Author: FarJourney Caribbean

Born in Guyana : Wyck Williams writes poetry and fiction. He lives in New York City. The poet Brian Chan lives in Alberta, Canada.

BODY PART BRIEFS & HIP HOORAYS

 

                                                       
                                             "Peace is a full stop.
                                           And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade,
                                             now only time will consent to have anything to do with us,
                                             for what purposes we do not know.”
                                                                                        – John Ashbery 
                                                                                        from “Chinese Whispers”, 2001

                        So what’s the mandate? the masked executor asked
                      the Governor, his axe paused in a golfer’s down
                      swing through; blade open gleaming, This is
                      what we do.

                      Someone’s chopping heads and limbs, leaving quarterly
                      memos off cocaine highways; faith based scat wired
                      devices display your résumé with the fruits & vegetables.
                      Scarved mothers, be advised. Rosary beads, track markers.

                      Clit eyelid nipple tongue – ears so last
                      millenium! – lower back tattoo: what why not’s
                      left to pierce hook brand? Mum did only nostrils,
                      back in Mumbai – meanwhile fat gathers; bones
                      on line wait shake rattle.

                      Lip moist, finger stroke, smooth thigh show; chest span, O
                      the night shift dangle! See, these pins snag rip reel
                      the heart, “Soul’s born to swim, love plays
                      bit part” – no, not quite Nietzsche, though his
                      trade mark. 

                      That vibrate buttock thing – there must be
                      a method, trick, an app so upstarch girls can do it;
                      hear Fernando Botero grinding teeth in sleep
                      like size still matters. Go, fringe plait!

                      Lamborghini sirens toasting, bass artery pounding red, 
                      chicks like bullets grazing your neck, cool million loitering
                      near horse reamed quakes and private jet suicides: no
                      “Mercy” – summer 12 – hip streets K.West. 

                      Stone club sword bayonet bomb forty 
                      seven – right now we’re drone proficient: less
                      in your face, more never know what hit you!
                      They’re working on the vaporizer: dust to dust
                      free, baby! – tree limbs saved.
                                                                                 -W.W.

 

 

 

                      

                  


   

      

                                  CERAMIC CALYPSO

                               open or closed, it is
                            not too hard to be a hole:
                            sooner or later, you know,
                               you will be fed some thing

                               some body needs to lose.
                            you will never feel hunger
                            unless all who live here quit
                               the scene, this way or that.

                               sometimes you wish they would:
                            you are weary of being
                            crushed and flushed and brushed. but left
                               alone, you would become

                               rusty, fusty, crusty.
                            better to stay in service,
                            though therein the horror lies:
                               there are no surprises

                                      left: all variations
                            on the theme of human waste
                            have but one resolution:
                               come to pass, gone for good

                               but somehow here to stay.

                   (from “Within The Wind” © by Brian Chan)

 

 

NY SLIDE 6.1: FIRE IN THE HOLE

 

                  Waiting on the first floor for the elevator, which seemed stuck on the third
                  floor, Radix was about to give up and take the stairs when the lights signaled it
                  was moving again. The door opened, teachers came off, talking fearfully,
                  searching each other for information, any scrap of information, now that things
                  were suddenly in flux.

                  Radix stepped in and pressed the button, and just as the doors were closing
                  MaryJane Syphers rushed in.

                  “Almost got yourself crushed to death,” Radix said.

                 “Yes, that would have been something.”

                  MaryJane Syphers gave him a smile that acknowledged his presence; then
                  the smile abruptly vanished. She burrowed in her bag and became preoccupied
                  with whatever it was she couldn’t find.

                  The elevator moved, going down, not up. They both groaned, and Radix in a
                  spontaneous wish to dissolve the awkwardness said:

                  “The story of my life! You want to  move up in the world…press the elevator
                   button…it takes you down…Next time I think I’ll rely on my own two feet.”

                   MaryJane Syphers released another frugal smile, and searched more frantically
                   in her bag. She seemed in no mood for small talk – not with this man in the
                   elevator. In any event when they got to the basement, Jim Holmstedder from
                   the attendance office came on, carrying sheets of computer printout, and
                   instantly her mood changed.

                   Maybe she’d known Jim Holmstedder a long time, and had more to say to him
                   than to a new teacher. In any event she got back her confidence, or must have
                   found that elusive thing at the bottom of her bag; and now suddenly she was
                   chatting away, not looking at Radix. Which left him free to study her again.

                   For the new semester, a new sweater. It didn’t conceal the veins in her
                   scraggy neck. Didn’t do much for her at all, though he was mindful of what
                   Bilicki had told him, that she'd lost her husband, her one true love, in the
                   Vietnam war. She seemed now a task-driven widower, all physical desire
                   turned inward; holding herself apart, a little curve at the shoulders, all flat
                   and pale and dry. Not much passion surging through her body; just that
                   skin-scratching resentment of the world for snuffing out the life of her
                   Vietnam warrior.

                   And now not caring to talk to Radix, though she evidently didn’t mind talking
                   to Jim Holmstedder, a teddy bear of a man, with a neat white beard and an
                   irresistibly friendly manner. They were having a tense exchange.

                  “I was told I might be excessed because they’re closing down the school. Not
                  that I’m  crazy about this school. It’s just that… you walk in here, all set to
                  start the new  year, and suddenly you’re pulled up like weeds…and tossed
                  aside… this is incredible.”

                  “They’re not going to toss anybody aside, MaryJane,” Jim Holmstedder said, in
                  his gentle teddy-bear voice.

                  “Well, that’s the impression I got.”

                  “I don’t think people were listening to what the Superintendent said; or maybe
                  they only heard what they wanted to hear.”

