The Caribbean Review of Books (New vol. 1, no. 19, February 2009)

Jeremy Taylor on John Williams’s revisionist biography of Michael X Mervyn Morris on Ian McDonald’s Selected Poems Melissa Richards on Jacob Ross’s novel Pynter Bender

Rhoda Bharath on Earl Lovelace F.S.J. Ledgister on Kamau Brathwaite’s academic legacies Gavin O’Toole talks to Leonardo Padura about free expression in Cuba

Fred D’Aguiar on Wilson Harris’s notions of space and time Nicholas Laughlin on cow mas and the art of protest Poems by Ishion Hutchinson and Tanya Shirley

No. 19 • February 2009 • www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com

Reviews

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The X file

Jeremy Taylor on Michael X: A Life in Black and White, by John L. Williams

10 Praise songs

No. 19 • February 2009 Editor: Nicholas Laughlin Publisher: Jeremy Taylor Editorial assistant: Mirissa De Four Marketing: Caroline Neisha Taylor Contributing editors: Jonathan Ali, Vahni Capildeo, Christopher Cozier, Brendan de Caires, Anu Lakhan Editorial board: David Dabydeen, Edwidge Danticat, Marlon James, Jane King, Ian McDonald, Annie Paul, Kim Robinson Walcott, Olive Senior Original design: Illya Furlonge-Walker, Form & Function Design Prepress and printing: Caribbean Paper and Printed Products (CPPP) Ltd. Cover illustration: Detail of The N Train (2008), by Phillip Thomas; mixed media on linen, 66 x 150 inches; courtesy Phillip Thomas and the National Gallery of Jamaica Photo credits: page 10, Ian McDonald, courtesy Macmillan Caribbean; page 13, Jacob Ross, courtesy Jacob Ross; page 21, Kamau Brathwaite, courtesy Salt Publishing; pages 28 and 29, T’in Cow Fat Cow images, by Nicholas Laughlin, courtesy Nicholas Laughlin

12 Family matters

Melissa Richards on Pynter Bender, by Jacob Ross

16 Home and away

Rhoda Bharath on Caribbean Literature After Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace, ed. Bill Schwartz, and A Place in the World: Essays and Tributes in Honour of Earl Lovelace at 70, ed.

Funso Aiyejina

20 On broken ground

F.S.J. Ledgister on Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, ed. Annie Paul

23 The contender

Sharon Millar on Sylvester Devenish: Trinidad’s Poet, by Anthony de Verteuil

In brief

Etc.

The Caribbean Review of Books ISSN: 1811-4873 New vol. 1, no. 19, February 2009 Published quarterly by Media and Editorial Projects Ltd. (MEP) for The Caribbean Review of Books, a not-for-profit company incorporated under the laws of Trinidad and Tobago 6 Prospect Avenue, Maraval, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago T: (868) 622-3821 F: (868) 628-0639 E: crb@meppublishers.com www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com

Mervyn Morris on Selected Poems, by Ian McDonald, ed.

Edward Baugh

Ronald Cummings on Valmiki’s Daughter, by Shani Mootoo (page 14); Geoffrey Philp on Daddy Sharpe, by Fred W. Kennedy (page 19); Lisa Allen-Agostini on Into the Mosaic, by Marlene St Rose (page 25)

3 Marginalia

News about Caribbean books and writers

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Reading list

Copyright © 2009 by The Caribbean Review of Books. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without the written consent of the publisher.

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The 2008 CRB books of the year

The original Caribbean Review of Books was edited by Samuel B. Bandara and published quarterly from 1991 to 1994 by the University of the West Indies Publishers’ Association (UWIPA) in Mona, Jamaica.

26 “Where the borders are”

The Caribbean Review of Books considers unsolicited fiction and poetry, and letters to the editor. All submissions may be edited for length and clarity.

Supported by:

Browsing the ether

The CRB’s editors recommend ten outstanding books from last year

Leonardo Padura talks to Gavin O’Toole about journalism, literature, and freedom of expression in Cuba

30 Prosimetrum

Fred D’Aguiar on the elasticity of space and time in the fiction of Wilson Harris

Portfolio

Nicholas Laughlin on T’in Cow Fat Cow and mas as protest art

Poems

“Just Like That”, by Tanya Shirley (page 15); “A Surveyor’s Journal”, by Ishion Hutchinson (page 22)

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

About our contributors Lisa Allen-Agostini (“In brief”, page 25) is a Trinidadian writer of poetry, fiction, and drama. She co-edited the fiction anthology Trinidad Noir (2008), and her yound adult novel The Chalice Project was published earlier this year. She writes a weekly column for the Trinidad Guardian.

Rhoda Bharath (“Home and away”, page 16) is a cultural studies researcher at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies, where she also lectures in African literature.

Ronald Cummings (“In brief”, page 14) is a Jamaican PhD student in the School of English at the University of Leeds. His work focuses on queer Caribbean literature and culture, and discourses of marronage.

Fred D’Aguiar (“Prosimetrum”, page 30), poet, novelist, and playwright, was born in London of Guyanese parents and raised in Guyana. His most recent book is Continental Shelf (2009), a collection of poems. He teaches at Virginia Tech in the United States.

Ishion Hutchinson (“Poem”, page 22) is a Jamaican poet. His work has appeared in the LA Times Review and the Jamaica Observer.

Nicholas Laughlin (“Portfolio”, page 28) is the editor of the Caribbean Review of Books.

F.S.J. Ledgister (“On broken ground”, page 20) is a British-born Jamaican. He teaches political science at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia, and has published work on Caribbean political development and political thought.

Sharon Millar (“The contender”, page 23) is a Trinidadian writer.

Mervyn Morris (“Praise poems”, page 10) is the author of six books of poetry, including I Been There, Sort Of: New and Selected Poems (2006).

Gavin O’Toole (“Conversation”, page 26) is the editor of The Latin American Review of Books, www.latamrob.com.

Geoffrey Philp (“In brief”, page 19) is a Jamaican writer based in Miami. His most recent book, Who’s Your Daddy? and Other Stories, will be published in May 2009.

Melissa Richards (“Family matters”, page 12) was born in Trinidad and now lives in London. She is a former journalist and is currently a desk editor at Hodder Education, UK. Tanya Shirley (“Poem”, page 15) is a Jamaican poet and lecturer at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. Her first collection of poems, She Who Sleeps with Bones, will be published in May 2009.

Jeremy Taylor (“The X file”, page 6) was born in the United Kingdom, and has lived in Trinidad for over thirty years. He is a writer, editor, broadcaster, and publisher. Many of his essays and reviews are collected in Going to Ground.

Phillip Thomas (cover image) is a Jamaican artist based in New York. His painting The N Train was featured in the 2008 Jamaica National Biennial.

For news about Caribbean books, writers, art, and artists; plus interviews, mini-essays, poems, photographs, and links to literary material around the World Wide Web, updated (almost) daily — visit:

antilles.blogspot.com 2

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Marginalia News about Caribbean books and writers Regional shortlists for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize were announced on 18 February, 2009. In the Caribbean and Canada division, the novel Pynter Bender by Grenada-born Jacob Ross was shortlisted for the best book prize (see a review by Melissa Richards on page 12 of this issue). It was the only Caribbean title shortlisted for the prize. Regional winners were announced on 10 March and the overall winners of the 2008 CWP will be announced in New Zealand in May. • The US National Book Critics Circle announced the winners of its 2008 awards at a ceremony in New York on 12 March.

The biography prize went to Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. The Calabash International Literary Festival — after a threatened cancellation due to a funding shortfall — will take place from 22 to 24 May in Treasure Beach, Jamaica. This year the weekend-long programme of readings and performances features Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat, US-based writers with roots in, respectively, the Dominican Republic and Haiti; Barbadians George Lamming and Esther Phillips; and Jamaicans Velma Pollard, Anthony Winkler, Rachel Manley, Marlon James, Staceyann Chin, Geoffrey Philp, and Millicent Graham. Former Jamaican prime minister Edward Seaga will read from his forthcoming memoir. Other participants include V.S. Naipaul’s biographer Patrick French, the American poet Robert Pinsky, and British-born travel writer Pico Iyer.

