Tag: Guyanese Fiction

Review Article: GUYANA’S E. R. BRAITHWAITE (1912 – 2016)

  

        Back in the days, long long before hand-gripped devices, boys and young
        men in Guyana and the West Indies loved climbing trees. And when British
        Royalty visited the colonies, the old Pathé News camera crew were sure to
        capture the plucky barefoot few perched in the trees, suggesting native 
        determination to catch a glimpse as the motorcade with shining outriders
        went by. 

        In Georgetown boys and young men climbed the trees outside the famous
        Bourda Green to get a non-paying view of Test Match cricket. You had to 
        get to the trees early to reserve your branch.

        There were squabbles. Men carved their initials on a tree branch to claim
        ownership. A dispute was once settled when a claimant sneaked back at
        night and chopped down the tree limb of a rival. This led to confrontation,
        and the involvement of the local constabulary who threatened to arrest
        and charge somebody with acts of public property vandalism. At which 
        point the small crowd of onlookers dispersed and the disputants
        disappeared.

           There's no record that proceedings in the previous paragraph actually
        took place, but they're not hard to imagine.

        Guyana's E. R. Braithwaite ("To Sir, With Love") might have been a tree
        climber. At the news of his passing (December 2016) that image seemed
        somehow appropriate to describe a man in search of the uninhibited, clear
        view; getting off the ground for the wider perspective.

        Like many West Indians he entered England in the 1940's  ̶  "grown up British
        …we knew no other cultural pattern"  ̶  where he joined the British RAF.
        Later in post-war Britain he experienced racial prejudice on London streets,
        trains and buses, and in the workplace.

        He could have found a place to cotch, nail down new habits and routines;
        then drawing on observations might have written books about the cramped
        lives of lonely Londoners warming themselves in marginal places.

           He could have taken advantage of affordable accommodation in academia
        to turn out peer-pleasing books. Or turn with withering comic prose on
        fellow Guianese back home, inventing a street named Miguel, with amazing
        characters like the fellas arguing under the tree outside the Georgetown
        cricket ground.

        First published in 1959, "To Sir, With Love" might not now be a dust
        covered source of pleasure on everyone's bookshelf. The latest edition (New
        York, 2014) describes it as "the book that inspired the classic film" (released
        in 1967), featuring the then immensely popular actor Sidney Poitier who
        managed to take over the book's memory pages.

        In the early 60s the opening lines, strange yet imaginable, drew you in:

        "The crowded red double-decker bus inched its way through the snarl of
        traffic in Aldgate. It was almost as if it was reluctant to get rid of the
        overload of noisy, earth charwomen it had collected on its run through the
        city  ̶  thick-armed, bovine women, huge-breasted, with heavy bodies
        irrevocably distorted by frequent childbearing."

        [Sticking a pin here: when it comes to opening lines from our region
        writers "To Sir, With Love" still can't beat "Miguel Street". And when it
        comes to inspiring something new, the movie can't beat the Audio Book
        (yet to be offered) of "Miguel Street".

        Imagine getting in your car, all set for traffic jam or a long drive. Seat
        belt. Then, audio disc first lines:

        "About nine o'clock one morning a hearse and a motor-car stopped outside
        Miss Hilton's house. A man and a woman got out of the car. They were both
        middle-aged and dressed in black. While the man whispered to the two
        men in the hearse, the woman was crying in a controlled and respectable
        way."

        Sounds retro '60s, yes. Vintage read and ride, though.]

        Braithwaite became what his admirers like to describe as "multifaceted"
        (diplomat, former Royal Air Force pilot, teacher). A man of "endless
        journeyings" as Guyanese author Jan Carew (British Army veteran, scholar, 
        activist) might say. Men whose talent and lives seem upwardly unlimited,
        not content to stay penned in one secure operating room.

          "To Sir, With Love" sent back to readers in Guiana intimations of what to
        expect if they trusted BBC voice amicability, and still wanted to make the
        Windrush crossing.