                  “Okay, tell me what you heard.”

                  “The way I understand it, there are going to be three schools instead of one.”

                  “Three schools?”

                  “Three schools…in the same building…Humanities and the Arts on the first
                  floor, Law and Government on the second, Mathematics and Science on the
                  third… three… separate…schools. They’re not going to shut down the building
                  and send everybody home. The plan, as I understand it, is to phase out the
                  old and phase in the new institutions. Starting next September. With the new
                  freshman class.”

                  “So what does that mean? Will they still need us here?”

                  “You’re needed right now,” Jim Holmstedder turned and winked at Radix. He 
                  placed an affectionate arm around her shoulder and drew her close to his
                  warm friendly chest. “And as the classes from the old school graduate, and the
                  new  school classes come in, they might even ask you to stay on and help.”

                  “Well, I don’t know if I want to be part of anything so…ridiculous… It’s so 
                  confusing. Besides it’s not going to change anything.”

                  The elevator had reached the third floor; they all stepped off.  Jim Holm-
                  stedder held the door and laughed; he should have gotten off on the first floor.

                  “See what you did?” he said. “You made me miss my floor. You sure know how
                  to grab hold of a man.”

                  A cherubic smile lit up his face. MaryJane Syphers smiled back at him, a rare
                  flower of a smile from the hothouse of her youthful years.

                 (from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)

 


 

Review Article: BACK TO THE COLONY: “CHINESE WOMEN”

 

                  Much of what happens in Chinese Women (2010), the latest work of fiction from
              Guyanese Jan Lowe Shinebourne, occurs in the mind of the central character as
              he looks back at his colonial upbringing. Events begin in 1956 and end in 2006. You
              follow along as if you’re on his Facebook page, his voice giving twitter like
              accounts of what he has endured over the years.

              At first you’re not quite sure what to make of him. You sense there’s much
              more to his narrative which the writer has chosen to keep off the page.
 
              His story? After falling from a tree at age 10 ("I did not allow myself to feel any
              pain. I never have.") and lying in plaster cast and splints for two years, the
              narrator recovers to begin an amazing sequence of transitions.

              From a high school in Guiana to a university in Toronto; then on to success as
              an international oil engineer and a millionaire father of two. From life in a
              resentful “ingrown Muslim family”, right through the  aftermath of New York’s
              9/11 attack, his identity in full blown “Arab Muslim” membership.

              These transitions to riches and contentment overseas end, however, when he
              discovers his brother in bed with his wife.

              Carnal betrayal inside the family, conceivably more calamitous than the
              NY 9/11 attack, could have set off eruptions of neurological proportions.
              Shinebourne doesn't linger on how or why it all happened. Her narrator, cast
              this time in emotional splints and plaster, simply turns away and resolves
              to reset what remains of his life.

               Immersed in "no pain" and still financially endowed, he begins a search for a
              girl he'd fallen in love with as a boy in a classroom; the Chinese girl who sat two
              rows in front of him, now a Chinese woman, whose image he'd carried locked
              away in his Guianese head all these years.                                                                                

              He locates the object of his old love in England – like author Shinebourne,
              the girl had forsaken the yards (and populism) of the old country for the
              gardens (and order) of the old colonial power. They catch up; he begins
              a diligent courtship, offering money, security and if possible marriage.

              Psychologically, you could argue, he’s still “going home”, back to old familiar
              starting blocks; hoping to add fresh meaning to his broken life. Shinebourne,
              however, seems more interested in the grandeur of their romance: will her
              narrator enter his Chinese kingdom? can his new money buy out old feelings?

                                                                              ≈☼≈

                                
                 The focus of the novel is not, as the title suggests, exclusively Chinese women in
              Guyana. Shinebourne writes to help us what lies beneath her narrator's
              fascination with the Chinese as a group. His assumptions about the colonial
              world had developed through the funnel of what "my  father told me”, and
              what he observed growing up on the sugar estate where his father was an
              estate manager.

              In 1960 in British Guiana, he tells readers, the African “collected his pay
              …[headed] straight to the dancehall [?] where the many mothers of his many
              illegitimate children waited.” The Indians on the other hand maintained
              “values of thrift and ambition…for generations.” 

              Emblematic of political leadership of the times was the hero, Cheddi Jagan,
              “the Hindu revolutionary communist, our Fidel Castro”, and the villain,
              Forbes  Burnham, “leading his supporters to attack Indian people and turning
              the country upside down.”

              The ethnic group which wins the narrator's admiration and approval are the
              Chinese, represented by the Yhip family who own a bakery near the sugar
              estate. What seems prominent in the Yhips, and apparently in no other group,
              are the traits of “hospitality and generosity… kindness and mercy…the only
              civilized behaviour I ever knew.”

                  After such group approval and admiration it doesn’t take much “linking” for him
              to be enchanted with a Chinese girl, Alice Wong, though on several pages he is
              at pains to point out her “race did not interest me.”

              Perhaps aware that some reference to lovemaking is almost de rigueur in
              contemporary fiction, Shinebourne digs up stuff from an undisclosed archive on
              intimacy in the colonies.

              Readers are asked to accept that “on the apartheid regime of the sugar estate”
              in 1957 Guiana, where “the master watched the slaves like vultures and
              swooped down to knaw at their humanity”, everyone was copulating; or
              watching copulation in progress.

              There was copulation on the lawns, in the canals and drains and under the
              bridges. Even the stiff-mannered white overseers with wives and lovers had
              their own good times rump romping in full world view.