For more information, visit www.calabashfestival.org. • The seventh St Martin Book Fair will take place from 4 to 6 June, 2009, with the theme “Wired”. Readings, discussion panels, and workshops will focus on intersections between new technology and Caribbean literature. *** A note to our readers: The present issue of the magazine, dated February 2009, arrives several months late. The editors apologise for this delay in our publication schedule, which is the result of the CRB’s continued financial uncertainty. As a small literary non-profit, the magazine has struggled to cover its costs since the first issue was launched five years ago. In 2008, thanks to generous support from the Prince Claus Fund and also our individual subscribers, the CRB published four bumper issues, but at the start of 2009 we found ourselves facing a serious financial shortfall. Our fundraising efforts have finally produced a sufficient sum to permit us to resume publishing the magazine, and we plan to catch up with our regular quarterly schedule in the coming months. But the CRB’s long-term survival depends on the support of its readers. For information on how you can help, contact the editors at crb@meppublishers.com.

Subscribe to the CRB

One year’s subscription to the CRB (four quarterly issues): • Trinidad and Tobago: TT$150 • Rest of the Caribbean: US$24.99 • North America: US$34.99 • Europe and rest of the world: £17/US$34.99 Subscribe via the secure link on the CRB website, www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com, or contact our Subscriptions Department at: 6 Prospect Avenue, Maraval, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago phone: (868) 622-3821 fax: (868) 628-0639 email: crb@meppublishers.com To process your subscription, we need your name, mailing address, email address, and credit card information (number and expiry date). Or send us a cheque payable to The Caribbean Review of Books.

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The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Reading list Browsing the ether We tend to think of the Caribbean as a series of small places where everyone knows everyone else, but the region of the world to which we might apply the C-word is in fact a geographical extravagance, tricky to define on a map: “as many islands as the stars at night,” Derek Walcott once wrote, plus the continental irredentas of the Guianas and Belize, the Antillean outposts of Colón and Limón and Bluefields in Central America, and a fecund diaspora in North America, Europe, and further abroad. It is a region with no centre, no single capital, no lingua franca, and from most Caribbean territories it is easier to fly to Miami than to an island three stops up the archipelago.

For that matter, it’s often easier to follow the political news from New York or London than that from Kingston or Bridgetown — to say nothing of the literary news. And the magazines and journals whose special job it is to pull the multilingual literatures of the region into one frame of reference — to maintain the very idea of one Caribbean literature out of many — can be frustrated by the great distances between them and their possible readers. To put it plainly, it is expensive to transmit printed matter through the post, almost as expensive as printing it in the first place (as the editors of the CRB know only too well).

The obvious solution, in the Internet age, is to launch into the electronic ether, and there are few major Caribbean periodicals without their own websites — not to mention blogs, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages. Keeping up with the latest in Caribbean writing increasingly means online reading. And in recent years a small crop of new literary journals has sprung up which eschew paper and ink for the lower costs and wider reach of pixels and bytes.

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal (www.anthurium.miami.edu), published from the University of Miami, was a 4

pioneer. Their first issue, devoted to the work of Kamau Brathwaite, debuted online in 2003. Appearing roughly twice per year, Anthurium includes fiction and poems, interviews, peer-reviewed scholarly essays, and has even published the proceedings of several academic conferences; the latest issue collects material from a 2007 conference called Archaeologies of Black Memory.

(The Anthurium editors are crucially supported by the University of Miami’s Otto G. Richter Library, which has also digitised a mass of historical materials from the Caribbean, especially Cuba.)

Another early(-ish) adopter of the digital medium is Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters (www.nyu.edu/ calabash), based at New York University.

Unrelated to the Jamaican literary festival of the same name, Calabash started in 2000 as an ambitious paper journal, “dedicated to presenting the arts and letters of those communities that have long been under-represented within the creative discourse of the region,” but by its fourth issue it yielded to “economic realities,” as its editor Gerard Aching explained in a prefatory note. “In bringing you the latest works from a burgeoning community of important and dynamic creative artists, writers, and thinkers via this format, we have merely substituted one virtual reality for another.” (The format involves making each piece available as a downloadable PDF; not quite the most convenient medium for most readers.) Fiction and poems are the heart of the matter, alongside a strong visual arts vein. The latest issue is a tribute to Wayne Brown, the Trinidadian writer who now lives in Jamaica, running an influential course of writing classes.

Brown himself made a foray into online publishing in 2007, with a journal called Caribbean Writing Today. Early issues presented a distinguished line-up of contributors, including Mervyn Morris, Olive Senior, Edward Baugh, and Ian McDonald. But CWT was premised on the expectation of an audience willing to pay to read its monthly editions; and the annual subscription fee was not

exactly modest. Sadly, the journal did not last a year, and its archives are currently offline. The lesson for prospective online editors? Forget expensive custom-designed sites, use free web tools, and do it for love, not money.

Consider, for example, Repeating Islands (www.repeatingislands.com), a weblog started in early 2009 by two literary scholars, Ivette Romero-Cesareo and Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, offering “news and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature, and the arts.” Often posting a dozen items daily, Repeating Islands is a broad, bubbling stream of information about new books, exhibitions, films, and scholarly conferences, with particularly strong coverage of the Spanish and French Caribbean.

Another newcomer is Tongues of the Ocean (www.tonguesoftheocean.org), an online poetry journal based in the Bahamas (it borrows its name from a hundred-mile deep-sea trench off the coast of Andros), edited by poet and playwright Nicolette Bethel. Launched in February 2009, Tongues plans to publish three issues annually, releasing the material from each issue gradually, a few poems at a time, encouraging readers to check in weekly. Early installments include poems by better-known Bahamian poets like Marion Bethel, Obediah Michael Smith, and Ian Gregory Strachan, as well as contributions by younger poets from the wider Caribbean. “Our world surprises us with its vitality,” says an eloquent note on the Tongues submissions page. “Seeds tossed on our soils grow into big trees.

We want your best trees.”

“Trees” nudge our thoughts back round to paper — to which medium the CRB has managed to cling, for almost five years. But who knows how much longer? Already the audience for our online archive is bigger than the physical magazine’s print run, and the publishing industry is quickly evolving to a point where, for a small literary magazine, paper is not a luxury but a liability.

As you turn the next page, reader, contemplate for a moment the unlikelihood of the object in your hands. 

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

The 2008 CRB books of the year

T

he CRB reviewed fifty books in 2008, and “noticed” another thirty-five in our “Also noted” column. (The tally is a little lower than in 2007. The magazine actually published more pages in 2008, but we devoted a greater proportion of them to covering visual arts and film, and to new poems, stories, and essays.) Our longish leadtime means that some books from the latter part of 2008 will actually be reviewed in our pages in 2009.

Of all the books that passed over our desks and through our hands last year — books of fiction and poems and essays, biographies and autobiographies, books on history and current affairs, art and culture — which ones do the CRB’s editors believe should find a permanent place on our readers’ bookshelves? As we did at the end of 2007, we’ve asked our editors and most regular contributors to name their standout Caribbean books of the last twelve months in order to compile the following list.

Once more, we have chosen books that ought to interest general readers across the Caribbean, excluding specialist scholarly titles. There are ten books on our list: two novels, two books of poems, two anthologies, a biography, a memoir, an illustrated volume of art history, and one book hard to categorise.

On 31 December, we announced the 2008 CRB books of the year at Antilles, our weblog. We list them again now for readers of our print edition. In alphabetical order: After-Image, by Dennis Scott, ed.

Mervyn Morris A posthumous selection of poems by the much-missed Jamaican writer. Dating mostly from the last years of his life, these poems seem to foreshadow Scott’s untimely departure. (Reviewed in the November 2008 CRB.)

Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today, ed. Nathalie Bondil This massive exhibition catalogue looks at the art of modern Cuba against the country’s tempestuous history over the last century and a half — reproducing works from the national collections alongside documentary photographs and political propaganda. (Reviewed in the August 2008 CRB.) Horses in Her Hair: A Granddaughter’s Story, by Rachel Manley Manley’s family memoir tells the story of her grandmother Edna, wife of Jamaica’s first premier and a cultural icon in her own right. Gently, eloquently, Manley offers an assessment of a woman who was a legend in her time. (Look out for a review in the May 2009 CRB.) Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture, by B.W. Higman At once a cultural history, an anthropological study, and an encyclopedia of flora and fauna — fish, flesh, and fowl — Higman’s comprehensive survey of “food practices” in Jamaica is a surprisingly entertaining miscellany of historical references, statistics, and recipes.

