Category: Books

 

               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 26^th 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.

                                                             ≈☼≈ 

  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)