              Coupled with awful living conditions on the estate – people "shat and urinated"
              everywhere, and oh, the flies, the mosquitoes! – these descriptions, you sense,
              are meant to elicit sympathy for the narrator, for his pursuit of a kind of dry
              cleansing romance with the Chinese girl; and his attraction to the inert,
              shop-bound (bed-room kept secret) lives of the Chinese Yhips, blessed with
              consoling "powers of endurance and stoicism”.
                              
                                                                 ≈☼≈

                                                                    
            Unlike, say, Guyanese author-diplomat David Dabydeen, also resident in England,
              who works and writes from inside the brickwork of academia with its resources
              for recovering information, Shinebourne's novel scrapes along on the residue of 
              loving memories, hoping the results would be embraced as a postcolonial
              achievement.  But issues of language threaten to undermine the book's ambitions.

              The prose falters in stretches of expired usage. The narrator describes, for instance,
              the plight of Africans and Indians “dragged in chains to the country to labour like
              brute animals.” There’s mention of “racy calypsos” and a woman who “danced
              with abandon, winding her hips”. Characters and scenes feel underwritten, 
              feebly imagined, then drafted into service.

              The absence of compelling matter in Shinebourne’s fiction has been defended
              through the courtesy of academic paper work, intent on covering up short-
              comings with sociology fillings and forgiveness – often reading more into the
              books than is actually there.

              This time around, with its purpose skewed, its "groups" honoured or caricatured,
              Chinese Women ( 50 years of its narrator's colonial tree fall and independent
              high rise, compressed in 96 memoried pages) pleads for credibility. Sad to report,
              there’s more of nothing here.

                                                                             - Wyck Williams

              Book Reviewed: “Chinese Women”: Jan Lowe Shinebourne, Peepal Tree Press,
              England, 2010, 96 pages

 

 

 

 

 

 

NY SLIDE 6.0: STARTERS LATE AND EARLY

 

                 Radix came flying into the building, alarmed at how late he really was,
                      and certain someone had noticed;  thinking: if his job was now in jeopardy,
                      he had no one else to blame but himself. The world was in upheaval; the
                      Soviet Union, that citadel of centuries-old orthodoxy, was crumbling; the
                      event was sending  ripples across the globe. The first ripple had already
                      touched the shoreline of his work habits. Here he was back to school, start
                      of a new school year, first day and he was late, very late.

                      He tripped on the last concrete stair leading to the front door and went
                      tumbling forward into the surprised arms of the two security officers. They
                      held him up and shook with laughter, as if they’d been waiting for just that
                      sort of distraction.

                      These officers were young (and not so young) men and women, often
                      overzealous with male students, overfriendly with female students. For
                      the new semester they were wearing spiffy new outfits to go with the bulky
                      arrest paraphernalia around their waist.

                             His first stop after taking care of his time card had to be the department
                      office. It was empty. The hallways had a strange deserted look. Everybody
                      was convening somewhere – but where?

                      Then Mrs. Schnupp came into the office, her fist full of duplicating carbon.
                      She gave a chirpy hello to Radix, but there was on her face a vacant
                      disoriented look.
                      
                      “I hope the copying machine is working. Do you know if it’s working?” she
                      asked offhand, not waiting for an answer.

                      “You’re in a hurry for classes to start.”

                      “I like to be ready – before the floodgates open and the flood races
                      through.”

                      As she said this, Mrs. Schnupp switched on the copying machine; it whirred
                      and clattered, its green copying light came on to indicate a readiness to
                      churn out copies. Mrs. Schnupp watched the whole start-up process with a
                      nervous skepticism.

                            “Where is everybody?” Radix asked. He’d been scanning notices on the        
                      department board, looking for clues to the day’s agenda.

                      “Department meetings…discussing the bad news,” Mrs. Schnupp said, not
                      looking up.

                      “What bad news?’

                      “Haven’t you heard? Weren’t you at the faculty meeting?” Her face
                       tightened into a grimace. The copy machine needed paper, and here was
                       someone she barely knew talking as if he’d just come off a subway car
                       from Mars.

                            “I just got here. What’s going on?”

                      “Nothing’s going on. It’s the beginning of the end. The school’s been taken
                       over. This copy machine’s got short paper, I need long paper. Where do
                       they keep the long paper?

                      "Taken over?”

                      “Yes…taken over. The writing was on the wall a long time. Guess I’ll
                       have to use the short paper. Yes, this is what we've come to.”

                      And Radix, who didn’t know her very well, decided he’d had enough of her
                      distracted manner, and enough of her dispute with the copy machine.

                      “I think I’d better find the department meeting.”

                      “Started awhile back. Room 252,” Mrs. Schnupp said, stuffing paper in the
                        paper tray.

                      (from "Ah Mikhail,O Fidel!", a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)

 

 


Review Article: UP FROM THE CANEFIELDS: ROOPLALL MONAR

                 Coming after publications of his poetry and a novel, High House and Radio (1991)
is a collection of Rooplall Monar’s short stories. If the back cover is a reliable
guide readers are invited to follow the lives of characters who once occupied
cramped living quarters on a Sugar Estate, who now live independently in
their own homes. 

                 The stories come draped in the satins of Guyanese Indianness, and on that level
they might intrigue those pursuers of groups and constituencies, the pollsters
and publishers who enjoy framing the cultural plight of their preferred
collectives.

                 But collectives (ethnic or religious) are ice blocks inside which the human
spirit lies frozen, with all its contradictions and unconscious bits. You expect
talented writers to chip away at these blocks so that individual fates might
be freed, and minds made open again to possibilities and diverse view-
points.

                 Monar’s fiction has encouraged snappy comparisons with writers working a
similar literary terrain, Sam Selvon (in Ways of Sunlight, 1957) or V. S Naipaul
(in Miguel Street, 1959). And obligatory references to “the kala pani” voyage.
Those older writers brought incisive observation and humour to bear on a
mosaic of desperate living.