(Reviewed in the November 2008 CRB.) Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles, ed. Thomas Glave An anthology of fiction, poems, essays, and memoirs confronting one of the contemporary Caribbean’s areas of darkness. These voices insist that gay and lesbian writers (and readers) have a central place in the Caribbean literary tradition. (Reviewed in the November 2008 CRB.) Pynter Bender, by Jacob Ross This epic first novel tells the strange and densely lyrical story of the title charac-

ter’s childhood and adolescence in an unnamed island shadowed by a sinister dictator. Pynter’s movement from his rural home village to the confusions of urban life mirror his island’s social evolution. (Reviewed in this issue.)

The Same Earth, by Kei Miller The first novel by an accomplished younger Caribbean writer shows the development of the gifts Miller displayed in his previous books of poems and short fiction: narrative energy, wry humour, and a knowingness about the world as tender as it is unsparing. (Reviewed in the November 2008 CRB.) Selected Poems, by Ian McDonald, ed.

Edward Baugh This career-summing volume by an eminent Caribbean man of letters covers six decades. McDonald’s poems are scrupulously attentive to the world and its joys and pains; only rarely does lyrical talent so closely coincide with generosity of spirit. (Reviewed in this issue.)

Trinidad Noir, ed. Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason This bold anthology of short fiction stares unblinking into the dark corners of the contemporary Caribbean, and reminds us that these islands have always been home to violence and brutality and things we’d rather forget. (Look out for a review in the May 2009 CRB.) The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of V.S. Naipaul, by Patrick French French’s biography of the Caribbean’s most polarising writer, a writer we love to hate and hate to love, is a gripping study of a literary intelligence prepared to destroy everything in its path in its quest to understand the world. (Reviewed in the November 2008 CRB.)  5

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

The X file

By Jeremy Taylor

Michael X: A Life in Black and White, by John L. Williams (Century, ISBN 978-1-846-05095-4, 288 pp)

O

n 22 February, 1972, police in Trinidad dug up a body in the gardens of a burned-out house at 23 Christina Gardens, Arima. The victim was a man — “a brown-skinned person wearing green pants,” according to the gravedigger — whose neck had been slashed with a cutlass. The grave had been covered over with a bed of lettuce.

The body turned out to be the remains of Joseph Skerritt, who had been hanging out at the house for some weeks. He was a cousin of Michael Abdul Malik, the man who was renting the house and building a small “commune” devoted to agriculture, education, and revolution; some of its members doubled as the “Black Liberation Army.” Malik — aka Michael de Freitas and Michael X — had recently left in a hurry for Guyana, and the house had burned down the same night.

Two days later, another body was dug up. This time it was a white woman, Gale Ann Benson, who had not been seen for more than seven weeks. She was covered with cutlass “chops,” but the fatal wound had been caused by a cutlass blade driven deep into her throat and lungs. There was earth in her lungs, indicating that she had still been alive when the soil began to cover her.

Gale Ann was English: her father, eccentric and aristocratic, had been a member of parliament and an inventor. She had been at the commune since the previous October, along with her lover, a handsome black American called Hakim Jamal, born Alan Donaldson. Gale Ann had also changed her name, to Halé Kimga, an anagram of Gale and Hakim. They were keen on changing the world, but had no money and were running out of ideas. Hakim was close to the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers in the United States: he had left a trail of white celebrities swooning over him, including the actresses Jean Seberg and Vanessa Redgrave. He said that he was, literally, God, and Gale Ann believed him.

Hakim had bonded quickly with Malik. Gale Ann had not been best pleased with his waning interest in her. But no one had seen her since 2 January: it was thought she had gone away. Hakim himself returned to the US on 20 January, five weeks before the first grave was discovered, along with his sinister sidekick Kidogo.

6

Of Michael X’s two other lieutenants at Christina Gardens, both Trinidadians, one — Steve Yeates — drowned in mysterious circumstances on 3 February; and the other, Stanley Abbott, fled to Tobago, apparently in terror, and stayed there until he returned to Trinidad on 24 February and spoke to the police.

In Guyana, Malik heard about the discovery of the graves.

He changed his clothes, shaved his beard and hair, and set off for Brazil. He claimed later that he could never get a fair trial in Trinidad; he would be the automatic scapegoat for anything that had happened, even though he was totally innocent.

He was hauled back to Trinidad, where he behaved like the celebrity he believed he was. He was tried for the murder of Joseph Skerritt, found guilty and sentenced to death. After exhausting almost every possible ground for appeal, he was hanged in the Royal Gaol in Port of Spain on 16 May, 1975.

It was a rush job: his lawyers were cooking up a final plea of insanity. He was never tried for the murder of Gale Ann Benson.

According to evidence at the two murder trials, graves had been prepared in advance for both Skerritt and Benson, who had been brought to the gravesides unsuspecting. Benson asked what the hole was for, and Stanley Abbott replied “It’s for you,” and jumped into it holding her neck so that the “professional” Kidogo, specially imported from the US, could to get to work. But Kidogo turned out to be incompetent with a cutlass, and Benson fought back until Steve Yeates jumped into the hole, placed the sharp end of a cutlass against her throat and drove it down hard into her body. The grave was filled in, and the men got on with their day: no one else at the commune suspected what had happened.

In Skerritt’s case, it was Malik himself who stood in the hole and ordered “Bring him!” Again it was Abbott who took Skerritt by the neck and jumped with him into the hole, where Malik held him face down by the hair and sliced the cutlass across his neck. He climbed out and started to fill the grave with stones. But Skerritt wasn’t dead either: he managed to get up and stumble across the bottom of the grave. Malik then smashed his head with a large stone and Skerritt died saying “I go tell! I go tell!” His mother was informed that Joe had had to go abroad suddenly.

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

M

alik, born in 1933, grew up in the Port of Spain suburb of Belmont as Michael de Freitas, “Red Mike.”

His mother was a black Barbadian, obsessed with colour: white was good, black was bad. His father was a white (or whitish) “Portuguese” who absconded before Michael even knew him. His mother remarried, but his stepfather saw him as simply a “red bastard.” He lived mostly with relatives, eight people crammed into three rooms. In due course he dropped out of school and went to sea, winding up in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay and later, in 1957, London’s Notting Hill.

By that time, London had been absorbing black immigrants for a decade and was in a panic. Jobs and accommodation were hard to get. The unhinged Conservative politician Enoch Powell was having visions of blood flowing like a river. The “Notting Hill riots” were just ahead. The sadness, laughter, and frustration of the West Indian community was captured in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, published the previous year.

The (white) English journalist Colin MacInnes remembers Michael as short, stocky, soft-voiced, eloquent, crafty, and seductive; and also, one suspects, capable of violence and duplicity.

He is highly intelligent and, when speaking off the record, lucid and sardonic . . . however mixed his motives may be, however ambitious and potentially unscrupulous, he is a creative man of undoubted personality, will, and ultimate seriousness.

John Williams calls Michael a “born hustler.” He was into scams of various sorts, small-time pimping, gambling, drugs, worthy-sounding charities which never materialised. He could play the tough gangster, or he could be gentle, charming, and sociable (though one of Williams’s interviewees says “I wouldn’t like to have been on the receiving end of any bad shit from him”).

As the years went by, Michael extended his repertoire, bouncing from one role to another: small-time crook, community leader, party-lover, enforcer, idealist, pragmatist, playboy, national Black Power celebrity. He transformed himself into Michael X after meeting Malcolm X in London, and into Michael Abdul Malik when he converted to Islam soon after. He became an expert in extracting funds from the wealthy, espe-

cially “white liberals” sympathetic to the cause of the month or buying remission for ancestral sins. He became a celebrity.

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Muhammad Ali, Dick Gregory, and Malcolm X all spent time with him.

There was an eagerness among the new wave of black Britons for some kind of political organisation, and there was an even greater eagerness among the British media to identify a black figurehead to feature in news stories about the race problem.

