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)
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.
Near the end of Part I of Edgar Mittelholzer’s Sylvia (1953), thecentral 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 waysit’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)
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.
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 novelby 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)
On the first day back after an extended break there was this wonderful feeling of returning to waxed floor surfaces, scrubbed chalk boards, painted exteriors (if money had been found). After the summer vacation staffers could look forward to new class assignments, the timid faces of the freshmen. Regardless of how long they were out the John Wayne Cotter H.S. family, or those who considered themselves family, would confess with a laugh they actually missed the old school. They prayed no one had clipped the padlocks on their book cabinets while they were away. It was nice, really nice, to be back.
There were stories to tell, or no stories to tell, about what happened over the Christmas or the summer season: a plane hijack foiled on a trip to Spain; this absolutely gorgeous man on the boat cruise to the Caribbean; a boring husband who didn’t want to go anywhere; the rain in England; a wedding in California, My daughter got married to this computer analyst.
There would be meetings, of course, and new program schedules, the faculty assembly in the auditorium. Some teachers sported deep tans or beards that made them barely recognizable; some showed signs of weight loss, sometimes down to worrisome fat-free levels. There were jeans and sneakers, bright Polo shirts and bright T-shirts with logos; huddles of laughter, smooched cheeks and getouttaheres!
Bilicki was always happy to be back. He’d enter the building and rightaway his adrenaline started racing. He’d touch base with the department, exchange gossip with the department secretary (any new faces this year?) and any of the old crew who came in. He’d wander down to the cafeteria where he encountered other faces, more hellos, a touch on the arm, more pleasantries. The secretaries teased him about his haircut; it made him look so much younger.
He had few stories to share since he didn’t care much for travelling, at least not to vacation hot spots overseas. He looked forward to his class of new seniors taking notes, asking questions or staring out the window. Everyone needed to recharge the batteries, scrape off the dross and accretions of the previous semester. He’d be the first to admit that despite its problems and frustrations it was good to be back in the Bronx to John Wayne Cotter.
Reality began to set in at the faculty assembly in the auditorium. Still loose and relaxed, staffers toned down their chatter; there was an attentive hush as the principal began her welcome back address. The hush deepened into silence.
Bilicki was always prepared for this. He settled down, slouching a little, in the middle of the auditorium so no one would have to squeeze past his legs for a seat; and he opened his Times and got ready to immerse himself in the pages. He looked around for his co-conspirators, Radix and Mahmood. Bits and pieces from the podium floated past his head, sometimes making contact, as far away he switched to a fresh caption or headline on the page.
“Good to see everyone back…healthy and reinvigorated faces…what promises to be an exciting year… the challenge before us…happy to announce two of our colleagues got married over the summer… from the Science Department retired and was last seen bike-riding somewhere in Florida… the years go by so quickly … back from sabbatical and pregnancy… gave birth to a bouncing baby boy, we’re all excited at the news… now I’d like to introduce new members of our faculty…our mission for the new year continues …That was the good news, now for the Not so good news… Reading scores remain below acceptable levels…cause for concern…budget cuts…We have no room to put all these kids…bursting at the seams… Those of you who wish to continue receiving the NY Times… mailboxes should be checked daily…exciting possibilities for the new year.” (from "Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!" a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
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)
"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  
; 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)
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)
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)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 