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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)

 


 


MARSELLUS’ STRUGGLES IN 10th GRADE

 

                                                          
                                                             Skin like midnight, baby, white sheet on its way,
                                                             Skin like midnight, baby, white sheet on its way,
                                                  Jus’ know your Mama loves you, prays for the break of day."   
                                                                                                            - unrecorded Blues lyric

                                  
                                           Late for class, bouts with anger, too lean
                              for baggy-sagging – hip shoulder glide through
                              bowls of raisins, winter suns, Hansberry & Martin
                              fiction dreams corn rows tight set for homework.

                                                       Never knew, know what you’re saying!
                             days stopped & searched, street cornered bitch again;
                                    black looks snot wiped, white look aways, snuffed fear
                                    they dare you share outside the crew; cool Math mapping:
                            [lead point stray/intended] ÷ [licensed breath remaining]
                                   and your parent’s Sunday shepherd churching,
                                   her single lamb picked off, the blue wolf cruising.

                                                        Happy, still, you graduated;
                                   shook your hand so hard from years knife
                                   chipping, shaping the grip of Exit found,
                                   all grown & ready – Go, get medieval! – for
                                   that flag caped mutha – any triggery
                                   finger! – fucker, making you grind halt again.
                                                                                                 -W.W.

 

                                                                                      

                       

                                   

 

                                                 CLOUD

                                   I come to pass
                                   like everything else but I
                                   do not pretend that pausing denies
                                   the stretch. I’m already no longer
                                   myself: quick, pause
                                   and read what you can of your dark mind
                                   in my faithless body of a thousand urgings
                                   and as many faces, all as naked as they’re shadowed,
                                   as good as gone.

                                 (from “Scratches On The Air” by Brian Chan)

 

 

 

Review Article: PLEASURES AND MISFIRINGS OF MYTH

                                                                                                                                

      Characters in Edgar Mittelholzer's novel, Shadows                     
      Move Among Them, would have given considerable                            
      thought to the suggestion that ghosts or "jumbies"     __________________________ 
      as experienced in a forest environment were little        
      more than "electrical misfirings" of the brain. This       SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM
      viewpoint was put forward by scientists writing in                     by      
      an issue of the journal Nature. Human agents, they         Edgar Mittelholzer
      claim, by sending electrical impulses to the brain,
      could induce anyone to think "duppies" are real                 Peepal Tree Press, 
      entities.                                                                      England, 2010, 358 pgs

      In Shadows Mittelholzer's folk had their own theory    __________________________ 
      of ghosts and spirits. When asked to explain sometimes    
        bizarre behavior in the jungle, one character described it as “myth pleasure”. This,
      he says, is when people exercise their creative imagination and amuse themselves in
      concordance with a code of make believe. “We here create our myths and
      conventions day by day and discard them as easily as we create them”. Seen in such
      playful, rational terms and robbed of its ancient mystery and fears, life without spirit
      visitations could be managed with greater confidence even if futures remain
      indeterminable.

      Myth and innerworldly behavior have been central to the fiction of Wilson Harris. A
      cozy scholarly complex has built up around his books. The sequence of novels that
      comprise "The Guyana Quartet" was published between 1960 and1964. Using difficult
      prose Harris has argued (in "Tradition, the Writer and Society", 1967) against
      “realism”, asserting its “inadequacy” as a writer’s tool for exploring complexities in
      Caribbean history and peoples.
 
       Shadows was recognized in Time magazine as one of the significant works of fiction
      published in 1951, a “hard to classify novel.” It could be read today as a comic   
      parallel to Harris’ hyper-articulate folk taking off on metaphor-laden boat rides up
      the Canje river, finding at the very top the fabulous connectedness they want to find in
      "The Guyana Quartet". The humour and inventiveness in Shadows, the “mad slant”
      Mittelholzer brings to the Guyana landscape would appeal to many in the Caribbean,
      like folk in Trinidad, not disposed to “brood”.