                 After his remarkable achievement with Janjhat (1989), Monar in this collection
creates a world that showcases the Indianness of his Indians. The stories don’t
probe deeper than that.

                 His Indian folk occupy a self-contained village on the coast (Annandale). They
no longer work for the sugar estate, but lack of education has severely
handicapped their life prospects.

                 The old estate worker solidarities have begun to fray; tempers and divisions
develop a sharper edge. “Over me dead body, no  Hindu blood in me family”,
a Muslim father shouts at his daughter who is thinking of getting married. “Greed
and selfishness invade people spirit”, another character says in a bitter jokey
rum shop mood.

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

                 On occasion black creoles from an adjacent village (Buxton) cross boundary
lines: a woman, unhappy with her black obeah man, searches for a Hindu spirit
man and hopes for better results. There are “thiefing black people” who raid
backyards for poultry; and idle black youth whose crude sexual comments as
Indian girls walk by raise tension and alarm.

                 Tension swells into aggression as when politically generated violence sweeps
across the land. A few stories (“Election Fever”) look at volatile situations
during Election time when Indians became random targets.

                 Though Monar  doesn’t write with an activist’s eye for Indian grievance, the
stories shed light on the predicament of self-sufficient communities, where
caution and a hushed anxiety are the main rules of engagement when darkness
and outsiders approach the prayer flags at the gates.    

                 Monar’s prose – “And don’t talk, them coolie people beetee yapping while
one-two coolie women beating they chest dab dab: ‘O Bhagwan, is real
murderation.’” – lies like thick thick paragrass on every page. Sometimes he
seems happy to display his easy way with creole words. At other moments the
narrator’s voice wears you down with its revved up ethnic speak.

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


≈☼≈

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

                  In the Booker sugar estate days of the 60s, where these stories are set, and
later in the 70s, when “folk” culture helped stoke anticolonial fires, fiction like
this gave reason for awards and performance; and an overseas delight in the
liberation of a once marginalized language and culture.

Monar’s fiction received a special Judges’ Prize in 1987. And Janjhat has been
hailed as his remarkable upcoming Guyanese novel.

                  But new territory is already laid out and waiting for Monar’s attention. Up from
the estate canefields more of his Indians, no longer prepared to tolerate
bypass, have made expanded moves from rural dwelling to new residence in
the towns, where they dispense political patronage and must “look outward”,
share residential space and intermingle with non-Indian creoles and strangers.

                  Authors Edgar Mittelholzer and Jan Carew once worked like porknockers in
similar areas of human scramble and depredation. They’ve left us standards
and enduring literary models. There have been solitary attempts at political-
murder mystery, but the field remains wide open for literary forays: into the
acquisitive itchiness of administers-in-chief; their always self-serving lovers;
or the creole melodramas of our desperate housewives. 

                  In this day and age, if serious literary fiction seems unwanted or must stay
locked up overseas institutions of higher reading, a second tier of well-
crafted books could keep us pleasurably engaged.

                  Otherwise, Guyana will remain at the mercy of freelance entrepreneurs in yachts,
who sail in, make sly gestures and company, then quickly sail out. Writers with
Monar’s storytelling talent would appear to have their work cut out for them. 

                  Book Reviewed: “High House and Radio”: Rooplall Monar:  Peepal Tree Press,
England, 1991, 176 pgs. (A version of this article appeared in 2007)

NY SLIDE LXIX: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, PLEASE!

 

                If there was anyone in the auditorium on the Principal’s side that morning,
                someone who viewed her with considerable sympathy, if not bursting
                affection, it was Mrs. Haliburton; seated in the second row, chatting away like
                everyone else, until from the corner of one eye she sensed the anxiety
                Principal Wamp must be feeling. Mrs. Haliburton tried shushing everyone
                around her so things could get started. It was a gesture Principal Wamp
                noticed and acknowledged with a weary, grateful smile.

                Mrs. Haliburton understood what Principal Wamp was going through as the
                first woman to be appointed to run John Wayne Cotter H.S. The first woman 
                of color – her mother was Philippine, her father American, though she looked
                more Philippine than American. Her skin was almost white, bearing that fraction
                of difference that, in someone holding so conspicuous a position, would not go
                unnoticed.

                She tested the microphone; she looked around as if she’d misplaced
                something; she said something to one of her assistant principals in the front
                row, walked back to the podium and stood ready to begin her presentation.
                The buzz in the auditorium would not let up. Principal Wamp touched up her
                hair and waited.

                “Ladies and Gentlemen!” The microphone squealed and grated the nerves; she
                looked at it in an amused, horrified way; the buzz in the auditorium swelled.
                “Ladies and Gentlemen, if I can have your attention, please, we have a lot to
                get through this morning.”

                Getting them settled proved always a difficult proposition, more difficult that
                it ought to be. She’d arranged a welcome-back morning breakfast spread in
                the cafeteria, after which they always straggled up to the auditorium, still
                munching and sipping. She'd spoken to her assistant principals about the need
                for a tight schedule on this first day. Teachers should be handed a program of
                activities; they should be reminded they were back to work, ready to care of
                business especially at the September start.

                   This morning as she entered the auditorium, with her important guests and
               their ground-breaking news, she was almost flattened by the noise level,
               laughter and chatter coming at her over rows of chairs in anarchic waves.

                   Above the din someone was playing the piano – it looked like Mr. Bobcombe,
               the band instructor, bald and bulky on his piano stool and singing some
               jazzy melody; turning the auditorium into a jazz club, or a cocktail lounge.
               And – please, heaven help! – there was one of the teachers, that short eccentric
               woman in the English dept. who taught Drama, her skinny body perched on top
               the piano, pretending to be swoony with desire for Mr. Bobcombe.

