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.
≈☼≈
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)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 