        The narrator opens on a note of cool outsider curiosity:  "I smiled inwardly
        at the essential naturalness of these folks". Soon he discovers he must tread
        warily. Good conduct was not always its own reward. "We were to be men,
        but without manhood."  

        The chapters roll forward but the writing eventually loses some of its 
        imaginative promise, slipping into a Record and Assess Vérité mode as
        the narrator enters friendships and faces issues in and outside his school's
        classrooms.

        Braithwaite was reportably not altogether happy with the performance of
        Sidney Poitier as the lead man in the movie. The book's Mark Thackeray is
        a model of even-handed civility, learning more and more about his host's
        "essential naturalness", until his mobility reaches the first tight corner 
        where he feels compelled to push back in anger.

        Despite a captivating performance, it's entirely possible Poitier's easy
        charm might not have been what every reader visualized, or what
        Braithwaite had in mind for the book's narrator. (Had he been born and
        working back then, the British actor David Oyelowo might have been
        perfect for the role.)  

           In Jamaica, at the University of the West Indies, immediately after the
        street demonstrations in 1968 over Professor Walter Rodney, the island and
        the Mona campus were thrown into a ferment of identity course correction
        and rebranding (leading in many cases to the distortion of individual lives,
        and the flatlining of distended careers.)

        The work of Professor Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the celebrated Barbadian
        poet and scholar, was a major talking point during that period of regional
        self-assessment.

        Loyal lovers of his poetry urged sources to be careful, when galvanizing his
        house of ideas, not to misspell his last name; and please don't confuse the
        man's "vision" (the grounding of his Caribbean folk "nation language", its
        Africa out roots) with the reputation of the other Edward Braithwaite from
        Guyana.

        "To Sir, With Love" played no part in the culture conversations of the 70s.
        If mentioned at all, it struck readers as intellectually inconsequential.

        Overachieving writers from Guyana are a thing of the past. Over recent
        decades standards (reading and writing) have plummeted. Solid,
        interesting work from writers  ̶  the few not stuck in ethnic viscera and
        mirror relations  ̶  is difficult to find.

        Though not on a top tier with Guyana's literary giants  ̶  Edgar Mittelholzer
        (1909 -1965), Wilson Harris (1926 – ) Jan Carew (1920-2012)  ̶  E.R Braithwaite
        shares shelf company with Roy Heath (1926-2008); writers of quiet challenge
        and endurance who wrote from a station of not completely settled
        residency elsewhere.

        You have to give the man his props. That first novel, once described as a
        "triumph of human empathy", helped Guianese and West Indian readers come 
        to grips with the ever-shifting ground of accommodation in the developed 
        world. It prepared us for the migrant experience, its high expectations and 
        risk; over land and sea; back then and even now.

        Book Reviewed: "To Sir, With Love" : E. R. Braithwaite, Open Road 
        Integrated Media Inc., 2014
                                                                – Wyck Williams

 

  

Review Article: RAMPAT REMEMBERS, TREMBLES AND PRESSES ON

Back in 2013 Guyanese writer Ryhaan Shah published her second novel,
“Weaving Water”. It ventured into settings already crossed by, for instance,
David Dabydeen in his novel, “The Counting House” (2005). The concerns
are similar: characters are shipped from their native India and set down as
indentured labourers for the sugar estates in British Guiana.

               As a professor at a British University, author Dabydeen leavened the
historical drama of his novel with the grain and weight of his research
activity. Ms  Shah’s writerly origins are in journalism, and her novel, based
on a less solid retrieval grounds, follows a winding path between “fantasy”
and a wavy rendition of a familiar theme.