      Europeans as anthropologists, Governors, missionaries, adventurers have been drawn
      to Guiana with its exploitable Interiors and underrepresented tribes. From
      Schomburgh to the Roths these very serious men have left us museums and maps and
      musty volumes of fadingly important information. In Shadows Mittelholzer employs
      emblematic Europeans as central characters and it is tempting to view the novel as a
      satirical commentary on those explorers who came before, and the dream merchants
      who  came after.

      Reverend Harmston, the central character, is unlike those early serious men.
      Educated at Oxford he brings his family to British Guiana in 1937 and takes them 100
      miles up the Berbice River. There he assumes the responsibilities of coroner, registrar
      and protector of Amerindian rights. Once settled he starts thinking, maybe he could
      build his own cross-cultural civilization amidst the splendour of rivers and vegetation,
      “the gruff roar of baboons” and those gentle residents of the forest, the Amerindians, 
      whose lives seem astonishingly in harmony with nature.
  
        It’s the imperial settler’s dream, after the search for Eldorado; and since he is miles  
      away from official Georgetown scrutiny Harmston wastes no time establishing (what
      years later in 1960s North American argot would come to be known as) “a hippie
      commune”.

       The location is an exotic-sounding place called Berkelhoost, an old plantation once
      owned by a Dutch family with an exotic name, the Schoonlusts. In 1763 the
      well-documented slave revolt took place. As events of that revolt unfold in
      Mittelholzer’s novel, the white family members were slaughtered, but strangely their
      17 year old daughter, Mevrouw Adriana Schoonlust, did not resist when threatened
      with sexual assault. Her life was spared and she became a servant of the slave leader,
      Cuffy, attending to his sexual needs, and doing secretarial chores since leader Cuffy
      couldn’t read or write.

       He forbids the consumption of alcohol at Berkelhoost, it’s against the settlement’s
      health code. He installs the core values of “hard work, frank love and wholesome
      play”. Order at the forest settlement is maintained with balata whips. Malefactors  
      are generously granted three chances to mend their ways. A fourth offence would
      lead to their “elimination” as incurably bad folk. Throughout all this Harmston’s
      autocratic style is never challenged.

       The Harmston development model is a basically simple one: shared responsibilities,
      plus a blending of European enlightenment and the “local influences”. His forest-
      dwellers are not entirely free to run around, having fun, half-naked in pursuit of
      interests and pleasures. Depending on their aptitudes the children are separated into
      “squads”, the Book squad, Drama squad, Labour Squad. Conditions are spartan but
      life though regimented is far from beholden to the Ten Commandments.

        Harmston sets up his own education system which requires immersion in the Best of
       European Culture: Chopin, “Aida”, Shakespeare, "The Ride of the Valkyries”; and
       reading US "Time" magazine.

 

 

                    


  

                 

            

       The European through whose interrogatory eyes we wander around the settlement is
       a tormented young man named Gregory. He arrives with a raft of personal “issues”
       that spring from crumpled nerves and marriage memories he can’t seem to erase. A
       psychiatrist had suggested a change of environment (the exotic climbs & discoveries
       in the Guianas) as a cure for these “issues”. Harmston considers him a refugee from
       an “over-civilized Europe”.

         Slowly he is drawn into the weirdness of the Harmston experiment and he begins to
        display weird, trancelike behaviours of his own.  In time he becomes the love interest
        of the Harmston girls – a precocious 14 year old who sends him notes (“My Flat Chest
        Burns For You”) written in her blood; and 19 year old, sexed-up Mabel Harmston who
        wants to give up her free loving way with Amerindian boys and settle down.

         The problem for Gregory is, should he give up the securities of England (its night
        clubs, restaurants and banking system) and commit years of his life to a forestrial
        haven of corials, hairy spiders and those erotically-charged Harmston girls.

        Events in the novel are not all outlandishly funny. Mittelholzer manages to keep a
        thread of 1930s colonial credibility running through the pages. Lightning and thunder,
        torrential rains and the full moon intervene at hallucinatory moments of self-
        discovery; and though the benabs aren’t built with creaking doors things manage to
        go bump on the forest floor amidst all the insect and bird noise. His Europeans might
        come across as cartoony inventions, but the unambivalent depiction of the Berbice
        wilds is a measure of the author’s imaginative of the Guiana landscape, from city to
        forest and savannah.

