Tag: Edgar Mittelholzer

Review Article: DARK MUSIC IN THE BONE

 

         Published before (1955) in Great Britain, "My Bones And My Flute" (2015) was
       meant to be an entertaining work of fiction, "a ghost story in the old fashioned
       manner". Which might tempt old-fashioned readers to anticipate haunted houses,
       cobwebs and creaking doors. In the hands of Guianese readers back then, it was
       a boldly invented tale that scared the living daylights out of many.

        In (pre-television) 1950s Guiana, reading habits were more empowering than what
      passes as functional literacy today. Local folklore was filled with "jumbie" (ghost)
      stories of headless horsemen, and unseen tormenting spirits just waiting for city
      residents to step into the Guiana forest with its Amerindian guardian myths.

      Pioneer Guianese poets and writers turned     ________________________________
      to the coastal and forest interiors for        
      phantasmagorical material and metaphors.             MY BONES and MY FLUTE
      Human mysteries were solvable and literary                        by
      detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Watson     
      were the preferred gentlemen of reason on               Edgar Mittelholzer
      the job. (Mittelholzer's characters make  
      reference to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.)           Peepal Tree Press Ltd.
                                                                                    England, 2015, 236 pgs

                                                                         _________________________________
 
       In preparing his manuscript Mittelholzer must have felt he had a winning formula
       for overseas publishers: a Guianese ghost story with original genre elements: a
       flute, a toxic "parchment", disoriented locals and a haunting colonial memory.
       Something editors had probably never seen before. 

       The flute interrupts the daily routines of his main characters, the Nevinson
       family whose leisure habits included listening to Debussy's "L'apres-midi d'un
       faune" on a portable gramophone. It intrudes on the soirée small talk of Mrs.
       Nevinson and her church folk, and the conversation of her adolescent daughter;
       all of whom, the narrator notes, should remind readers of the pride and prejudice
       "characters in a Jane Austen novel".  

       He explains that at first it sounded "as if someone were practicing a Debussy 
       scale and weren't getting it right." Later with widening appreciation he
       identifies the sound as "a tuneless, wandering trickle of treble notes coming
       out of the trees that stood so still in the night". A vagrant flute, then; baffling
       but bearable; no great cause for concern. 

       But there's the "parchment". It belonged to an old Dutch planter, Mynheer
       Voormans, who committed suicide after the insurrection in 1793 during which
       he suffered "persecution" at the hands of rampaging "black wretches" once
       under his plantation control.

       To show he wasn't quite done, that plantation power (and its European source)
       would not go away quietly for good, Mynheer Voorsman placed an avenging curse
       on a parchment left behind. Touch it  ̶  as a curious Mr. Nevinson did, preparing
       to read  ̶  and disharmonies would fall upon the rest of your sleep and waking life.

          Mr. Nevinson, who manages the Berbice Timber and Balata Company, invites the
       narrator, Milton Woodsley, to join his team of investigators (his wife and
       daughter) as a kind of 'paranormal consultant'.

       Readers get a sense of what in Mittelholzer's work would become a major theme
       or pathology: skin colour and colonial privilege. The Nevinsons' near-white skin in
       those days allowed them the ease to distance themselves from unwanted sights, 
       flute annoyance; and from most everyone else.
       
       The narrator tells readers his skin was actually "olive"; that is, near near-white. 
       This partly explains his self-styling as the epitome of 1930s Guianese bohemian
       "cool"  ̶  an ambivalent fellow; even-tempered, quite pleased with himself; who
       makes diary entries and sketches for paintings in spare moments.

       His (authorial) descriptions of Guianese jungle creepiness should make today's
       disabled (or disinterested) Guyanese writers sit up and take notice  ̶  how far,
       despite fears of rejections, Mittelholzer's confidence and talent had advanced in
       1955: his exuberant evocations of colonial folkways and the Guianese natural
       world.

                                                       ~~

      At some point in the narrative you might expect a panicky loss of composure,
      and full-throat screams when the team of jungle sleuths first encounter the
      cursing, walking spirits of the insurrection (accompanied, you'd imagine, by
      phantom flutes orchestrating in the trees). Doesn't quite happen that way.

      At Plantation Good de Vries they make contact with the locals; they learn of
      mysterious new deaths and new flute playing; they return at night to share
      deductions, and wake up the next day to a sun that "shone from a sky remotely
      daubed and speckled with cirrus and cirro-stratus which dissolved as the morning
      progressed ".

      Mittelholzer prompts his narrator to deliver erudite Sherlock Holmes-like
      analyses: "Let us suppose," he says, "that this Dutchman had left some strongly
      psychic emanation of his personality  ̶  some etheric magnetic effluvium  ̶  within
      the fibres of this manuscript…"

         He maintains his rational perspective until, during a period of "waiting and 
       watching", as new harbingers (the sharp rustle of shrubs; a rank goatish smell;
       a creaking hammock rope) gather to challenge human bravery, he observes
       "a humped shadow-mass" entering the bedrooms of their jungle cottage. 
       (This is probably the scare moment best remembered by older Guianese 
       readers.)

        Kenneth Ramchand (Professor Emeritus, University of the West Indies) has written
       an Introduction to this edition  ̶  46 blowy, biblio-background-filling pages  ̶  that
       opens up the book's contents for scholarly partake. (Mittelholzer, he says, "wants
       to leave you accepting the supernatural".) The cover blurb suggests, too, that the
       novel has "serious things to say about the need to exorcise the crimes of slavery
       and individual wickedness".

       New readers may elect to stay the discourse (which could be sopor-inducing at
       times); discover what the fuss was all about (dabbling in the dark arts could
       unsettle bone complacency? ear plugs and face masks won't keep out dust
       fall from the past?) Or simply jump the gap and ride along with Mittelholzer's
       story-telling, his chapters gliding steamer-like up the Berbice river in the full-
       bloom English registers of his day.

       Either way the new British publisher of "My Bones and My Flute"  ̶  Peepal Tree
       Press, a home port for redemptive postcolonial opportunity  ̶  would be
       delighted if you put a serious handle on the book's reputation; get as comfortable
       as verandah arrangements permit these days; at the very least give the story a
       good old-fashioned try.    
                                              - Wyck Williams

 

 

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)