Michael’s visibility, backed up by his existing reputation in the ghetto, began to push him to the fore. The newspapers came back for more lively — if factually dubious — quotes, and gradually more serious political figures began to get in touch with Michael to discuss this new movement of his.

Michael spent more than thirteen years in London, including a couple of jail sentences and another stint as a seaman. “No one would condone the violence that he became involved in at the end of his life,” Williams writes, “but [in London] there was . . . a sense that here was a life full of potential that had become twisted up.” Michael wasn’t just “bad or fraudulent or [an] insincere Black Power leader”: he was “shoehorned” into “ghetto rackets,” and later into pretending to be a Black Power leader, because English racism left him no choice.

Of the many people Williams interviewed for this book, those who had been in serious politics in the 1950s and 60s had no time for Michael, because he “used Black Power politics as a hustle, a way of making money.” But more artistic types, especially as the “counterculture” of the late 60s warmed up, saw Michael quite differently: the driving force of the movement was fun and play, as Williams observes, and Michael, with his constant image-changing, wildly chasing new ideas, was accepted as part of the scene.

In this spirit, Williams takes seriously the more respectable projects Michael was involved in: a community school, a legal assistance programme, development of the Notting Hill Carnival, rent reduction. He understands why Michael would have worked with the legendary slum landlord Peter Rachman, another English hate-figure. Rachman too was an immigrant survivor, traumatised by experiences in the Second

Michael de Freitas transformed himself into Michael X after meeting Malcolm X in London, and into Michael Abdul Malik when he converted to Islam soon after. He became an expert in extracting funds from “white liberals” 7

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

This is essentially a revisionist biography. John Williams doubts whether Malik was quite the satanic figure he was later made out to be. He questions the reliability of the Trinidad trials, and is not convinced that Malik was guilty as charged World War, and had made a huge success out of property scams.

What’s more, he rented to social rejects — poor black families, prostitutes — even if this wasn’t purely out of charity.

He was someone Michael could understand.

Williams thinks that Michael’s second jail term was the turning point. He had heard Stokely Carmichael at a rally, and was asked to stand in for him at a meeting in Reading the following day, since Carmichael had been advised to move on.

Michael got the gist of the Carmichael message without the oratorical skill: a white man laying a hand on a black woman should be killed, he announced. He made sure of hostile press coverage by calling the journalists present “white monkeys.”

He was charged and convicted under the new Race Relations Act (which was supposed to protect minorities from white racism) for inciting racial hatred, and was sentenced to a year in jail. Unwisely, he had turned the courtroom into a sitcom, playing the fool and provoking the judge in true countercultural spirit.

Michael’s response [to the verdict] was once again weirdly contradictory, as if he saw himself as a participant in a play rather than in an actual court case, one which was about to result in him going to an actual prison . . . he showed no emotion at the verdict, but addressed the judge with the following distinctly heated words: “I was speaking at Reading about black justice and white justice. You represent white justice and you have shown how it is you work out that, so my people know how to deal with you from now on.”

Williams thinks that the sentence was vindictive, and that the subsequent experience of prison and the ugly racism flourishing inside hardened Michael into something different and dangerous. It tipped him over the edge into paranoia, megalomania, a bitterness so deep that it became murderous.

He suggests this accounts for the disaster of Malik’s last big London project, the Black House on Holloway Road. It was supposed to be a broad-based black arts and welfare 8

complex — education, canteen, supermarket, accommodation — but turned out to be more of a commune run by Malik, with strict rules (no alcohol, no interracial sex), trials and “sentences” for violations, and blatant criminal projects.

Malik told an interviewer: “If I feel I want to kill my brother, that’s my business . . . It’s a family matter and we take care of family matters.” It all came crashing down when Malik disciplined an unco-operative businessman, subjecting him to a mock trial and parading him around the Black House with a genuine spiked slave collar around his neck.

Police, charges, a looming trial at London’s Old Bailey.

The game was over: but Malik was not going back to jail, not for anyone. He resigned from everything, and headed for Trinidad. Somewhat peeved not to be greeted as a revolutionary leader in Port of Spain, he retreated to Arima and started setting up his commune and his Black Liberation Army in a desirable suburban development called Christina Gardens.

J

oe Skerritt was Malik’s cousin, a drifter from Belmont with no big role at Christina Gardens. So why was he killed?

At Malik’s trial, the explanation was that Skerritt had refused to cooperate in a lunatic plan to steal weapons from a police station. But Malik had told his inner circle that a hole would be dug for him the day before Skerritt even knew about the scheme. It was claimed that Malik finished off Skerritt by smashing his head with a large stone: but the medical evidence only showed the cutlass slash. Malik’s defence lawyer failed to exploit these inconsistencies, and had Malik make only a vague unsworn statement from the dock.

For Williams, this raises reasonable doubt about the facts.

Perhaps Skerritt had found out about the Benson murder (or Malik thought he had); or perhaps Stanley Abbott was the real culprit and was saving his neck by blaming Malik. Williams mentions local rumours of drug pushing and gay sex, and an anonymous phone call to the Bomb newspaper claiming Skerritt was not meant to be killed, only beaten up. There are unanswered questions.

Williams has reservations about the second trial too, the one dealing with the killing of Gale Ann Benson, which took place in July 1973. According to Abbott, Malik had ordered and planned Benson’s death because she was putting Hakim Jamal under stress, and it wasn’t appropriate for him to be with a white woman in his new Black Power role. An air ticket

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

to London wasn’t enough: Malik said “I want blood,” and everyone else followed his orders because they were frightened of him.

It was a messy, botched killing, and there would have been blood everywhere by the time Kidogo and Yeates finished with Benson. But there was no mention of blood-soaked clothes, Williams notes: the men just went back to work. Also, Benson had a human fingernail in her throat (a detail not mentioned by anyone else): whose was it? And what about Hakim Jamal, who was not at the scene but who reportedly had long fingernails? Is it credible that he knew nothing of the killing, and accepted Gale Ann’s disappearance without question? He was questioned by police, but not charged.

Williams thinks that the whole truth has not been told.

The evidence produced at Malik’s trial is “hard to credit.”

The prosecution case depended heavily on Stanley Abbott’s story, and Abbott could have had good reasons for portraying Malik as the killer. Malik’s notoriety alone meant that every potential juror in Trinidad would know about him; whether he was even sane was a fair question. A better defence counsel might have pursued all these points and established reasonable doubt.

As for motive, perhaps Malik suspected that Benson was a spy planted at the commune by the English (he had found her looking though his papers). The FBI might have engineered the killing to discredit Malik and Hakim and thus the Black Panther connection. Maybe the mysterious Kidogo was an agent provocateur: he was never charged or returned to Trinidad. One might add: perhaps, in Benson, Malik was killing whiteness.

Strange events overtook most of the other players. Steve Yeates drowned (or drowned himself, or was made to drown) at Sans Souci. Hakim Jamal was shot to death in his apartment in Boston. Benson’s brother, who had been playing detective on his own in Trinidad, died in a car accident in California.

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o this is essentially a revisionist biography. Williams doubts whether Malik in his London years was quite the satanic figure he was later made out to be. On the contrary: his impression is of a “bright, creative individual who continually gravitated towards dubious enterprises as a result, at least in part, of racism.” Not his own racism, but other people’s. The obsessions, the vindictiveness, the gullibility, the double standards, of the English. He questions the reliability of the Trinidad trials, and is not convinced that Malik was guilty as charged.

In this he diverges sharply from his predecessors. V.S. Naipaul covered Malik’s trial for the London Sunday Times, and in 1974 published a ninety-page essay, Michael X and the Killings in Trinidad. Two English journalists, Derek Humphry and David Tindall, published a biography called False Messiah in 1977. Both works judged Malik harshly, especially Naipaul’s. Being a specialist in puncturing other people’s pretensions, Naipaul warmed to his task and portrayed Malik as a hollow man, deluded from the start and playing a series of roles thrust on him by other people (Naipaul was especially annoyed by “white liberals” with return air tickets in their pockets playing at revolution). Humphry and Tindall thought Malik squandered a golden opportunity to provide leadership for the black community in Britain.

