Guyana Fiction – Page 4 – FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN

Review Article: GUIANA 1823: BLOOD SEX AND ANGST

                1823 might one day come to be regarded as a hinge year in Guyana’s historical
                development, outsignifying
other years and events, like 1834 in Essequibo,
or
                1763 in Berbice. And who knows, some good day, when our nation is brimming
                with prosperity, and can boast a film studio and film-making talent, someone
                might
secure the financing to make a movie or documentary based on events of
                that year.

                    1823 saw the uprising of slaves on the Demerara plantations
in what has been
                described as “one of the most massive slave rebellions in the
history of the
                Western Hemisphere”.

                     It has inspired several books, the most acclaimed so far
“Crowns of Glory, Tears
                of Blood” ( 1997) by the Brazilian professor
(History/Yale) Emilia Viotti da Costa.
    This
book is recognized as a serious work of reconstruction, well researched,
                careful
with facts and the nuances of relations among the many power players.
                But long
before the publication of that scholarly work there was Ratoon (1962),
                a novel by
Christopher Nicole.

                     Based on events of the same year, Ratoon takes fearless liberties with the
                historical record. In an
author’s note Nicole states that incidents described in his
                book were “based on
eyewitness accounts of what actually took place”; but the
                main characters were
invented.

                The novelist like the professor attempts a multi-angled
chronicle of events,
                though for his staging Nicole inflates the number of
slaves involved in the
                uprising from the estimated 12,000 to a potential cast
of 20,000. Nicole’s fiction
                covers those history-altering days in prose that
feels "modern", if at times
                unmoved by (to borrow language from author George Lamming) the
profound
                implications of that human tragedy.

                    The focus of the novel is the Elisabeth Plantation House. It
stands in an almost
                exotic setting, “in
the centre of a carefully created paradise of soft green
                lawns, deep flower
beds brilliant with multi-coloured zinnias, and borders of
                heavenly scented
jasmine and spreading oleander bushes.” Beyond
it, the slave
                compound, a vegetable patch; then the chimney of the boiling
house, the
                canefields and irrigation ditches.

                Readers get a sense of what life was like for slaves and
slaveholders in East
                Demerara villages, stripped now (though not completely) of
their colonised
                character – Plantation Nabacalis, Plantation Le Ressouvenir, Le
Reduit,
                Vryheid’s Lust, Mahaica, Felicity, Success – and reconfigured today as
numbered
                “Regions”, as if the places never existed.

                    Nicole allows access to the August meeting of the Demerara Racing
Club in Kitty,
                “a teeming, brilliantly coloured
ant-heap, winning and losing, drinking and
                sweating, betting and gossiping”.
At Camp House, the Governor’s Residence
                “overlooking
the silt-discoloured estuary of the Demerara River” , we listen
                as Governor Murray and Captain Bonning argue over what to do about rumours of
                slave insurrection, and how to deal with the rebels. We’re curious as a
young
                English missionary John Smith passes by “astride an emaciated mule, proceeding
                slowly up the coast.”

                     Nicole seems very much attuned to the speech rhythms of the ruling
white
                oligarchy (“Ah, Bonning,” Murray called. “Resting
your men. Good. And this is
                Packwood? Come inside with me, my man.”) He is
on less certain ground with
                his “invented” creole-slave talk (“She done sleeping. And it time. She going
feel
                them blows for she life.”) which often sounds invented, and might dismay
                regional linguists; though no one can be sure what creole voices sounded like
in
                1823.

______
≈ ↨ ≈ _______

                    The central characters in Ratoon were born in Guiana: Joan Dart, daughter
                of a plantation
owner Peter Dart, but not “representative” of Demerara white
                women of the time. Unmarried (at twenty six) she had spent all
her life in
                Guiana and had come to view
Plantation Elisabeth as “home”. Then, Jackey
                Reed, “a young negro, tall and slim”, drawn to the crusading ideas and energy

                of the white missionary John Smith. He adopts Christianity and joins the
                movement
plotting the slave revolt.

                    Their contrasting plantation-creole identities converge one
fateful day. Jackey
                Reed makes a break for freedom but is pursued, captured and
placed in the
              stocks by Peter Dart who, multiple heartbeats later, collapses and
dies. In that
                instant his daughter must assume owner responsibilities.

                  Joan Dart had kept her father’s books; she’d helped him run
the plantation after
               his wife died. But at the moment when she must give the
order for the branding
               and flogging of a runaway, she hesitates.

               It is a mind-altering moment. With responsibility suddenly
thrust upon her, Joan
               Dart begins to weigh issues of ownership, belonging (“Sugar and heat and mud
               were in her blood”),
the moral welfare of slaves; and the plantation as “home”.
               Later with the leadership
role thrust upon him, Jackey Reed, too, is forced to
               grapple with complex emotions: duty
to his race, the unchristian values of his
              “Congo” brothers who indulge “their Damballas and their cane rum”;
and an
               eruptive desire for Joan Dart whose white body “behind the thin muslin” stood
               six feet away from him in the stocks.

