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)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 