Tag: Caribbean Literature

 

                 A newspaper columnist in British Guiana writing a Sunday column (February 1922)
                 makes the following statement: “Georgetonians are of two kinds: those who live
                 in Queenstown and their unfortunate neighbours who inhabit the remaining part
                 of our garden city.” That newspaper columnist is a fictional character, and the
                 statement sets the stage for Roy Heath’s first novel From the Heat of the Day
                 (1979).

                    The Queenstown part of the city was apparently not fully developed at the time.
                 From a home on Anira Street you could hear the “incessant roaring of the waves
                 at floodtide” coming all the way from the seawall. Heath describes the area as
                 “the unblemished district with its tall houses and blossoms on year end, and
                 painted palings like flattened spears embracing yards darkened by thick branches
                 of fruit trees.”

                 Residents hired gardeners to tend all              __________________________
                 those blosoms. New Garden street was
                 remarkable for its fine houses with large          FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY
                 gardens in front of them, "in which they                        by
                 flourished roses and dahlias, their stalks                  ROY HEATH         
                 maintained by a staff to which they were           Persea Books, New York, 
                 tied". A pipeline sewage system was set                   1994, 150 pgs 
                 up in the early twenties foreseeing dignity     _____________________________
                 for the fortunate (and the end of posies
                 under the bed). Who could resist the dream of moving one day to the good life 
                 in Queenstown?                                               

                 Over decades, and rapidly since the 1990s, the beauty and social mores of the
                 city have deteriorated. Parcels of dilapidation and vacant grassy lots remain;
                 clogged drains and ocean threat defy permanent solution. New fire-proof struc-
                 tures tower over old places (neglected, and now eyesores); and new migrant
                 and vagrant occupiers have established a kind of pell-mell opportunity ethos – a
                 modus vivendi that tends to discourage the best in people.

                  On Peter Rose Street, jostling with once elegant homes, there’s an Auto
                  business, cars or vans packed tightly in a paved yard, with streamers flapping in
                  the wind across the road. Of interest, too, is a mosque, and a house turned into
                  an office for taxi service; and a fruit vendor’s shack set up at the entrance of an
                  Oronoque Street home.  

                  You could argue these are buoyant signs of post-Independence development in
                  the city; a messy kind of free for all residential zoning that disdains vestiges of
                  colonial order and respectability, even as a new moneyed and political class
                  finds finer prospects of manicured grass elsewhere.

                  Today minivans take short cuts through Queenstown’s narrow, quiet streets, 
                  honking to get the attention of evening strollers. And Bastiani (“the under-
                  taker” in Heath’s novel) and the smell of horse manure from the shed housing
                  his funeral carriages have long gone; his Forshaw Street business has been
                  replaced by a more upbeat entrepreneur selling bridal accessories.

                  But colonial Queenstown was where Roy Heath situated his main characters, 
                  Armstrong and his wife Gladys, in his novel  From the Heat of the Day;the
                 1920s Queenstown, its alleyways well-maintained by “men spraying the gutter-
                  water with cisterns of oil”.  Heath examines what happens when their marriage
                  falls apart in the Forshaw Street property they occupy.

                                                                   ≈ ↨ ≈       

                  After two years and two children, the flush of cohabitation worn off, a rift
                  develops in their relationship. Gladys Armstrong, a woman of healthy appetite, 
                  gentle, pledged “to breed and obey”, cannot understand what she’s doing
                  wrong. She must cope all of a sudden with “a wave of irritability" sweeping over
                  her husband, "that seemed to have no cause” .

                  Her husband is doing very well by colonial standards; he has gained promotion
                  to Post Master at the Georgetown post office. But he wraps himself up in uncom-
                  promising “silences”; and her attempts at conversation are cut short by
                  reminders, for instance, that he is "reading”; a hint at his interest in personal
                  development through knowledge. 

                  Beneath the newly-married love routines, Heath suggests their union was 
                  anchored in sexual passion. Gladys Armstrong recalls “the sweetness of cop- 
                  ulation which became for her the heart of their marriage”. What she finds
                  hard to take now is her husband's growing indifference, the cold bed at night.