               There are telling differences in             ______________________________
the narratives. The vessel leaving
Ms Shah’s India  ̶  “the “SS Ganges”  ̶                 WEAVING WATER
is the last ship “to cross the kala pani                       by
for British Guiana in 1917″. Her central
characters, Rampat and Parvati, take               Ryhaan Shah
on roles and responsibilities that might
have taxed the sympathies of other           Cutting Edge Press, 2013
passengers with worries of their own.                    254 pgs.
___________________________

Without given the matter second thought they decide to “adopt” a baby
born on the Guiana bound ship (the mother dies and, with little ceremony
or teary detail, is buried at sea).

The ship borne “family” arrives eventually in the village of Corriverton,
Berbice and begin the heartfelt mission of the novel: bury talk of
“returning”, raise Neela, the “adopted” child, and build new family
bonds and a grounded residence. Much of this “building” will take place
under the mesh scaffolding of duties, deities and rituals.


≈  ֍  ≈       


With no physical connection to her biological mother, or to her “mother
country”, Ms Shah’s Neela grows up as a quiet, self-absorbed child and
then as a girl of extraordinary capacities. Her parents, as if compensating
for their own childless relationship, pour love and devotion into her
upbringing.

               She is kept away from colonial school rooms, and at age 15 “[she] read the
‘Bhagavad Gita, the whole of it, in Hindi…sang all the bhajans and chalisas
at the mandir in the most beautiful voice.”

               Village folklore and superstition develop around her; stories spread about
her gifts for “magic…omens and signs… to become water itself then turn
herself back into human form.”  Rampat, her “father”, registers the real
life family concerns about her future  ̶  her marriage prospects, her willful
behaviour at times (her frequent unexplained disappearance from the
household).

                Ms Shah uses chunky pages and paragraphs to describe the colonial forces
arraigned against the family’s survival. These include the Canadian
Presbyterian Church, the British (Anglican) school system, plantation
owners, the neighboring creole culture. And a particular menace in the
form of a black overseer named Sampson, appointed to whip and keep the
indentured labourers in place.

                Black Sampson paves the way for the introduction of another central
character, Billa. He is from the North of India. He worships a non-Hindu
god, but on the ship and in the village he strikes a lasting jahaji bhai
friendship with Rampat and Parvati.

                Defying archival images of the slender, dhoti-clad estate labourer, Billa’s
work routines on the estate bulk him up   ̶  “[his] arms became muscled…
his stomach flat…[he] bristled with fighting energy…big laughter”  ̶  to
the point where he fancies his chances in a duel as redeemer of ethnic
manhood.

                On the banks of a canal, one day, a brawny Billa challenges and defeats
the bullying black Sampson, and is rewarded with the loser’s “respect” and
a seal of intercultural friendship. (They continue through the novel as
village buddies, sharing confidences and memories of the fight like retired
heavyweight contenders.)

                                              
                                                            ≈  ֍  ≈       

It is through Billa’s expanded filters that worrying reports of change
 outside the village boundaries come to their attention.

                People and agencies are raising issues in the city: bright young men like
Cheddi Jagan (handsome, guest at a village wedding); Forbes Burnham
(eloquent, back home from London); variant party politics and talk of
Independence; communism and the CIA; Walter Rodney, general elections
and those Africans who menace innocent voters with sticks.

                At this point Ms Shah’s authorial hand seems unsure how to weave these
“real life” intrusions into her fictional village.

                Her aging originals, The SS Ganges cast, soon retire from making
observations. Their descendants  ̶  joining the author in a narrative leap to
the 1950s  ̶  seem cautious and speculative in their fictional roles. They
express alarm at the restlessness in the city, but merely note for the
record their anxieties about the players and proposals for change; and the
flood of events that could one day race through their barely rooted, not
fully accepted life habits.

                You get the sense, then, that with one eye on history Ms Shah’s purpose in
“Weaving Water” is to take her readers on a pleasant  “spiritual” Sunday
afternoon drive  ̶  past signposts of village cohesion, famous names and
places; past her carriers of survivor traits (enhanced for “symbolic”
cultural value)  ̶  so certain this is all her readers want to hear and see.