Williams leans quite heavily on these earlier accounts (at some points, the texts become remarkably close), and on Malik’s own ghost-written autobiography. He has tracked down many of the people who knew Malik in London and Trinidad, and quotes extensively from them. The book is very readable — sometimes scary, often funny, written with style and with a healthy scepticism and irony. It offers a sense of the human being behind the masks that Malik learned to wear: Naipaul’s severity tends to dehumanise his subjects, while Williams’s cheerful, streetwise cynicism somehow rehumanises Red Mike.

The key point is Williams’s emphasis on racism as the driving force behind Malik’s life and death.

He’d never been entirely accepted as black while growing up — certainly his mother had done her best to stop him seeing himself as black — but once he came to Britain it had been made clear to him that black was what he was . . . In some ways, then, the whole black-hustler persona he had developed in Britain was a kind of act — a deliberate reflection of the stereotypes that the white world seemed determined to lay on him. It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that Michael De Freitas was a man formed by other people’s ideas of him . . . he was continually figuring out what sort of black man they wanted and making himself into that black man, instinctively realising that in doing so there would be plenty of opportunities for profit.

How valid all this is perhaps no one will ever know. But on the page it feels possible, plausible. And while it excuses nothing, it does make Christina Gardens just that bit more comprehensible. 

The CRB supports International PEN’s Freedom to Write in the Americas campaign Throughout 2009, the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN will be running a campaign to promote freedom of expression and freedom to write in the Americas. For more information, visit www.internationalpen.org.uk/go/freedom-of-expression/campaigns/freedom-to-write-in-the-americas 9

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Praise poems

By Mervyn Morris

Selected Poems, by Ian McDonald, ed. Edward Baugh (Macmillan Caribbean, ISBN 978-0-230-02871-5, 120 pp)

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orn in Trinidad, Ian McDonald is now associated with Guyana, where he has lived since 1955: after reading history at Cambridge, he took a job with Bookers, eventually becoming CEO of the Sugar Association of the Caribbean. He is one of the Caribbean’s great contributors: lawn tennis representative, radio commentator on public affairs, newspaper columnist, editorial assistant to the West Indian Commission, novelist (The Hummingbird Tree), playwright (The Tramping Man), short story writer, anthologist, editor, poet, with four published collections, Jaffo the Calypsonian, Mercy Ward (which won the Guyana Prize for Literature in 1992), Essequibo, and Between Silence and Silence (Guyana Prize, 2004). Now his Selected Poems has been published by Macmillan Caribbean for McDonald’s seventyfifth birthday. Edited and introduced by Edward Baugh, it is organised in three sections (1950s and 1960s, early to mid-1980s, late 1980s), a guide to the chronology of composition. (Mercy Ward was published before Jaffo the Calypsonian, source of the earliest pieces.)

The poems I like best are in the middle section of the book, selected mainly from Mercy Ward, which is centred on people dying in a hospital for the poor. We are introduced to patients (not all of whom are poor), staff, visitors, the drama of their interactions, the natural world that people in the ward can see and hear, and even the cemetery to which many will be consigned. The characters reflect diverse life experiences and Guyana’s ethnic range. Evaluative ironies pervade; but what comes through most consistently is the tightly focused emotional force of the poet’s compassion. Baugh tells us that the poem which “started and inspired the sequence was ‘God’s Work’, about a man . . . who had been the poet’s gardener and eventually his friend for many years, and who died a slow, agonising death.” McDonald does not allow being privileged to limit his sympathies or his relationships. In “A White Man Considers the Situation” the poet-persona muses: Almost certainly I will have to go from here.

The laagers of the world build higher, black and white.

And no one is to blame except my brother, me.

No one is to blame except my brother.

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A younger Ian McDonald

I am my brother; my brother is me. The persona does not “go from here,” and there are various indications of his commitment: “I decorate now my dark-skinned love / With hibiscus for her shining hair”; in “Betrothal” he is asked to intervene when a fifteen-year-old Indian girl he has known since she was born is resisting her parents’ choice of a husband for her.

Baugh tells us that when “Jaffo the Calypsonian” was first published (in Bim in 1955), “it struck a new and distinctive chord in West Indian poetry.” The poem, like others that followed, “used a very long line, unrhymed and rhythmically flat, tending towards prose and formatted in simple definitive sentences, with inventive turns of phrase and bold, clearly drawn images.”

“Jaffo”, honouring an underprivileged artist struck down by cancer, has always seemed to me remarkable in its focused respect, its hints of socio-historical context (“as if he told of old things, hurt ancestral pride and great slave-humour”), the accumulation of sensory detail (“rows of dark red bottles, in the cane-scented rooms”, “rough floors of rumshops, strewn with bottle-tops and silver-headed corks and broken green bottle-glass”) and the concluding image of the frustrated artist, dying in the public ward of the Colonial Hospital: “Until the end Jaffo stole spoons from the harried nurses to beat rhythm on his iron bedposts.”

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

A number of McDonald’s poems, early and late, follow a similar pattern. They centre on vivid figures who invite compassion or admiration: a rumshop girl, a mystic at a nightclub, stick-fighters, a cane-cutter, seine-pullers, a charcoal seller, a drunk, a murderer who rescues people from drowning, an English explorer in Guyana, the Main Street madman, a scholar-priest who once “meant to write,” a decaying loverboy, and so on. The early McDonald tends to point at their importance, as in “Our epics begin to form. / I know the great stick-fight is one,” or “Lives form around facts and the great-

the mysteries of the Guyana interior — deep pools, forest paths, river-crossing moths (“The wild brilliance, the suddenness, the wonder”). The collection ends, meaningfully, with “I write this absurdly happy verse / to tell what it was like once forever.”

A sensitive poet-persona is foregrounded in a few of the early poems (such as “Decorated for a Kiss”, “Greeneyes”, “Pelting Bees”, “Poem on a Black Stone”, “On an Evening Turned to Rain”). In some of the later pieces, the poet-persona, more fully presented, is inclined to wax philosophical.

Many of the Ian McDonald’s pieces are essentially praise poems: “between silence and silence, there should be only praise.” Poems toast the rumshop girl, “breast stuffing her blouse”; a son at baptism; the mysteries of the Guyana interior est lives around the greatest facts — / So the old men speak of bataille bois; their greatest fact,” or “On the sand under the loose-leaved tree I watch the seine-pullers: for me a romance.”

In his later work, significance is more often left implicit, as in “Sing-Song’s Place”, about a popular barman made redundant by the new management: “Well, I hear they closing Parkview down: / computer working good, customer leaving fast.”

One strand of McDonald’s achievement is his unemphatic use of Caribbean vernacular. He is particularly successful when creating the appearance of knockabout versification.

When a feud develops between Nurse Guyadeen and a preacher man, He spends his hours thinking hard And looking happy when he could shout “Someone smell like pit-latrine It must have to be Nurse Guyadeen!”

And Guyadeen giving as good as got Lip match lip, hot for hot And when she think he gets too fas’ She jam an enema up his arse.

But here and there a line will slip over the edge from knockabout, as in “The Last Classroom of Hubertus Jones”: “His wit unvarying as the texts he taught: / Mark him down five in scale from ten to nought,” where the omission of an article before “scale” seems clumsy, even if convenient for rhythm.

Many of the pieces are essentially praise poems: “between silence and silence, there should be only praise.” Poems toast the rumshop girl, “breast stuffing her blouse”; the girl decorated for a kiss (“Her body has the scent of sun-dried khus-khus grass”); Mary, “Rounded / O of love”; the poet’s memory of his mother; roses thriving in a surprising context; a son at baptism (“In the dark world / bathe him in light”);

The poems work best when, as in “Spinster Ganteaume and the Birth of Poetry”, significance is effectively conveyed through narrative or imagery. But from time to time there are reflections which do not seem necessary where they occur — as in “Man need not have been. No one knows why / God maintains his kingdom without persuasion.”

Especially as he grows older, the poet is constantly aware of mortality (“my own lines of age,” etc), but in the end he is underscoring positives — love and friendship and respect.

“There is no limit to our love, / even death will set no limit.”

In “Meeting Once a Year at Britnell’s”, a marvellous passage — simple, sure-footed, a triumph of tone — enacts domestic happiness: A world away in dark, dazed Guyana, I settle for the comfortableness of love, a good wife’s caring, the miracle of sons, a sea-wind murmuring in green trees.