                   After the first 100 pages – of Dart family dispute, slave
restlessness, gathering
               clouds and screaming kiskadees – the weighty issues blur
into background, and
               the August 17, 1823 revolt gets under way.

                   With firm command of his material Nicole switches reader attention back and
               forth between the clashing
forces, tracking the shift in fortunes with movie-
               making craft. There are set pieces done in graphic detail of violence and battle
               and rape. The slaves win
an encounter, but celebrate prematurely, settling
               scores and drinking freed rum. Slave-General
Jackey Reed, with the numbers
               favouring a one-sided overrun of the plantation, finds his hopes for victory with
               few casualties quickly dashed.
He argues with his co-conspirators (Gladstone,
               Obadiah, Quamina, Cato of
Felicity, Paris of Good Hope) over tactics; he is
               alarmed at how quickly the slave
will to fight evaporates after sudden reversals.

               At the height of the insurrection, Nicole shifts the focus away from confusion and
               bloodletting. Taking a page
from old Hollywood movies – where amidst exploding
               ordnance or circling Indians the
hero takes time out to cradle the head of a dying
               man, and share dying seconds
of reflection – he asks readers to follow his
               conflicted couple as they slip away to share moments in the canefields. At
               issue, whether they should commit fornication.

                    Joan Dart, fighting back a “spasm of shudders” in her thighs, reminds Jackey
                Reed that he is
six years younger; in her eyes still a boy, and for all intents and
                purposes still
a slave. He reveals the lust he harbours for her, and the Christian
                faith that has
kept these feelings prudently locked away. In any case, he reminds
                her, he’s in control now
of the plantation.

                They argue and agonize for several pages, sorting through
fears and desire, until
                Nicole’s pen breezily steps in to decide the issue: “Her arms moved of their own
                volition wrapping themselves round his neck in a paroxysm of delicious agony”.

_______ ≈ ↨ ≈ ________

                    If there’s a governing principle in Nicole's “explosive
bestseller” novel, it
                frames issues of intercultural curiosity and biophysical
play, evolving identity
                and individual freedom (albeit at an unformed, ratoon stage)
that engage the
                two natives of Plantation Guiana; and how easily an eruptive interest
in “the
                other” can be swept up in the tide of “events”. This will not come as
news to
                tribe-wary Guyanese who observe each other’s ways and means with averted
                post-plantation eyes and ship sinking feelings.

                    First published in 1962, round about the time a self-ruling
Guyana was teetering
                toward those overseas-engineered “racial disturbances”, Ratoon is usually
                mention (if at all,
and in a lowered volume of appreciation) – as among the best-
                known published works of
Guyanese fiction. For some readers its consumerist
                treatment of grave historical matters might seem inappropriate. Christopher
                Nicole, its 1930 Guiana-born white author, no doubt had his reasons for inventing
                and inserting characters in the maelstrom
of that pivotal year.

                To bring lyrical closure to the predictable course of events
Nicole serves up a
                coda to remind readers his novel is not just about a doomed uprising
and an
                impossible romance.

                    Captured and held hostage for awhile, weary and disheveled from
lovemaking in
                the cane fields, Joan Dart is rescued by a Colonel Leahy (“How long have you
                been like this…? Anderson get a carriage… Damnation.
Have a litter made, then,
                and I want four of your strongest men.”) But in
the very next minute, on receipt
                of “an express from Mahaica Post” delivered by
a horse militiaman, the Colonel
                places her under arrest for “consorting with
the enemy”.

                    Readers interested in how the colonial justice system dealt
with white
                women and their unconventional choices must get through the last
30 pages
                to see how that turns out, if Joan Dart wins forgiveness and goes home again.

                    Those pages might also set in motion the kind of discourse
on ‘broader issues’
                that regional academics find pleasure in – “the whole
question of the role and
                responsibility of native white proprietorship in modern
C/bean society”. Though
                not a few would
argue that Ratoon's sensational account, its blood flow,
author
                liberties and subsidiary lust, is not a useful place to start this inquiry.

                    Book Reviewed: Ratoon:
Christopher Nicole: Bantam Books/St Martin’s Press:
                New York, 1962, 246 pages. A version of this
article was posted elsewhere in
                2008.

Review Article: BACK TO THE COLONY: “CHINESE WOMEN”

                  Much of what happens in Chinese Women (2010), the latest work of fiction from
              Guyanese Jan Lowe Shinebourne, occurs in the mind of the central character as
              he looks back at his colonial upbringing. Events begin in 1956 and end in 2006. You
              follow along as if you’re on his Facebook page, his voice giving twitter like
              accounts of what he has endured over the years.

              At first you’re not quite sure what to make of him. You sense there’s much
more to his narrative which the writer has chosen to keep off the page.

              His story? After falling from a tree at age 10 ("I did not allow myself to feel any
              pain. I never have.") and lying in plaster cast and splints for two years, the
              narrator recovers to begin an amazing sequence of transitions.