                    Her visitors shifted restlessly in their seats, their visitor conversation
               exhausted. She caught the Superintendent looking at her, smiling patiently.
               Principal Wamp rallied her flailing spirit.

                   She fiddled with the microphone, adjusting it up and down; and now, finally
               losing patience, she raised her voice, meaning to signal she’d wait not a minute
               more. “Ladies and Gentlemen…LADIES AND GENTLEMEN…we have a lot to get
               through this morning.” Something caught in her throat; the faculty buzz slowly
               subsided.

               And then the microphone squealed and went dead. Fortunately, Mr. Dalghetti
               who was in charge of rigging up the system hurried to the front of the stage. She
               could wait no longer. Leaning forward on the podium and trusting to the
               acoustics of the hall – at least until Mr. Dalghetti got his wires and speakers
               functioning properly – she launched into the welcome-back speech she’d
               prepared.

               Mr. Dalghetti signaled the address system was working again. Principal Wamp
               tried it; it screeched and howled. She recoiled, “It’s working too well now, but
               better too well than not at all, right?” she joked. Then she touched her flower-
               pattered scarf and ran her hand down the side of her dress; and she smiled a
               dazzling smile now that the problems had melted away and everything was
               finally set and ready to go.


POEMS FOR PROFESSORS OF TIME (& ISLE MORES LIVE)

 

                                                                                                  for Imhade U.

                                                                                    I

                                    
                              When did they come ashore? like hook-hand pirates? Look,
                              there! end of the road Brazilians encamped, at the other
                              the Chinese; for oil or gold or fairy tale treasure, boat loads
                              of exotic diggers feeling up day breaks for confrontation:
                              her island sweet pepper bush against new buccaneers.
                              Coast inlets breached? who let them stay?
                 

                                                                      Those bamsies elected for siren
                              escort Hollow Follow! with posey pot players’ big
                              belly work on stage wanted limbo exchange for her currency
                              of years. Flambeau heart, upwind in flutter – ground here?
                              she’d wing, move time flickering elsewhere.

                                                                                         II

 

                               She spoke of new city life, migrant reservations,
                               family embers who’d shout cook old bird foods
                               when Italian pizza was just around the corner, and
                               that speared meat, what’s it called? and
                               dips in swirled jamoony sauce.

                                                                                   Well, when I came,
                               fleeing the sirens of bamsies on stage, you could stroll
                               fabled streets, stop shop book titles in windows.
                               You hope to face the day seized with iSpace? memory
                               links hand held?  plus island cultivations? not even
                               the genuine article, east of real India, Africa west.
                               A real Gucci would joust you off sidewalks; unzipped
                               Japanese girls know possibility plays, they climb glass
                               mountains with eyes wide closed and parasols.


                                                                                        III

                               Pledge set eyes awed, a survivor tending futures!  
                               next thing you know, from orchid pink lips, “Enough,
                               Tuesday chippin’s under wearing. Let me twine
                               myself with thee.”

                                                                After shared talk laugh sighs,
                               what purpose? Caught, they’d send her home, I’d lose
                               my tenure. “I’ve stripped to my soul for you – off
                               with alarm.”

                               Ok, here’s a gate, garden, felt paths to pact. First, huddled
                               hugs like snow down feathering the grass. Something more
                               comfortable?  this thick white blanket on our landing
                               green, the stars aligned, a tiled roof Eden rented
                               for one night.

                                                                                IV

                                                                      Hard shipped to toil on island
                               shores of cropped compliance, cut last for crossing fresh,
                               who knew what port we’d find, fearing the gods
                               Date Due. Sure, fast fattened cell mate hips, sky vault
                               brick glass guarded; nights we’re too tired to take
                               breath deep. Here you get old by the hour and paid;
                               an icy wind feeds longing to the eye.
                                          

                                                                                      Curved kite
                               dancer of unknowing, dare I grade you up away?
                               down bite marks in the margins? Yes, we're tested;
                               not much from script; with each limb bare you
                               stretch raise torque up rush.
                                                                                         -W.W.

                                                     

 

 

                                   AFTER WORDS,

                                                         you embraced me
                                  as though you were rescuing
                                  a child out of the quicksand
                                  of a floundering desire,
                                  but who the child, whose the urge?
                                  And did the tongue of fire fusing
                                  your breast and mine utter not
                                  only recognition but
                                  also dismissal, a kind
                                  of farewell manured by good
                                  common sense fed by the fear
                                  of drowning in the maelstrom
                                  of our own insistent flames?

                                (from “Gift Of Screws” by Brian Chan)

 

 

 

Review Article: MIXED RACE, TROUBLED HEART: Mittelholzer’s “Sylvia”

 

                Near the end of Part I of Edgar Mittelholzer’s Sylvia (1953), the central
                character, Sylvia Russell, barely 14-years old, still a student at Georgetown's
                Bishops High School, experiences a moment of trembing self-discovery. She is
                standing naked in a hotel room in New Amsterdam, looking at herself in the
                mirror. She is worried about letters she has found in her father’s jacket,
                letters from his mistress; and snapshots of the woman posing naked on the
                Seawall; confirming what people had been whispering, that her father was “a
                rake”.

                    Sylvia is a mixed-race girl. She has begun to wonder what life holds in store
                for her in Guiana of the 1930s. She idolizes her white father. Conversations with
                him have always informed her maturing girlhood. And at that moment, curious
                about her pubescent stirrings, his words give her “a sense of consolidation”.