         But where, you might ask, are the Guianese men and women in Shadows? Aside from
        the Amerindians who represent “the local influences”, they are miles away in George-
       town. These are the 1930s, remember. The brightest local minds, unrepresented in the
       in the novel, are probably preparing to set out for Oxford U., LSE and other hatcheries
       of new world ideas.  Years later they would return and, like Reverend Harmston, begin
       to commission their own earth-moving rigidities, be it “socialism” or “cooperative
       republicanism”, or the ethnic chauvinisim that still grips the land.

       With its European settler themes and characters Shadows Move Among Them – first
       published in 1951, and reissued in 2010 with an escorting Introduction by Peepal Tree
       Press – could be read as Mittelholzer’s cautionary tale for our unsettled nation,
       starved for notice of any kind. In the jungle, he might be saying, be wary of white
       elephants and European dream-builders; and new mobile entrepreneurs, their seed
       bags bulging with  capital and big ideas. Like recurring omens they come to  Guyana
       in many postures and disguises. Some may not even speak in European tongues. A
       few might well be shape-shifting Guyanese.

        Grant them a wish, concessions, tracts of green virgin land anywhere, you never
       know what they’ll do next – the grand schemes they’ll devise, the human cost and
       waste if these grand schemes misfire.

       Book Reviewed:  “Shadows Move Among Them”:  Edgar Mittelholzer, Peepal Tree
       Press, England, 2010, 358 pages. (A version of this article appeared in 2007)

 

 

NY SLIDE LXVI: THE WHAT’S IN A NAME GAME

 

             "How’d you end up with a name like that?” Radix asked, that first day Degraf-
             fenbach reached over to shake his hand.
                    “How did you end up with a name like – sorry, what did you say your name
             was?” Degraffenbach shot back, pulling in his chair, keeping things on even keel.
                     He went on: “There’s this guy in the Math department, he’s from Nigeria,
             he’s got this funny-sounding name, nobody can get their tongue wrapped 
             around the syllables… Oban…jem…funa! See, even I have a hard time with it.
             Anyway, everybody calls him Mr. O. The kids call him Mr. O. Even the payroll
             secretary calls him Mr. O. And, get this, he doesn’t mind!  Says it makes things
             easy for him.”  Then turning to Radix, he said, “By the way, everybody calls me
             Dave or Mr. Degraff. I have no problem with that.”
                Not to be outdone, or to seem outsmarted, Radix said there was someone in
             his department with a name everyone managed to pronounce correctly, with no
             abbreviation, despite its strange spelling.
                “Zbryznski… anyone know him?”
                Degraffenbach said he hadn’t heard the name, nor did he know the guy. “In
             any case, what did Shakespeare say…That which we call a rose by any other
             name would smell as sweet…? Isn’t that Romeo and Juliet?” Bilicki assured
             him it was. "That line has stayed with me since 9th grade.”
               Radix thought he heard in the tone of the other man’s voice an attempt to
             slide him down a notch. He figured Degraffenbach had just stopped by and had
             no intention of joining them. But the next day he was back, with his tray of
             cafeteria food, and his ebullient manner. When Radix tried to draw him out on
             political or current issues he got the same joking response. Once Degraffenbach
             slapped him on the shoulders, telling him to “lighten up”. Radix played with his
             coffee spoon, refusing to lighten up, his resentment of the man growing.
                   For his part Mahmood seemed put off by Degraffenbach’s lack of seriousness,
             but chose not to make an issue of it, putting it down to the younger man’s
             inexperience. Raised on Long Island what could he possibly know about the lives
             of “rock breakers” around the world?
                   One morning Degraffenbach joined them just as Mahmood was explaining an
             incident in California involving a white police officer who had found him in his
             stalled Volkswagen in what they considered a “wrong” neighborhood.
                 Bilicki shook his head and reminded everyone there were “wrong” neighbor- 
             hoods in New York. “I live in a “wrong” neighborhood just across the river in
             New Jersey. If someone like you happens along there at certain hours, acting
             suspiously, as they say, there are nice old ladies peering through the blinds who
             would not hesitate to reach for the phone.”
                   Degraffenbach looked down at his plate, chewing thoughtfully; then as his
             forked picked away for the next food dispatch he made a startling disclosure:
             he’d lived among white people all his life on Long Island, and he couldn’t  
             honestly say he had experienced racism.
                    Everyone looked at him, mildly amazed.
                “No, I’m serious. I hear talk about taxis not stopping when you hail them in
            Manhattan, because you’re black. Well, I’m black, and I’ve never had a problem
         &#0160
;  with cabs in Manhattan.”
                  “Why do you think that is so?” Mahmood asked.
                  “I really don’t know.” Degraffenbach leaned back, and seemed to give the
            question some thought. Then he said, “Maybe taxi drivers find me attractive.”
                 Bilicki laughed; he was the only one who didn’t mind Degraffenbach’s jokes. 
            “That's it,” Degraffenbach went on. “That's why they stop for me every time. They
            find me irresistible.” His voice climbed to a falsetto of mock incredulity; his
            boyish face beamed amusement.
                 A lost cause, Radix thought, his mouth compressed in irritation. Telling funny
           stories, simply refusing to think. Beyond saving, Radix felt sure.