There’s well-drawn tea on the veranda, delicious meat patties melting on the tongue, jobs to do for money, men from Porlock — the poetry later, should there still be time.

What follows, however, weakly gestures towards “the spirit’s victories” and “wisdom’s final lesson,” and declares, grandly, “Truth does not die and we have savoured it. / The morning’s beauty lasts for all its time.” (McDonald settles for the word “beauty” surprisingly often for so experienced a poet.)

McDonald has written fine poems in every period of his adult life, though in some poems of real potential the craft does not seem patient enough. His great virtues as a poet are his notable narrative skills; a fundamental decency; a habit of respect and compassion; and openness to people, society, and the natural world, which he often renders memorably.  11

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Family matters

By Melissa Richards

Pynter Bender, by Jacob Ross (Fourth Estate, ISBN 978-000-722297-1, 452 pp)

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he title character of Jacob Ross’s first novel is born blind, a full two days after his twin brother. He has the eyes of a white man and is viewed with suspicion both by his family and by Old Hope, the community of plantation labourers in which the novel is set. He is a jumbie boy, “one of de Old Ones come again.” Specifically, he is believed to be the reincarnation of Zed Bender, a rebellious slave who died at the hands of his master.

When the novel opens, Pynter has gained his sight through the intervention of the village mystic, and Ross beautifully captures the world that the boy discovers with his “new and delicate” eyes: Pynter left home, let the slant of the hill carry him down towards the water to watch them wash and talk the day away . . . He just sat there, feeding his eyes on the glitter and the green and on the throbbing reds and yellows of their washing spread out on the soap-bleached stones . . .

Each woman had her own little acre of stones on which she spread her washing. Up to their knees in water, they beat the clothing against the boulders and flashed their soapy corn husks over them. He’d grouped their names in his head according to the sound of them — Ursula, Petra, Barbara and Clara, Cynty, Lizzie, Tyzie, Shirley. And then there was Miss Elaine, her name all pretty and by itself, just like the way she was.

Pynter is a sensitive, intelligent child, and Ross conveys both his curiosity and his vulnerability while gradually making us aware of the complex family relationships that surround him.

When the narrative opens, he and his brother Peter are the only children in a family of strong but often powerless women, and men who are absent or else planning their escape.

This complicated extended family lives in a yard that Pynter’s grandfather John Seegal spent ten years blasting out of the rocks above Old Hope Road, creating a space for each of his three daughters (his only son is required to make a way for himself): Tan Cee, the eldest, childless, and devoted to a philandering husband, arguably the strongest maternal influence in Pynter’s life; Elena, the twins’ somewhat distant 12

mother; and Patty, the family beauty, but also the one who will prove herself closest to Pynter’s intellectual equal. Deeka, the matriarch, is eternally grieving for John Seegal, the first of the book’s men to “walk.” Openly hostile to Pynter, she is convinced that he is destined for an early death, and on occasion we worry that this may come at her own hands. Then there is Birdie, a gentle giant of an uncle, able to achieve miraculous things with bread, but unable to keep himself out jail for any extended period of time.

Strange circumstances surround Pynter’s conception, and during his extended stay on his own with his father Manuel Forsyth we are introduced to a hostile half-brother. We hear the name of Gideon, Pynter’s half-brother, well before the character is introduced, so it is little surprise when his appearance threatens the idyll that has been created between father and son. Gideon’s relative wealth (and we learn quickly that money is at the heart of the enmity) is a reminder of the vulnerability of Pynter and his family, and by extension all of the rural poor.

It may be significant that it is Pynter’s time with his father that creates the opportunity for him to be educated, and exposes him to the poetry of a mysterious, long-dead uncle whose possessions Pynter finds. This is also when Pynter meets Paso, a nephew many years his senior, who will have an influence on his actions later on.

Ross is at his best when describing the knotty connections and intricate patterns of rural life, and within the first hundred pages of his novel he has introduced everything we need for a complex, layered portrait of life in the shadow of the sugar cane plantations. Pynter Bender should be an engaging story about rural Caribbean life in the 1960s, a charming, beautifully told variation on the Caribbean Bildungsroman.

But Ross appears to lose faith in the power of the complex domestic tableau that is at the emotional centre of his novel.

He wants more for his central character — and perhaps for his novel too — and thus overreaches himself.

The multiple strands that Ross has begun to develop around Pynter’s family relationships, both maternal and paternal, are slowly abandoned as ever more characters are introduced into the plot. This is especially frustrating because Ross proves himself adept at building suspense. In the early part of the book a subtly crafted tension is allowed to develop around specific characters. It seems a marker to the relative

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

importance of these characters within the plot. We read on eagerly awaiting the events that have been presaged. But these events never come, or else, when they occur, lack the drama that seems promised. Many of the characters we might expect to play a significant part in the narrative simply disappear.

Similarly, new characters are introduced without it being clear how they serve the narrative, or whether they tell us anything new about the central characters. This may be the way events occur in real life, apparently significant characters appearing and disappearing without ultimately having any real impact

native for the men who “look up from pulling ratoons from the earth and suddenly see nothing but the canes, stretching all the way to the end of [their] days, beyond life itself,” Pynter’s feelings about the movement are ill-defined. While he will eventually make his disillusionment clear, from the very beginning he is presented as distant and uncommitted.

Ross seems to suggest that his involvement is motivated by a desire to protect Paso and others, but this creates problems for his characterisation.

While the initial portrayal of Pynter as the remote, know-

Jacob Ross

Jacob Ross is at his best when describing the knotty connections and intricate patterns of rural life, and within the first hundred pages of Pynter Bender he has introduced everything we need for a complex, layered portrait of life in the shadow of the sugar cane plantations on our lives, but it makes for unsatisfying fiction. It allows the book to feel rambling and unwieldy.

F

rom the very beginning, Ross builds a picture of the vulnerable rural poor, crushed by their labour on the sugar cane plantations, and some of the shifts in his narrative are part of a movement from the domestic to the political. The focus of the narrative becomes the struggle between the oppressive political regime and a fledgling movement being mobilised to resist it. The rich family relationships recede into the background as Pynter becomes entangled with this burgeoning revolutionary movement, in which Paso is a central force. And while many of the characters obviously believe that the movement will create an alter-

ing child works well (in part because we are often reminded of his vulnerability), the portrayal of Pynter the adult is less successful. An equally sage adult, he now manages to effect daring rescues, while miraculously avoiding harm. Because the story is told almost entirely from his point of view and he shows little evidence of a capacity for self-questioning or self-doubt, the characterisation gradually begins to feel onedimensional.

The novel becomes less successful the further away it moves from the yard, its complex emotional heart. Ross, who is the author of two short story collections, is obviously a talented writer, but his plot is too diffuse, his cast too great.

Despite Ross’s gifts, Pynter Bender is a novel rich with unfulfilled promise.  13

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

In brief Valmiki’s Daughter, by Shani Mootoo (Anansi, ISBN 9780-88784-220-7, 352 pp) Valmiki’s Daughter is Shani Mootoo’s third novel. It follows her widely acclaimed debut novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and the somewhat less well known He Drown She in the Sea (2005). But Valmiki’s Daughter is markedly different in texture. It has none of the allegorical touches, magical realism, or gothic sensibility which typify Mootoo’s previous novels, and thus may disappoint readers who come to its pages expecting a similar kind of story and narrative voice.

Instead, this book offers an intense engagement with what I would describe as the politics of the everyday.

Set in contemporary Trinidad, Valmiki’s Daughter narrates the story of the Krishnus, a well-to-do middle-class family living in the San Fernando suburb of Luminada Heights. It focuses most closely on Valmiki Krishnu, a successful medical doctor and the patriarch of the family, and his daughter Viveka, a literature student at university in Trinidad. The stories of Valmiki and Viveka parallel each other in striking ways. As the narrative unfolds we learn they both have secrets that threaten the respectability of the family, and are called on at integral moments in their lives to make key decisions regarding marriage, family, and sexuality.