                    "Ignore the vapourings of people. People suffer from fear. People are
                ineffectual escapists. People strive always to side-step reality, because
                reality baffles them, or is more often than not ugly or terrifying. Reality
                generally carries with it the threat of death – or discomfort.” (p. 108)

                     It might seem a bit of a stretch, allowing such thoughts to surface through the
                mind of a 14-year-old, but in this stroke of startling illumination Mittelholzer
                shares something in common with the American writer Ayn Rand who through
                conversations between characters would insert the philosophical principles that
                underpinned their decisions and behavior. (Think of Roark’s arguments in the
                Fountainhead.)

                Wilson Harris takes this literary device to upper sphere levels of often
                impassable prose, his semi-mythical characters becoming mouthpieces for
                counterpointing visions and interlinked identities across rivers and continents.
                But Mittelholzer, always the grounded realist, his characters relieved of weighty
                symbolic duties, rivets behaviors in the reverberations of the individual’s time
                and chosen place.

                This is British Guiana in the 1930s. Georgetown like some multi-tentacled beast
                is slowly emerging from the mudflats and swamps of plantation politics. A
                mishmash of estranged souls struggles to establish a society, setting up
                boundaries defined clearly by profession, race, residence, religion, property,
                skin complexion and other pedigrees of separation. Within this turmoil of
                colonial differentiation, Mittelholzer reminds us, men and women must find
                mates, sort out the belongings of love, consider marriage.

                    At age 14, mixed-race Sylvia seems less interested in the large umbrella issue
               of ethnic identity. Uppermost in her mind are approaching adolescent anxieties:
               with whom could she fall in love? what was it like to have sex?

               And whom would she eventually marry? The Portuguese boy she really likes (he
               goes to St Stanislaus College, but he’s not from “the coloured middle-class”, the
               group her father considers right for her)? Or Jerry, the young man with “good
               hair” she meets one day, his handshake “powerful and masculine”, but his
               manner and accent a bit on the crude side?

               The struggle between desire and restricted choices, her ‘terrifying reality’, could
               resonate just as powerfully with 14-year olds of mixed or unmixed blood at B.H.S.
               today – daughters seemingly more secure in their ethnic identity; bombarded by
               the “vaporings” of newspaper sophists, but facing a similar pattern of stifled
               possibilities; and unlikely to hold intellectual conversations with their worried,
               race-conscious fathers.

               Sylvia was published in 1953, years after Ayn Rand’s most popular fiction (The
               Fountainhead), but their concerns would seem to be similar: the individual’s
               struggle for dignity and independent thought, the refusal to sacrifice oneself (in
               the colonial context, the emancipated self) to fashionable ideals, the importance
               of scepticism & reason when faced with populist rhetoric or (in the global
               context) fundamentalist orders.


                                                           ≈☼≈

                

                    Sylvia is often referred to as a novel about race & tropical sex (“She violated the
                taboos”) and one can see why. Sylvia’s father came from England to build a
                bridge over a river in the Interior. He stayed on and met Sylvia’s mother “dark of
               skin and dark of eyes and hair”, and part Amerindian. When Sylvia was conceived
                – out of wedlock, with features “European, though her cheekbones were high
                [like her mother’s]” – he could have returned home. Instead he chose to marry
                her mother.

                     For this breakaway autonomous act he loses English friends and privilege, but
                finds an outsider’s tenuous place and purpose in the colony. Mittelholzer roots
                his main character’s dilemma in her father’s opportunist temperament. He
                grows weary of his wife’s shallow comforts and resumes his skirt-chasing ways
                (at “Scandal Point” near the Seawall with the naked girl in the photo); but to
                Sylvia he offers valuable lessons in free will, choice and survival in a constricted
                colonial world. At the end of Part I, as we prepare to follow Sylvia’s emotional
                and social growth, Mittelholzer sets the reader up firmly on a plateau of
                anticipations: how long will she hold on to the values and insights discovered at
                age 14?

                Human relations at that time, as reflected in the novel, seemed sorely in need of
                “development”. Men saw women and turned into post-plantation predators. Sex
                was engaged with not much fairness or durable affection. Typical of male
                cruelty, a character locks his wife out the house, leaving her to spend the night
                naked on the back steps in drizzling rain. In the scramble for public dignity in     
                Georgetown attitudes are as half-formed as the society the colonials inhabit.
                (Today the scramble extends beyond Georgetown – into assemblies stuck on
                illusionary roads, cruelties in traffic with state imperiousness, sexualities
                unreformed.)

                    The turning point in the novel comes when Sylvia’s father dies. His badly
                mutilated body (and that of his ‘outside’ woman) is found in a car. Someone
                resentful of his “rakish” public behavior must have fixed him good with a
                cutlass, no one seemed sure. His departure unhinges Sylvia. Bereft of his ability
                to frame her life choices (her mother has faded into house swept wood work)
                Sylvia’s world turns this way and that, into tense vulnerability and a sorrowful
                end.

                Mittelholzer’s regional novels are usually praised for their pioneering depiction
                of colonial dilemmas. These days there’s a renewal of academic interest in
                uncovering fresh patterns and pertinence. Sylvia was out of print until
                recently. Peepal Tree Press, England, in a “classics” gesture towards a golden
                jubilee of West Indian literature, has reissued it; retitling it, The Life and Death
                of Sylvia ( 2010); and hailing it as a “cosmically meaningful” novel.

                     Assuming Sylvia finds a spot on reading lists in Caribbean classrooms, students
                 might feel challenged to unlock the issues of a novel very much of its time and
                 geography. In some ways it’s a schmaltzy soap opera of a novel, with a
                 serialised structure and patches of True Romance writing; which could be
                 enticing for today’s young readers drawn to its race crossed predicaments;
                 though in a land of routinely Hobbesian adult practices, most probably wouldn’t
                 give a tweet.