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

 

NEWS HIGH LIGHTS DARK INNOCENCE

 

 

                                                                 Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
                                                         et lux perpetua luceat eis.”
                                                                                                  – Requiem Mass

                                Mujeres in migraine storm, occupy a morgue,
                             naming, wanting the bodies of loved ones
                             struck numb in a prison fire.                                      

                             Fear borne refugees cross burnt fields away 
                             from villages ravaged by soldiers; drop infants
                             too heavy to carry, leave bones not keeping up.

                             Memo declassified: from men upright in blue
                             suits: to men with chest medal drawers: Our future
                             is in your hands. Burn their library.

                             Island school youth sentenced five years for stealing
                             spice mango sleeps back to the window –
                             fearing his bed – watching the door.

                             God shrilling warriors hurl stones, ferry open
                             coffins of comrades shot up check scarf streets;
                             gather again fresh, stone fresh.

                             Sun waxed plants stored away by squirrels
                             thirty two thousand years ago see,
                             disbelieving, skies of spring again, cheer scientists.

                             Days of glory, nights of stars – what, from nothing
                             fallen, buried for that first tribe stare touch word?
                             what something? whose voices of release?
                                                                                          – W.W.

  

                         

 

                                        PLAINER AND PLAINER

                                          my confusion
                                       of voice and eye, nothing
                                       left to prove or
                                       improve: a plain peace

                                       sculpting certain
                                       ghosts drifting in and out
                                       of time, the wind caught
                                       by an ancient curtain:
         
                                       sketches of essences,
                                       graphs of a stare
                                       whose centre is any,
                                       whose aim is all.

                                         (from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)

 

NY SLIDE LXV : DAVE THE ADAPTABLE

 