                The novel bypasses the opportunity to pause and examine, if only briefly,
how the indentured mind (apart from the big Billa & black Sampson
punch-up throw-down) grapples with issues of contact, adaptation and
(mis)understanding; as well as those usually undisclosed contradictions,
 and areas of personal darkness. 

≈  ֍  ≈

                The kala pani-to-indentureship “experience”, sometimes referred to as an
“odyssey”, has been embraced by enablers of “Indo-Caribbean Writing”. (A
recent addition to the genre is “Coolie Woman”, 2014, by Gaiutra
Bahadur.) The assumption is that these journeys through fiction  ̶  blurring
and holding the ethnic/individual lines  ̶  might recover distant connect-
ions, and provide corrective insights into “what really happened” to the
ocean-crossed labourers from India. 

                Ms Shah’s first novel, “A Silent Life” (2004), was a stumbling, not very
good entry to Guyanese fiction. This time around, after what seems many
long years voyaging to publication, “Weaving Water” shows evidence of
renewed writer confidence.

                Her sentences, flecked with authentic Hindi words, ripple along in narrow
homely straits, determined not to upset anyone; slowing for pages of
tender (at times sentimental) descriptions of village innocence; on
occasion sliding into a “fairy-tale” lyricism in an effort to tighten reader
embrace of her characters.

                And more often than you might expect, old-time sentences like, “Rampat
always trembled when he remembered…” pop up like speed bumps on the
way.

                As part of the colonial indenture “recovery” act (which some consider a
“political” act) “Weaving Water” might succeed in its retro-construction
goals  ̶  in “filling in the gaps and silences”; and offering sea and land
markers for readers studiously retracing the kala pani routes.

                As a work of fiction, in the wake of similar “new world” evocations  ̶  by
established authors Edgar Mittelholzer, Jan Carew and David Dabydeen  ̶
the challenge for Ms Shah’s imagination is still to find fresh material, and
the prose strengths that make for a path-breaking connection to a wider
Guyanese and Caribbean and world readership.

                In other words, finding ways to measure and interpret those stubborn
“gaps”  ̶  with newer understandings, fewer cherished sweetmeats; and
with courage as free ranging as before.

                                                                                   – Wyck Williams

Review Article: UP FROM THE CANEFIELDS: ROOPLALL MONAR

                 Coming after publications of his poetry and a novel, High House and Radio (1991)
is a collection of Rooplall Monar’s short stories. If the back cover is a reliable
guide readers are invited to follow the lives of characters who once occupied
cramped living quarters on a Sugar Estate, who now live independently in
their own homes. 

                 The stories come draped in the satins of Guyanese Indianness, and on that level
they might intrigue those pursuers of groups and constituencies, the pollsters
and publishers who enjoy framing the cultural plight of their preferred
collectives.

                 But collectives (ethnic or religious) are ice blocks inside which the human
spirit lies frozen, with all its contradictions and unconscious bits. You expect
talented writers to chip away at these blocks so that individual fates might
be freed, and minds made open again to possibilities and diverse view-
points.

                 Monar’s fiction has encouraged snappy comparisons with writers working a
similar literary terrain, Sam Selvon (in Ways of Sunlight, 1957) or V. S Naipaul
(in Miguel Street, 1959). And obligatory references to “the kala pani” voyage.
Those older writers brought incisive observation and humour to bear on a
mosaic of desperate living.

                 After his remarkable achievement with Janjhat (1989), Monar in this collection
creates a world that showcases the Indianness of his Indians. The stories don’t
probe deeper than that.

                 His Indian folk occupy a self-contained village on the coast (Annandale). They
no longer work for the sugar estate, but lack of education has severely
handicapped their life prospects.

                 The old estate worker solidarities have begun to fray; tempers and divisions
develop a sharper edge. “Over me dead body, no  Hindu blood in me family”,
a Muslim father shouts at his daughter who is thinking of getting married. “Greed
and selfishness invade people spirit”, another character says in a bitter jokey
rum shop mood.