                 Down to earth, Sylvia succeeds in recording the insecurities of men and women
                 dispersed along the Guiana coast in the 1930s and grappling with looming social
                 questions: how to break old habits of distrust & self-distancing? at what points
                 of shared interests do communities merge and function as a nation?   

                 The novel has its fair share of Guianese opinionists who argue on many pages;
                 but the streets and landscape are eruptive with people and their entangled
                 anxieties about the future. And Mittelholzer spreads out like a map his main
                 concerns: the native (and empire) forces that gave shape to our nation –
                 absconding husbands, willing or willful daughters; those tumescent fields,
                 callaloo or bhaji, ploughed over and over, “raked” women of hope and
                 renewal.

                 Book Reviewed:  Sylvia: Edgar Mittelholzer: Dell Publishing Company Inc. New
                 York,1953, 383 pgs. (A version of this article appeared in 2007)

 


 


NY SLIDE LXVIII: PRINCIPAL WAMP, MESSENGER OF CHANGE

 

               

                Starting her third year as principal of John Wayne Cotter H.S., Theresa Wamp
                had prepared for her moment on stage at the faculty meeting, addressing the
                staff after the Christmas break, at the start of a new calendar year. The 
                district superintendent was in attendance, as was a representative from the
                Dept. of Education.
           
                They had an announcement to make. John Wayne Cotter H.S., the institution
                they’d been a part of for so many years, would soon be a thing of the past.
                Its name would be changed; the way it was structured and run would be   
                radically  altered. A new institution based on an exiting new concept would
                take its place.

                And Principal Wamp felt fortunate, so very fortunate, to be the one to break
                the news of this impending new life and form for the school.

                     So with a keen eye on future arrangements, to the possibility that she might
                be asked to play an important role in the school’s transformation, Principal
                Wamp hoped, on this first ground-breaking day of the year, to give the kind
                of leadership performance that would leave no doubt in her visitors’ minds
                that her managerial skills (she was still acting principal) should not be
                overlooked.

                     As for what the changes would mean for the faculty, well, the details were still
                being worked out; but from what she’d gathered so far – and this came For Your
                Ears Only from the Superintendent – the Dept. of Education had in mind a little
                house cleaning. Some of the people at that moment noisily carrying on, still
                filing into the auditorium, would be excessed or assigned elsewhere.

                     What pleasure! To put a little fear and anxiety into the lives of the faculty, most
                of whom were still ringing in the New Year, and hadn’t a clue what awaited   
                them down the road.

                At the moment they sat scattered all over the auditorium, too many occupying
                the seats at the back – her frequent appeals to faculty to come closer, to occupy
                the centre seats, fell on deaf ears; some reading the newspapers, the solitaries
                in the wings; the tiny cluster of black women; the union-sheltered shirkers of
                responsibility, the time servers, grubs and worms.

                    What a pleasure, indeed! To toll the bells, to watch the upturned faces turn
                grave with bewilderment when the news broke of what was coming.

                    First, she had to have some kind of order in the auditorium.

                Principal Wamp did not like raising her voice and asking for quiet. Her approach,
                as custodian of the school’s good name, was one of patience, good humor and
                propriety. She liked to appeal to the faculty’s professionalism, after all they
                were adults; they often complained of the unprofessional way they were
                treated, yet here they were twisting in their seats, clucking away like barnyard
                hens, stirring up an unbelievable hullabaloo

                     She caught the Superintendent looking at her, waiting for proceedings to begin.
                She tested the microphone – “Ladies and Gentlemen” – and looked around as if
                she’d misplaced something. She stepped forward and spoke to one of her
                assistant principals in the front row; then she walked back and stood ready to
                start her presentation. The buzz in the auditorium ebbed and flowed; no one
                seemed quite ready to hush so the meeting could get started.

                Principal Wamp cleared her throat. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” she appealed,
                humming a little tune as she waited.

 

                                                            ≈☼≈

 

 

Review Article: SEXY VOICE YOU COULD TRUST?

 

               If you’re a bookstore browser who likes reading first pages or paragraphs
               before deciding, here’s an interesting challenge. The opening sentences from
               book # 1, A Mercy, a novel by the American author Toni Morrison: “Don’t be
               afraid. My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise
               to lie quietly in the dark – weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood
               once more – but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare
               teeth.” 

                   And here, the opening paragraph of book #2, Molly and the Muslim Stick, by
               the British/Guyanese author David Dabydeen: “Once upon a time – the night
               of Wednesday 26th October 1933, when I was fifteen – it happened. It. It. The 
               dripping down my thighs. Sticky, then thickening to treacle. As bloody as
               flesh from Leviticus.”
   
                    You might wish to escape headlines of world economic woes, the many
                messages streaming at you through headsets or hand-held devices. If deep
                down you long for a full-bodied text or voice you could trust, those opening lines
                from Molly and the Muslim Stick (2008) with its fairy tale overture, the
                promise of modern-day horror wrapped like sticky confection, might do the
                trick for you.

                    The American writer Mark Twain once said, “What you have not lived you cannot
                write about.” Toni Morrison might decline a response to that, but David
                Dabydeen might beg to differ. His research skills at reopening inquiry have been
                hard at work over the years, scrutinizing oil paintings, reconstructing stages &
                events in imperial past history with praise-winning results: the long poem
                Turner, works of fiction, The Counting House, A Harlot’s Progress.

                    This time around Molly invites you to consider the case of a woman who has
                been sexually abused by her father. She endures, she goes to college, becomes a
                teacher and travels to Guiana, spreading her tale with gush and acrimony even
                as her behavior spirals into the obsessive right before your eyes. Or right before
                your ears, for Dabydeen urges you to listen to her voice and follow her travels
                from abuse to compulsion as filtered through his class-accented prose.