          Dave Degraffenbach was everything the school’s Superintendent, the Board of
            Education, the school’s supervisors and Mrs. Haliburton looked forward to seeing
            more of in the teaching community – a  bright, intelligent, enthusiastic young  
            man of color. They weren’t enough of them coming into the profession, everyone
            agreed.
                Of course, Mrs. Haliburton had said it all along. At a time when young black
            males were viewed as increasingly uneducable, there was a serious need for
            young men of color to enter the teaching profession. They’d serve as important
            role models; they’d know how to win the confidence of troublesome students;
            they’d be living testimony of professional accomplishment outside the fields of
            sports and entertainment.
                   The system could not survive as it had all these years with young black males –
            so  many raised by single mothers! – being taught in classrooms by mostly middle-
            aged white women.
                  When she first met Dave Degraffenbach she’d sounded him out for those
            personal traits that would endear him to her. He was raised, she learned, outside
            the community, on Long Island; he didn’t wear a Malcolm X goatee. What fires
            she sensed in his stomach seem to fuel his own personal ambitions, but he was
            affable, well-groomed, energetic in his roly-poly way, and everyone seemed to
            like him. It would have been churlish of her to raise what she perceived as
            shortcomings in his character.
                     “I’m a very adaptable person,” he told her. “I get along with everybody.”
                This was much in evidence in the teachers’ cafeteria. He’d fill his food tray
            with whatever was on the menu that day, joking with the kitchen staff about
            portions and choices; and confessing that in any case his waist belt and stomach
            could cope with anything they prepared. Then he’d look around and head off to
            the first table that struck his fancy.
                For awhile he joined the Phys. Ed teachers table; they talked and laughed with
            locker room exuberance, in Polo shirts and sneakers never mind the weather;
            they organized wagers on major league sports like the super bowl game, and 
            debated fiercely the teams’ chances. Then he sat with teachers from the Foreign
            Language department, a merry group of women, young and old, with hairstyles
            always sparkling; they ate and laughed and shared jokes from late-night TV shows
            they’d watched. They talked about the guests on the shows, and what movies were
            currently playing. Degraffenbach would slap his thighs, his clothes as loose and
            breezy as his manner, and repeat his favorite one-liners.
               One afternoon he stopped by Bilicki’s table, declaring, “Why don’t I sit with the
            intellectuals today… if that’s alright…how you guys doing?” Even if they wanted to
            they couldn’t resist his rolling good cheer.
                  “Intellectuals? Is that who you think we are?” Bilicki said, making room with his
            chair, smiling.
               “Just kidding,” Degraffenbach said.

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

 


PARAMARIBO: EVENTS AND DREMPELS

 

 

       Flights to Paramaribo arrive just past midnight, if you’re coming from New York, on
      the regional carrier, whose seats and operations these days feel overused and over-
      worked. There's a nine hour wait in Port-Of-Spain, Trinidad for a connecting flight. To
      kill time you might consider venturing out via airport taxi; join multilane traffic under
      a Trinidad sun; catch a beach, “eat a food” or, if it’s Christmas, drink a Ponche de
      Crème. Take note and measure how close the island has moved toward developed-
      nation principles and practice.
    
       The flight schedule alone is enough to discourage the unadventurous from discovering
      Suriname, unless you’re willing to stop over in the Republic of Guyana and risk fractious
      travel over land, bridges & rivers. You might also need a sense of purpose. A young
      couple, college-break free, speaking Dutch, wearing sandals and visiting the former
      colony might find it easier to look forward to quiet settings where familiarity breeds
      acts of kindness and harmless transgression.

       The taxi ride in from the airport past midnight follows a narrow road, headlight-swept
      and free of anxiety. Visitors from industrial geographies might be excused for
      thinking they’ve entered a country of “sleepy” communities, stuck in time past,
      comfortable in village habits; though as you come closer to commercial areas – slowing
      for “drempels” (speed bumps) – and gas stations and security-lit buildings, a group of
      young men on motor bikes appear, hanging out (it’s Friday night); shiny crash helmets
      sitting on small heads, casting them as astral occupiers of night’s dreaming hours.


Img002     Next day the radio wakes you with 
     Sranang talk and sentimental song
     which play on almost every station.
     It closes you in like elevator doors.
     For the rest of your stay and
     depending on your circumstances, you
     might feel digitally cut off from the
     world, or at least temporarily disabled;
     though you may or may not mind.
    

     Over morning coffee paragraphs from 
     the newspapers might leap out at you
     showing you how things are done here,                   [2011 AlphaMax Academy, Paramaribo]           
     as for example this, from De Ware Tijd,
     recently: "The President has often
     stated since this government took office that he supports a transparent land policy.
     This has resulted in the sacking of Martinus Sastroredjo as RGB Minister after it
     became known that his concubine had applied for a large tract of land."

