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)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 