                     In Part I of the novel Molly sounds like an improbably heroic survivor. Her  
                family history is laid out in sharp, short sequences. You feel as if you’re sitting
                beside her, turning the pages of the family album. Here she is surviving her
                mother’s miscarriage (“I was snug in her womb”); and there, a teenager in
                the local library, “reading productively – the legends of Greece and Rome, the
                lives of great historical figures.”

                Her father, a hard tasking brute who once shoveled coal in Accrington,   
                Lancashire in the 1930s, liked to invite his pals home to get jolly with his
                daughter’s body (“from the age of fifteen into my twenties”). Here’s Molly
                again, an emblem of uncanny female forbearance: “When the pals departed,
                Dad would come and lie beside me, seeking the shelter of my swollen breasts,
                and I would listen to the drip drip drip of his guilt along my thighs”.

                After all that you might anticipate drenching developments, demons to be
                fought off, Molly’s young life “devastated” by all that has happened to her;
                plus some small hope of redemption (Molly meeting an older man who reminds
                her of her father, a kinder man.) But that would be too second-tiered, so third
                world. Dabydeen’s novel responds to a higher aesthetic calling; and that body
                of Molly’s manages to tidy itself and attempt a surreal resurgence of spirit.

                                                      ≈☼≈

                She escapes her house of sexual defencelessness; she redefines desire; and,
                packing as much “joie” as she can in her ravished “vivre”, she goes off to
                college. There she makes new friends, Corinne and Terrence, and attends
                lectures on Keats and Wordsworth. Her overridden appetite opens new
                folders. Terrence becomes her partner in torrid (or torrid depictions of)
                college sex and purging college introspection.

                We learn she has a hip problem and must now walk with a stick. When her
                father dies the walking stick starts talking to her: “You’re no more than a
                fond and hopelessly failed woman.”  Molly talks back to Stick. There are
                streaming pages of rant and disarray – Molly locked up in a boarding house,
                Molly wandering the streets.

                     As the narrative gathers momentum Dabydeen gets into a short-story rhythmic
                stride, his images moving fast, sketching and plumbing new depths in Molly’s
                self-devolution. Keeping pace depends on how willingly you give in to Molly’s
                voice which can be wearying at times with its troubled insistence and arguing
                interludes.  

                     Her doorbell rings often. People leave mysterious packages or deliver
                messages. Molly had talked as if her behavior were “predestined”, so when a
                stranger out of nowhere appears at her doorstep – a half-naked, shivering
                boy-man, exuding an unwashed “alchemy of aromas” – she’s smitten (“He’s
                harmless, poor thing, and far from home.”) and hooked by his aura of
                transpersonal convergence.

                     The stranger is from Dabydeen’s British Guiana. He speaks a language that
                requires translation. He’s taken in, cleansed of his jungle residue and
                christened Om (not Adam.) After much enriched conversation it becomes
                apparent that the novel, which has been doing a hop, skip and jump – from
                Nov. 1918, through two world wars, across cultures and over memory ditches –
                will follow an arc that takes Molly to the author’s Guiana. She arrives on the
                shores of Demerara in Jan. 1957.


                                                             ≈☼≈ 

Img003 (Medium) (Small)  On the surface her mission is to
  search for Om. She has been stirred by
  the "injustice of his deportation"
  (there are other imperatives embedded
  in her now off-centred consciousness).
  Soon Molly's issues are no longer prosaic,
  or even psychosexual. Guided by the
  author's own pedagogical imperatives
  the novel transitions into metaphysical
  adventurism, its higher purpose
  realized in letters sent home like posts
  from a delirious English patient.

  Weeks of lazing in a hammock – "the
  women bring me food…I drink from
  calabash as from a sacramental cup " –
  encourage wonderment about Walter
  Raleigh and those earlier journeymen
  who came in search of El Dorado.
  And then this invitation: Om wishes to
  take Molly to a Guiana watefall. It's a
  chance, since she's travelled this far  
  from the screwery of the past, to
  reconfigure her life path, redeem  
                 the 'poor thing' of her soul. Will she come?

                 Some Caribbean readers might snap: we know where this is going: a boat
                 crew will take her deep into author Wilson Harris’ forestry, into Wilson
                 Harris’ impenetrable marvellousness – his Palace, exalted insight & true 
                 understanding. Well, not exactly. There is no boat crew this time; nor is      
                 Om,  the mysterious Guianese deportee, in any mood to defy the language   
                 boundaries of the novel.

                 When it’s all over you might think: how extraordinary! Molly and her creator
                 working their prose off in an art house of intricate fiction: framing issues and
                 inviting you to marvel at a curious case of female self absorption; concocting
                 a narrative of mind and body saddled with turbulence, and hoping you’d
                 care enough to follow.

                 Whether you’re enchanted or unmoved by the fevered running of Dabydeen's
                 prose depends. In a surreal sense that river of allusions & images usually
                 in spate (with much mist) in his prose has begun to resemble a tool kit,with
                 allusions & images adorning the page.

                Still, you can rest assured Molly & author Dabydeen, like open-collared
                celebrities at a conference table, would be happy to take your comments &
                questions. You could say, for instance, you consider Molly and the Muslim Stick
                a bloody marvellous book. And that with all the subtextual moaning & much ado,
                the grim, incredible sex, you had a bloody marvellous time with it. Molly for one 
                would be pleased to hear you say that.

                      Book Reviewed: Molly and the Muslim Stick: David Dabydeen: Macmillan
                 Publishers Ltd, England: 2008: 179 pgs. (A version of this article appeared in
                 2008)