      On the streets, under a Suriname sun as bright and brassy as a Trinidad sun, people go
      about their business, as elsewhere, in cars and in bubbles, leashed to triumphs and
      failings, of diverse race and creed. There are sudden fierce rain showers which stop
      abruptly, then skies are clear blue again. If you stay long enough you might hear of
      crepuscular activity, a twilight gathering of local spirits or conspiracy webs. Individuals
      who otherwise seem educated and informed will swear that, regardless of how things
      appear, each resident soul is monitored by unseen forces, by living and dead people.

       The outside world has reached over language barriers, and moved deeper inland. The
      new consuming China with agreements-to-sign and full steaming enterprise has
      bespectably installed its zonal interests. Street blocks, currently home to many
      Brazilians, could expand in time and be viewed one day with settled pride as Little
      Brazil. In the Paramaribo of downtown bumper-to-bumper “progress” you are where
      you dine, or where you shop. 

       On the plane, early last year, next to my window seat was a Trinidadian (Lawrance G.)
      a soft-spoken man with a boxer’s upper body. Looking past 50 yrs, his fingers trembled
      as he settled his paper cup of coffee, hinting at a creeping vulnerability. He’d started
      working with an oil company soon after leaving high school in Port of Spain. How that
      transition straight forward happened he didn’t explain. Nickerie, in an area reportedly
      rich in oil deposits, was where he (and a team) were now headed on new contract &
      assignment.

       He had travelled around the world, slipping on work boots, hard hat and gloves each
      day as the company probed and drilled into the earth: to Gabon (the nicest people,
      despite miles of deprivation); to Venezuela (the President there cares about the poor,
      despite puffed global moments of ad hominem fist shaking.)

       Had he given any thought to How much longer, doing this?  His body had endured the
      rigors of travel and work hazards. What excited him these days, he revealed, was
      exploring the working parts of the human body.

      He reached into his carry-on bag and whipped out his latest purchase, the iPad. Did I
      own one?  No?  I should get one. The iPad 2, they say, has sharper screen display. To
      impress me his fingers brought up for viewing glossy images of organs in the body. He
      touch-swiped through the heart, liver, organs of reproduction, inserting his own
      commentary and breaths of marvel.

       A world of new information, which in all likelihood could extend his longevity, was now
     within his reach. And though near enough for pension plan review, he wasn’t thinking
     of retiring, not just yet. (Though where – in his hands? strong character? – lay the source
     of that span of energy upholding him over the years.)

       So what was my business in Suriname, he wanted to know, now that he had shared
      information and we were no longer strangers? Why was I going there?  To see an old
      friend, I told him. And to learn about an event he was planning.

      The event was the launch of a book, “Msiba, My Love”, by poet, Ivan A. Khayiat, a
      Guyanese educator who lives in Suriname. (The publication launch seems as ubiquitous
      these days as the baby shower.)

      Khayiat describes it as a “symphonic poem”. It has a coffee-table book readiness –
      assuming that books are still welcome these days on coffee tables – with high gloss
      pictures and supportive verse revealing the natural beauty of Suriname, and the
      ecological damage done to parts of its landscape. And it comes with a companion DVD
      of evocative images and soundtrack over which voices, in English and Dutch, present
      the poem in heartfelt cadences.

    

             
                


 

 

               
       "Msiba" DVD offers ten minutes of shimmering surfaces. It may be much less than a
       "symphonic” work, but the launch apparently made for a wonderful, rare evening out
       for invitees in Paramaribo. The Government of Suriname, it is reported, has adopted
       the DVD & book as a state gift for visiting dignitaries, impressed no doubt by what it
       sees as an excellent mix of art photo information and spoken words about the country,
       framed by knowledgeable, friendly hands.

         Finding brave new worlds imagined by Suriname writers and artists might require a
       long stay, some search and enquiry. There is evidence of activity – workshops, art
       discourse, exhibitions – facilitated by stakeholders in Holland. A more vibrant, grand
       platform for exposing creative talent to residents and visitors is certain to be avail-
       able when the next big cultural event, the regional festival for the Arts (Carifesta),
       takes place in Suriname in 2013.