Mootoo continues her exploration of areas of Caribbean life less traversed in the Caribbean literary landscape. Her exploration of the politics of sexuality in Cereus Bloom at Night was acclaimed as a unique, sensitive, and evocative addition to the range of Caribbean stories and voices. In Valmiki’s Daughter, Mootoo’s continued engagement with issues of gender and sexuality is keenly refracted through the lens of class and ethnicity. Her focus on middle-class lives is a particularly interesting choice. Almost fifty years after George Lamming observed in 1960 that “one of the most popular complaints made by West Indians against their novelists is the absence of novels about the West Indian middle class,” there are still relatively few of these narratives. Most Caribbean novels choose to focus on the rural and urban folk. Mootoo departs from this trend, and offers in Valmiki’s Daughter an insightful exploration of the ways in which codes of middle-class respectability function to shape these lives.

Mootoo’s talent for writing vivid and redolent landscapes is one of the hallmarks of her work. In Valmiki’s Daughter she demonstrates impressive talent in the writing of very different and distinct geo-cultural scapes. These range from the bustling intersection of Chancery Lane, which opens the novel, to the detailed portrait of Luminada Heights and the journey east to the village of Rio Claro. There is rich detail to be enjoyed here. The novel is also invested in marking the 14

class, cultural, as well as physical variations of these spaces.

The narrator tells us: to know one corner alone is not at all to know a place that is so miraculously varied geographically, environmentally, socially, linguistically. It sounds like a hodge-podge of a place, but it’s more of a well seasoned, long simmering stew.

The narrator as guide offers the “tourist let down from the sky, blindfolded in the middle of a weekday,” vivid scenes and accounts of life in urban, suburban, and rural Trinidad.

The reader is quickly aware that this is not a benign tourist tour. We are not invited to see only the “sea of green — the fronds of palm and coconut trees mixed with sampan, flamboyant, Pride of Barbados, mango trees,” but also the urban blight: the “row of beggars sitting on their haunches on the sidewalk with arms outstretched.” The music of the steelpan orchestra is drowned by the cacophony of human cries of despair from the beggars as well as those who inhabit the hospital wards, the chorus of taxi horns, and the hawking of the nut sellers. Scenes of beaches are traded for a focus on the suburbs which stretch beyond these beaches, and the narratives of the lives of their inhabitants.

The richness of detail evident in the description of these landscapes is also replicated in other elements of the book.

The result is that small moments become weighted with fundamental significance. The act of getting dressed and staring in the mirror, for instance, becomes a meditation on the politics of identity and the pressures of social orthodoxy.

These moments produce some fine reflective passages, but also contribute to the discernibly slow and often tedious pace of the novel. In some instances, Mootoo indulges her artist’s eye, leading to an excess of description. Characters like Merle Bedi, who we meet only once in the narrative, are introduced in detail disproportionate to their roles in the narrative. Such details are at once one of the most sumptuous and one of the most frustrating aspects of this book.

Mootoo’s intergenerational Krishnu family saga is an intricately woven and thoughtfully constructed book.

Its message and technique are consistent and considered throughout. Through its rendering of multiple spaces of interaction between the internal, private, and pubic lives of its characters, the reader is forced to confront the many ways and instances in which social obligations and expectations, and in particular expectations regarding gender and sexuality, constrain them. Its ideological and affective conclusion is not dramatic, but is detailed and painstakingly developed.

The epiphany is subtle but decisive and poignant.

Ronald Cummings

www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Just Like That she got up and died; scraped the chewed bones to the side, remnants of the stew she stayed up late making on Holy Thursday so that not a pot would be put on fire come Good Friday morning.

She centred the fork before lifting her plate high in the air and in one motion stood, bent over and collected his plate — her breasts dangling low before his eyes.

Then she navigated the sharp edge of table, swooshed her hips just once and died.

Her hips did not complete their sway before she fell full-bodied to the floor.

He, stunned into action, would later remember that he wanted so badly to skip breakfast and partake of her flesh, but she, thinking of her mother reciting verses in the back pew, thought it was sin enough that she was not in God’s house; she could not worship at his mouth.

And so, without the last rites of flesh on flesh, hip against bone, tongue along lip, they parted ways.

II She walked into church that Good Friday morning with death on her mind; sang each hymn louder than even the choir and off-beat bird propped in Sunday manner against the tree by the window (each week he forgot pursuits of nectar and women to sit on the highest branch, nose pointed down as if he knew the colour of each sin and sinner).

She threw the notes out and up as if Jesus could have been saved by her voice, his open wounds sutured by her bellow.

She had to get death out of her throat.

This was the first Easter she felt each whip, each nail, each jeer.

When they came to get her — three of her brothers, eyes on the ground, grown men looking like boys — a note rolled back down her tongue.

She saw her child flying higher and higher, the clouds parting; saw her greet Jesus on this Good Friday morning.

— Tanya Shirley

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The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Home and away

By Rhoda Bharath

Caribbean Literature After Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace, ed. Bill Schwartz (Institute for the Study of the Americas, ISBN 978-190-003-9918, 195 pp) A Place in the World: Essays and Tributes in Honour of Earl Lovelace at 70, ed. Funso Aiyejina (Lexicon Trinidad, ISBN 978-976-631-050-9, 201 pp)

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nless the name is Derek or Vidia, there aren’t many Caribbean authors likely to have two books of criticism published about them in the same year. In 2005, the University of the West Indies St Augustine campus celebrated Earl Lovelace’s landmark seventieth birthday with a conference and related celebrations.

Three years later, conference chief-cook-and-bottle-washer Funso Aiyejina published a slick illustrated version of the conference proceedings. Just months before, Bill Schwarz, a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, also edited a collection of essays on Lovelace, funded by the University of London’s Institute for the Study of the Americas.

Schwarz announces very early that “the distance between writer and critic is hazardous at the best of times,” and a comparison of his Caribbean Literature After Independence and Aiyejina’s A Place in the World certainly establishes this. The former is an academic tome offering a view that is for the most part non-Caribbean and North Atlantic in perspective, with contributions from the likes of Chris Campbell, Louis James, James Proctor, and John Thieme. With the exception of Lawrence Scott, who has memoirs of Lovelace in both books, the contributors are all researchers with a background in some form of postcolonial studies, but not necessarily a firm background in Lovelace’s work and the Caribbean landscape.

Aiyejina’s book functions as both an academic interrogation of Lovelace’s life’s work and a pictorial biography. Memoirs by Greg Rigbsy and Lawrence Scott give us a deft portrait of the artist in work and life, and Lynda Quamina-Aiyejina has provided an exhaustive bibliography that is a researcher’s dream. Academics and friends commingle within its pages, and every so often there are photographs marking some event in Lovelace’s life. There is a sense in which the contents of this book seem more familiar with Lovelace. There are essays from the likes of Gordon Rohlehr, Louis Regis, Merle Hodge, Sandra Pouchet-Paquet, and Jennifer Rahim: all intellectuals

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in their respective fields, but also friends and acquaintances of the man in question.

We can be skeptical of both books for two reasons: one seems almost too familiar with its subject, while the other is not familiar enough. In this regard, each book is a foil for the other. Both will be useful to new and seasoned readers of Lovelace’s work. Obviously there are many areas in which they overlap, but there are also places where they diverge, and at least one path both have chosen not to pursue.

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iyejina and Schwarz both focus on the importance of Lovelace’s choice to remain in the Caribbean and be an indigenous artist. Kate Quinn’s essay in the Schwartz volume tells us precisely what a decision like that means in dollars and cents. J. Dillon-Brown covers familiar areas when he looks at the theme of nostalgia in Lovelace’s novels. Patricia Murray attempts a comparison of Lawrence Scott and Lovelace in her piece “Writing Trinidad: Nation and Hybridity in The Dragon Can’t Dance and Witchbroom”, but she avoids close analysis of the language of both authors, which plays such an integral role in developing notions of nationalism as well as hybridity. She opts for broad statements about Lovelace’s use of Caribbean oral traditions, and is not quite sure what to make of Scott’s use of Trinidad Creole in his narrative. Her understanding of Dragon (1979) is also questionable (the novel’s focaliser is not Aldrick, nor does the novel’s plot span a one-year period, and Eulalie is a character in another of Lovelace’s novels. Perhaps she was referring to Sylvia). In light of this, Merle Hodge’s essay in Mural in Old Sanof Juan, Puerto Rico prothe Aiyejina volume, on Lovelace’s use language, vides some relief, despite its brevity. She gives a thorough explanation of Lovelace’s development from a stylised Standard English to his now signature Trinidad Creole.