From a high school in Guiana to a university in Toronto; then on to success as
an international oil engineer and a millionaire father of two. From life in a
resentful “ingrown Muslim family”, right through the aftermath of New York’s
9/11 attack, his identity in full blown “Arab Muslim” membership.

These transitions to riches and contentment overseas end, however, when he
discovers his brother in bed with his wife.

Carnal betrayal inside the family, conceivably more calamitous than the
NY 9/11 attack, could have set off eruptions of neurological proportions.
Shinebourne doesn't linger on how or why it all happened. Her narrator, cast
this time in emotional splints and plaster, simply turns away and resolves
to reset what remains of his life.

Immersed in "no pain" and still financially endowed, he begins a search for a
girl he'd fallen in love with as a boy in a classroom; the Chinese girl who sat two
rows in front of him, now a Chinese woman, whose image he'd carried locked
away in his Guianese head all these years.

He locates the object of his old love in England – like author Shinebourne,
the girl had forsaken the yards (and populism) of the old country for the
gardens (and order) of the old colonial power. They catch up; he begins
a diligent courtship, offering money, security and if possible marriage.

Psychologically, you could argue, he’s still “going home”, back to old familiar
starting blocks; hoping to add fresh meaning to his broken life. Shinebourne,
however, seems more interested in the grandeur of their romance: will her
narrator enter his Chinese kingdom? can his new money buy out old feelings?

≈☼≈

                 The focus of the novel is not, as the title suggests, exclusively Chinese women in
Guyana. Shinebourne writes to help us what lies beneath her narrator's
fascination with the Chinese as a group. His assumptions about the colonial
world had developed through the funnel of what "my father told me”, and
what he observed growing up on the sugar estate where his father was an
estate manager.

In 1960 in British Guiana, he tells readers, the African “collected his pay
              …[headed] straight to the dancehall [?] where the many mothers of his many
              illegitimate children waited.” The Indians on the other hand maintained
“values of thrift and ambition…for generations.”

Emblematic of political leadership of the times was the hero, Cheddi Jagan,
“the Hindu revolutionary communist, our Fidel Castro”, and the villain,
Forbes Burnham, “leading his supporters to attack Indian people and turning
the country upside down.”

The ethnic group which wins the narrator's admiration and approval are the
Chinese, represented by the Yhip family who own a bakery near the sugar
estate. What seems prominent in the Yhips, and apparently in no other group,
are the traits of “hospitality and generosity… kindness and mercy…the only
civilized behaviour I ever knew.”

After such group approval and admiration it doesn’t take much “linking” for him
to be enchanted with a Chinese girl, Alice Wong, though on several pages he is
at pains to point out her “race did not interest me.”

Perhaps aware that some reference to lovemaking is almost de rigueur in
contemporary fiction, Shinebourne digs up stuff from an undisclosed archive on
intimacy in the colonies.

Readers are asked to accept that “on the apartheid regime of the sugar estate”
in 1957 Guiana, where “the master watched the slaves like vultures and
swooped down to knaw at their humanity”, everyone was copulating; or
watching copulation in progress.

There was copulation on the lawns, in the canals and drains and under the
bridges. Even the stiff-mannered white overseers with wives and lovers had
their own good times rump romping in full world view.

              Coupled with awful living conditions on the estate – people "shat and urinated"
            everywhere, and oh, the flies, the mosquitoes! – these descriptions, you sense,
              are meant to elicit sympathy for the narrator, for his pursuit of a kind of dry
cleansing romance with the Chinese girl; and his attraction to the inert,
shop-bound (bed-room kept secret) lives of the Chinese Yhips, blessed with
consoling "powers of endurance and stoicism”.

   ≈☼≈

            Unlike, say, Guyanese author-diplomat David Dabydeen, also resident in England,
              who works and writes from inside the brickwork of academia with its resources
              for recovering information, Shinebourne's novel scrapes along on the residue of
loving memories, hoping the results would be embraced as a postcolonial
              achievement. But issues of language threaten to undermine the book's ambitions.

The prose falters in stretches of expired usage. The narrator describes, for instance,
              the plight of Africans and Indians “dragged in chains to the country to labour like
              brute animals.” There’s mention of “racy calypsos” and a woman who “danced
              with abandon, winding her hips”. Characters and scenes feel underwritten,
              feebly imagined, then drafted into service.

              The absence of compelling matter in Shinebourne’s fiction has been defended
              through the courtesy of academic paper work, intent on covering up short-
              comings with sociology fillings and forgiveness – often reading more into the
              books than is actually there.

This time around, with its purpose skewed, its "groups" honoured or caricatured,
Chinese Women ( 50 years of its narrator's colonial tree fall and independent
high rise, compressed in 96 memoried pages) pleads for credibility. Sad to report,
there’s more of nothing here.

- Wyck Williams

Book Reviewed: “Chinese Women”: Jan Lowe Shinebourne, Peepal Tree Press,
England, 2010, 96 pages

Review Article: MIXED RACE, TROUBLED HEART: Mittelholzer’s “Sylvia”

                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)

Review Article: SEXY VOICE YOU COULD TRUST?

               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 26^th 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)