         In the meantime, Wan Fu Nyun Winti Seti Sranan Bun. So the sharp suits and bill-
       boards say.   – W.W.
         

                                                                ≈☼≈
 

                                     OPHELIA MAROON

                           Every leaf will return to blaze
                           sharp green all about me through days without
                               night (and yet no star shall be
                                   erased.) My gaze is
                               the same as the sun’s; neither
                           smile nor frown. My gown of water is all
                           red and white buds not yet burst like my heart.

                                        (from “Gift Of Screws” by Brian Chan)

 

 

 

 

NY SLIDE LXIV: BELLS AT CHRISTMAS

 

  More often than not MaryJane Syphers sat alone with a cup of coffee and her cigarettes and a folder of scripts over which she poured diligently, hardly looking up; though if anyone happened to stop by at her table she’d interrupt what she was doing and give them her undivided attention, brushing back strands of hair; and turning in her chair, leaning forward to share confidences.
    The semester was weeks away from Christmas. Classes were set to run right down to the start of the holidays, leaving teachers no time for seasonal shopping. A memo from department chairs reminded faculty that Christmas parties, or events linked to the spirit of the season, were to be discouraged. In fact, classroom observations of teachers were scheduled for just this time, when students, in a fractious celebratory mood, made classroom management difficult for everyone.
   Radix, Mahmood and Bilicki were more than happy to find each other during the lunch period. The situation in the hallways was approaching levels of the “chaos” MaryJane had described. Radix had attempted once to separate two students fighting in his class. He was advised by Quickenbush to follow Union guidelines – take yourself out of harm’s way first; get help from security personnel. He talked to Bilicki about this – was it a really dangerous thing to do, jumping in to separate two students fighting?
    When MaryJane did stop by again, it was on a day of hysterics and incident.    
  There had been a knife stabbing on the 1st floor. There was a trail of blood spots leading to a stairwell, but no sign of the victim. Two security officers with much theatrical hand gesture directed foot traffic away from the blood spots. MaryJane gasped, then thinking there must be a wounded student somewhere in the building, she started following the blood trail. Thinking better of it she turned back, muttering, “O my God!”
    She entered the cafeteria as the Principal was appealing over the P.A. system for calm on the 2nd and 3rd floors. She swept past their table, her shoulders bunched; she came back, gave them a look of terror, and in a harsh trembling voice, the tendons stretched on her neck, she said, “What did I tell you? What did I tell you? We’re way past redemption now.” Then she rushed off again.
    They looked at her, speechless. They had no idea what she meant. They supposed she was referring to what they’d been discussing – the general breakdown of order in the building.
  Annoyed at the school’s effort to dampen or ignore the Christmas season, students were finding ways to celebrate. Someone kept pulling the fire alarm. Bells went off almost every day. They rang for five minutes before someone shut the alarm off, but the strobe lights kept flashing and teachers were never sure what to do – ignore the bells, wait for an announcement or vacate the building right away. Outside the sirens of fire units could be heard approaching.
     Then there were nerve-jangling bangs as from left-over Halloween firecrackers; fights erupting in the hallways; and the emptying of classrooms when someone stuck his head in the door and shouted, “Fight!”
      Bilicki railed at attempts by the administration to downplay the gravity of the situation. It was the responsibility of the supervisors to provide a safe learning environment in the building. Evidently they were failing to do so. The school was on a slippery slope, moving closer and closer to a state of anarchy.
    There was this proposal he’d been working on. He was thinking, he said, of forming a watchdog group. He had a name for it, Excellence in Teaching. No, this was not another attempt to run for office. The watchdog group would throw a spotlight on areas where radical improvements could be made. It would be a far cry from the sentiments emanating from the principal’s office; a far cry, too, from the police blotter of alarming incidents issued by the Union chairman. He hadn’t spoken to anyone about it. He wanted to hear, first, what Radix and Mahmood thought.
  (from “Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!”, a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)