                 Monar has set his own limits for these stories – intense creole talk and amusing
portraits that release ripples of laughter and recognition. Characters often
get drunk and feel emboldened to perform reckless acts. Village tricksters use
their wits to survive. And humour is at the level of the unemployed man whose
day to day problems are compounded at night by his unhelpful wife – her bulky
torso and heavy thighs making bedroom intimacy strenuous if not completely
satisfying labour.

                 On occasion black creoles from an adjacent village (Buxton) cross boundary
lines: a woman, unhappy with her black obeah man, searches for a Hindu spirit
man and hopes for better results. There are “thiefing black people” who raid
backyards for poultry; and idle black youth whose crude sexual comments as
Indian girls walk by raise tension and alarm.

                 Tension swells into aggression as when politically generated violence sweeps
across the land. A few stories (“Election Fever”) look at volatile situations
during Election time when Indians became random targets.

                 Though Monar  doesn’t write with an activist’s eye for Indian grievance, the
stories shed light on the predicament of self-sufficient communities, where
caution and a hushed anxiety are the main rules of engagement when darkness
and outsiders approach the prayer flags at the gates.    

                 Monar’s prose – “And don’t talk, them coolie people beetee yapping while
one-two coolie women beating they chest dab dab: ‘O Bhagwan, is real
murderation.’” – lies like thick thick paragrass on every page. Sometimes he
seems happy to display his easy way with creole words. At other moments the
narrator’s voice wears you down with its revved up ethnic speak.

                 You sense the need for editorial oversight and suggestion so that the language
hews to the task of delineating character, offering insight. A world wide
webbish Indian, drawn to the book’s Indianness, might feel compelled to
tread gingerly through a word field like this: “But gat luck, she nah gat none big
brodda in the house, else he mighta fat-eye she, cause nowadays, you cyan
trust some buddy an sissy never mind them come-out pon one mumma-belly.”


≈☼≈

So much of short story success depends on its cast of invented characters. Monar
has called up folk from his own village experience; but his Danky, Mule, Bansi,
Bungu, Naimoon & Shairool don’t stay on in the imagination after you’ve closed
the book. They behave in recognizably Guyanese ways, arguing & cussing,
scheming & daring, beating tassa drums & cooking mutton curry; and on
drunken occasions they dish out “one proper cut-rass” to their wives.

                  In the Booker sugar estate days of the 60s, where these stories are set, and
later in the 70s, when “folk” culture helped stoke anticolonial fires, fiction like
this gave reason for awards and performance; and an overseas delight in the
liberation of a once marginalized language and culture.

Monar’s fiction received a special Judges’ Prize in 1987. And Janjhat has been
hailed as his remarkable upcoming Guyanese novel.

                  But new territory is already laid out and waiting for Monar’s attention. Up from
the estate canefields more of his Indians, no longer prepared to tolerate
bypass, have made expanded moves from rural dwelling to new residence in
the towns, where they dispense political patronage and must “look outward”,
share residential space and intermingle with non-Indian creoles and strangers.

                  Authors Edgar Mittelholzer and Jan Carew once worked like porknockers in
similar areas of human scramble and depredation. They’ve left us standards
and enduring literary models. There have been solitary attempts at political-
murder mystery, but the field remains wide open for literary forays: into the
acquisitive itchiness of administers-in-chief; their always self-serving lovers;
or the creole melodramas of our desperate housewives. 

                  In this day and age, if serious literary fiction seems unwanted or must stay
locked up overseas institutions of higher reading, a second tier of well-
crafted books could keep us pleasurably engaged.

                  Otherwise, Guyana will remain at the mercy of freelance entrepreneurs in yachts,
who sail in, make sly gestures and company, then quickly sail out. Writers with
Monar’s storytelling talent would appear to have their work cut out for them. 

                  Book Reviewed: “High House and Radio”: Rooplall Monar:  Peepal Tree Press,
England, 1991, 176 pgs. (A version of this article appeared in 2007)