                  Heath offers her no religious faith for solace and strength; she doesn’t consider
                  returning to her father’s home. She chooses a long-suffering wait for her
                  husband’s self-isolation to end, absorbing his “outbursts” and irritability.

                  Armstrong is somewhat mystified at the downturn of his marriage. Alert to his
                  wife's inadequacies, he finds fault with her “passivity”; he notices “her thighs
                  becoming thick, and her breasts flabby”. Libidinal urgencies overwhelm his
                  thinking, and most nights he stumbles home sullen and inebriated; sometimes he
                  slips into the servant’s room.

                  Armstrong's conversations with himself stir doubt and self-pity. He wonders if he
                  had married above his station. He had plucked Gladys from a well-to-do
                  household respected for its piano playing, embroidery and sketching. Maybe he
                  should have settled for a woman from his village in Agricola, “one of them big-
                  batty women with powerful build who kian’ tell a piano from a violin.”  He
                  suspects he’s being constantly “judged” by his wife’s family, viewed as some- 
                  one lacking an acceptable “background”.

                  To deepen his dilemma, the colony is plunged into economic turmoil. The 
                  collapse of the sugar market spreads fear among workers. There’s talk of
                  “retrenchment” (a word as frightening then as “recession” today) among Civil
                  Service employees. Armstrong hangs on, but his job security eventually falls
                  victim to budget cuts. Gladys responds with belt-tightening courage, holding
                  fast to her vows of love till death; and hoping her patience and sacrifices
                  would salve Armstrong's closed-off inner seething.      

                  Just when you wonder how long she can remain emotionally cut off from her
                  husband, Gladys Armstrong dies; and Heath's prose seizes the moment to turn
                  damp and maudlin. Pages dwell on and depict scenes of the husband’s grieving
                  disbelief: “the tears trickled through his fingers, down his chin to fall on to
                  his shirt.” Images of his remorse pile up, and after the funeral, “desolation
                  in his heart”.

                    
                               [Roadway to Queenstown, Guyana 2009]

                                                                          
                                                                   ≈ ↨ ≈   

                  Heath is not a stern moralist, but the school-teacher side of him sometimes
                  nudges his narrator to offer "lessons" from tragedy. Readers might empathize
                  with Gladys, or feel dismay at her unwearied virtuous waiting. And Armstrong
                  comes across as a curiously tormented, though not wholly unfeeling family man;
                  certainly a notch or two above other men in the colony who in similar situations
                  might have ceased quickly to care.

                  Heath suggests, too, that marriage (of the average, or below average couple) 
                  in the colonial 20s was often no more than a simple self-serving arrangement
                  based on mutually accommodating roles and expectations, which did not  
                  include the possibility of change. As Gladys mused: “Things were just so. There
                  was a sky and an earth; there was the wind and the sun; and there was
                  marriage.”

                  Readers today might hope to find some causal insights in the novel, though there
                  was little public understanding then (and little now) of human impulse and 
                  intimacy. Heath chose simply to present the unraveling of a 1920s union in
                  stages: withdrawal, drinking, outbursts; stifled goodness, the misery of the
                  cold bed; the male impulse to roam outside the roost. Children, like molasses
                  from sweet cane, were often byproducts of unbridled passion, lucky to be 
                  cherished in extended family folk ways.

                  From the Heat of the Day is the first in a trilogy of novels. Old Georgetown
                  neighborhoods are faithfully restored in Heath’s patient (at times, plodding)
                  prose. Readers can follow the tribulations of the Armstrong children and their
                  grief and guilt-burdened father in the follow-up novels, One Generation and
                  Genetha.

                  Heath’s 1920s Guiana is in essence an imagined world, but many of the issues
                  explored in From the Heat of the Day could throw light on marital (and extra-
                  marital) relations in Guyana today  ̶  if you pay attention to distress signals
                  that sometimes breach community walls; if you listen to male talk about
                  copulation.   
                                                 – Wyck Williams

                 (A version of this review article was posted elsewhere in 2008)