on you like that. Just like all Italian men. I knew this wasn't going to work out. Judy, listen to me, you're going to have to forget this man…"
"I can't think of anything I said. Maybe it was …"
"…and forchrissake, stop flagellating yourself. It's not like you were hoping to marry this guy. If I were you I'd go right down to his pet shop and give him back his fucking dog. I'm serious. I told you I didn't like gifts. I had a feeling this wasn't going to work out."
(from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!" by N.D.Williams, 2001)
Most of the play is about Iago messing with Othello, getting into his head with the jealousy stuff. The man is like a dog with rabies, evil to touch. But Shakespear makes Othello act confused, like he don't know what to do. I'm saying, get mean with the bitch! Niggers don't take crap from nobody. He don't need to ask Iago what to do, telling him go spy on his woman, "bring me the ocular proof". Get straight up with the woman, ask her what's the deal. Shakespear have him falling down with epilepsy, and now Iago playing him for a sucker.
See, Shakespear didn't understand niggers. This Othello travel around the world, he tough and silent like Chuck Norris. The man decide to make a home for himself in Venice. Aint easy to migrate and start a new life in a strange country. People don't want you cause you different. But a man got to stop moving around some time, put down roots somewhere.
And Desdemona, she kind of migrating too. Moving out of Daddy's home, and starting a new life. Stepping out of "no man" in my life, crossing into new territory. People don't like when you do that. And since it's a black man and a white woman, she got to watch his back, he got to watch her back. Only way they going to make it.
Othello was right to tell her, you hang with me, everything's cool, you mess with me, then "chaos is come again". Nigger got to know his woman is there for him 100 Percent!!
So when Iago start getting into his head he should have settled the matter right there. Get mean with the bitch, that's what any nigger would do. Got Othello saying, "Arise black vengeance", like now this is some racial thing. And saying he "won't scar that whiter skin of hers than snow." Can you believe, Othello kissing his woman, at the same time getting ready to kill her, and don't want to mess up her snow white skin? Make no sense.
He shouldn't have trusted that sly dog Iago, calling him "honest Iago", like they were buddies. Trust nobody, I say. Your best friend will sell you out if you give him a chance. Trust nobody.
Well the handkerchief, Othello made a big mistake with that. Came back to haunt him. He should have given the woman jewelry and stuff, not a hand- kerchief. Desdemona didn't understand how much the handkerchief mean to him.
An Egyptian first gave the handkerchief to his mother, who gave it to Othello to pass on to a Moorish woman, who would understand about the "sibyl" and "magic" and stuff. Desdemona didn't understand all that. I think that's what flipped the Moor, when she lost the handkerchief. It's like losing a bird you care for all these years. You wake up one morning, you hear no sound, the bird cage open, the bird that used to sing to your soul is gone. Othello trusted Desdemona with the handkerchief. She didn't take care of it. Lost her man right there.
I rate this play a B. My reason for giving it a B grade is because I learned a lot about what could happen to a black man who's on his own in this world, even though Shakespear didn't get it all right. I think teachers should teach plays like "Othello" more. I had "Romeo and Juliet" in my freshman year, it was alright, then "Macbeth" with Mr. Bilicki which I didn't like (didn't like Mr. Bilicki either).
This play has taught me one thing, which is to get through all your adolescent stuff quick, then settle down with some woman. I don't plan to wait like Othello till I'm in the "vale of years". Might end up marrying the wrong woman. Anyway, first I got to shake off stuff that's on my back right now. The End.
(from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
"….between the storm and the calm between the nightmare and the sleeper between the cradle and the reaper." – John Agard, "Bridge Builder"
The oldest tree on our block came down as the last storm ̶ "a nor'easter, turf crosser!" ̶ swept through on buffalo wings. It fell to rest on Mr. Sanchez' roof. Easy to assume its root system was all surface, no heart. Mrs. Bourdy stepped outside swinging: tenured trees feel locked in by city sidewalks; and vanities like Mr. Sanchez' front lawn. The payback? hooded shoots infiltrating his sewer lines, she tittered. Thy neighbor, your love.
Mrs. Bourdy watched the storm from her attic window. The tree withstood 30 years of wind battery, leaf hang, her marriage to Mr. Bourdy (deceased). One mounting last push, over the top, the pleasures of grounding up ripped. No sap weep, willow style. How long can long standing allegories be sustainable? Mrs. Bourdy hadn't noticed bird nests in the tree. Squirrels, yes, playing tag and performing homeless traffic scurry. And some times a tacked Lost Dog note. So goes the neighborhood. Anyone could harvest tree bark make wine corks, she'd read somewhere, though no one shows up in her dead of night with plug or bark carving knife intentions.
The tree fall dealt a 10 foot slash in the sidewalk; it leaned in branching daze, earth crust privies exposed; drivers stopped for Increíble! camera shots; a young man, they heard later, not the screams, stepped on live power lines, cell sending views. These new fangled hand devices, Mrs. Bourdy tsk tsked, cradles so full of ourselves. Back inside she heard a chain saw buzzing her bow windows. Heaven's gorilla! how did that fly thru pass the particle screen? And what was taking the sanitation trucks so long, gathering passed overs for bagpipes? fixing years left how limbs were, give or take a bed mate, a tree hug.
After awhile nothing seems amiss. So your house roof leaks! catch a falling chord: cloud howl ruin day clean take turns like on line ancestors; bare mortals, we classify leaf vacancy, Move on! Let mediums search parallels for clogged artery parts, the walnuts you stock in that wind breaker chest. Not freaking funny, you find? Quantum poetics? Please. What news of footprint pillars sand you don't follow? Thy neighbor's kingdom come, will be done. -W.W.
THE WIND REVEALS
that on Earth's merest surface all things interdepend in a tango of bending and standing still, bending while standing within the tugging silence of depths that trust themselves. What it cannot show is what only a man can start to tell of an inner bell that sways to ring in rhyming with the wing's swing
– a sounding that does not need to wave a flag as proof of membership of any knot of roots only weakened so. Do branches of flowers and fruit point to their roots - or reach up to their seed of the Sun? Does the squirrel or robin bow to its own tail or wing – or, stopped short by men's fences, kneel to ghosts and bones of trees?
I let the wind in the hand go where it will, let the hand be a cloud or an unlabelled feather or flower or stone of light, let the themes of my dreams remember themselves like steam rising from the Earth's core only to become her rain whose fingers interlocking set free all her tongues to bridging Silence's chasms.
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 