Gordon Rohlehr leads off the offerings in A Place In the World with an historical overview that looks at not only the development of Lovelace’s body of work from While Gods are Falling (1965) to Salt (1997), but also the Caribbean’s political and intellectual landscape from the 1960s to the present.

Rohlehr links Lovelace’s development as both a critic and a writer with the development of the Caribbean from the postcolonial and post-Holocaust to the postmodern and multicultural. He looks at the recurrence of the motif of “newness” in the re-constructing of the Caribbean, and shows how

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Lovelace’s politics and ethos would lead to the development of a writer capable of conceptualising groundbreaking and controversial novels.

Rohlehr is careful to detail that Lovelace had notions similar to some of his literary peers, and that like the early V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott he too felt a sense of despair and dread about Trinidad society in the 1960s. In reference to Carnival, often touted as our highest manifestation of culture and nationalism, and used by Lovelace as a tool of self-definition and meaning, Rohlehr reminds us that Lovelace once said, “A

Lovelace does not write back to any empire, and according to Rahim he rejects the notion of exile. He has made his nation his empire, and writes to and for it. His preoccupation is not so much how we cope with postcolonialism, but how we move from the postcolonial condition — contending with our responses to and feelings about empire — and begin the new phase of responding to ourselves and not some other, of seeing ourselves as the subject, not the object. Rahim argues that Lovelace, in making rootedness mandatory and choosing to make “the island the real and imaginative centre from

In his essay in A Place in the World, Gordon Rohlehr is careful to detail that Earl Lovelace had notions similar to some of his literary peers, and that like the early Naipaul and Walcott he too felt a sense of despair and dread about Trinidad society in the 1960s society that glorifies waste is not and cannot be a serious society.” Lovelace’s perception of Carnival was then one of waste.

Then came his famous ultimatum: “Do, die, or run away.” It is from this point that Lovelace, almost monk-like in his dedication, applied himself to the task of validating rural and grassroots culture, attempting to build a new Caribbean out of the shambles of the past, and, from Walter Castle to Uncle Bango, building a case for reparation.

In Caribbean Literature After Independence, Aaron Love’s essay “The Crisis of Caribbean History: Society and Self in C.L.R. James and Earl Lovelace” echoes some of Rohlehr’s sentiments, and goes even further in exploring the dialectic between self and society. Love’s essay shows that Lovelace and James had similar concerns about subjectivity and history. Love takes the time to explain James’s troubled past with the People’s National Movement, and Lovelace’s continued analysis of their relevance to a post-independence nation.

James saw The Dragon Can’t Dance as a tool for cultural conception and self-perception, because it helped to foreground the historical consciousness of the Caribbean subject in search of a new selfhood.

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he term “transnationalism” is often bandied about with reference to Caribbean literary discourse. Migration is not only a theme in our writing, but a means to existence for our artists. In order for them to carve out an existence using their craft, they often have to find a metropolitan country in which to do so. And many of our artists spend their lifetimes as hyphenated individuals who write back home from the empire, or the neo-empire. With all of this in mind, in her essay “The Nation/A World/A Place to be Human — Earl Lovelace and the Task of ‘Rescuing the Future’” (included in A Place in the World), Jennifer Rahim lays a case to show that Lovelace, in choosing to do, and to remain rooted in Trinidad doing, has avoided the label of transnationalism.

which he views and speaks to the world,” has forged the way ahead.

Kate Quinn puts a very realistic spin on the opportunity cost of an artist’s choosing to stay rooted in the Caribbean.

There is no question that migrant artists have fared better than those at home, primarily because government policies in the Caribbean do not include the role of the artist, an issue that Lovelace has argued passionately for in his essays. Quinn uses very hard facts to show that Lovelace and others who chose to stay in Trinidad, such as poet Anson Gonzales and dancer Beryl McBurnie, paid a high price for their decision.

Bill Schwarz’s “Being in the World” also takes a look at Lovelace’s ideas of self and place. Through an assessment of several of Lovelace’s essays collected in Growing in the Dark (2003), Schwarz looks at the importance of failure, the folk, and folk practices to the author’s way of being in and interrogating his home in the new world. Schwarz’s essay seems an ideal segue into Sandra Pouchet-Pacquet’s paper “The Vulnerable Observer: Self-Fashioning in Earl Lovelace’s Growing in the Dark (Selected Essays)”, in the Aiyejina volume.

She assesses the development of Lovelace’s ideologies from a chronological framework, as opposed to the thematic framework with which Growing in the Dark was organised, and examines the shifts and complexities of the personal voice, issues of ideological self-placement, and the importance of connection and otherness that is at the centre of all cultural and historical representation. She sees Lovelace’s time writing for the Trinidad Express as the development of a holy trinity of the writer, his society, and the media organisation. In assessing Growing in the Dark, Pouchet-Pacquet looks at Lovelace’s familiarity with the critical works of James, Walcott, Naipaul, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, and Franz Fanon; also his interpretation of historical events such as the Civil Rights movement and Black Power, and the obvious organic development of his own counter-discourse.

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The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Schwarz and Pouchet-Paquet draw important parallels between Fanon and Lovelace, and their preoccupation with the African essence, identity, affirmation, social responsibility, racial origins, and roots.

I

t is not typical for us to think of Indo-Trinidadians as warriors. The word “warrior” tends to evoke images of brute strength and force, of rebellion and struggle — words which, when they are used in a sentence to describe IndoTrinidadians, seem paradoxical because of historical perceptions and misconceptions. Vishnu Singh’s “Lovelace’s UnSalted Indians”, in A Place in the World, analyses how well Indo-Trinidadians fit into the warrior tradition Lovelace has chronicled in his body of work. Singh looks at the modes of transformation available to them in society, namely business, education, and religion, and examines the characters of Moon, Sonan Lochan, and Kenwyn Lochan in Salt. He makes it clear that Lovelace’s interrogation of the Indian’s transformation and assimilation into Caribbean society is tentative at best. But, in a sense, so is Singh’s essay, because he makes no attempt to link Indian warriors in Salt to their forerunner Pariag, the outsider from The Dragon Can’t Dance. Any serious engagement with Lovelace’s depiction of Indians has to start with Pariag, especially if the assessment is from the angle of the Indian in the warrior tradition. His depiction makes a strong case for the Indo-Trinidadian as a fighter, facing obstacles and overcoming them.

Also in the Aiyejina volume, Louis Regis looks at the religious ideology of Salt as Lovelace’s coming to terms with the psychic dimensions of the African presence in the New World.

Obeah is transformed into something both spiritual and nonreligion-specific. It is the thing that makes black people feared and gives them their power. It is the occult that makes black people occult. The result is either ambivalence or opposition to everything African. As Bango (one of the main characters in Salt) sees it, only when people “acknowledge their inner strength and power, this power that resides in their possession and knowledge of obeah,” will they come to terms with themselves. Says Lovelace, “In denying Obeah it was easier to penetrate and destroy the basis of African society in Trinidad and Tobago, to remove its philosophical underpinnings.”

The reclamation of the power within us is also part of Lovelace’s argument for reparation, a recurring theme throughout his entire body of work. This preoccupation is also Carolyn Cooper’s concern in “Self Searching for Substance: The Politics of Style in A Brief Conversion and Other Stories”. She analyses Lovelace’s use of the ambivalent triumph of masquerade to project a reversal of hierarchies, whether they are sexual, social, religious, or metaphysical. Cooper acknowledges Travey’s rebellion, in the collection’s title story, as an act of empowerment. He is the heir to a self-empowering warrior tradition. She also looks at how masquerade’s absurd side emerges when used as a protective device by the female protagonist in “Call Me Miss Ross, For Now”, who assumes a

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fussy façade to protect herself from what at first are unwanted male advances. But having worn the masquerade for so long, when she is ready to drop the charade she is uncomfortable, unsure of how to behave in her own skin, because the masquerade is now all she knows.

Turning back to Caribbean Literature After Independence, Nicole King’s essay on Lovelace’s short stories goes even further than Cooper’s in its analysis of the function of masquerade in Lovelace’s work. King explores the importance of the performative as an everyday strategy in the search for personhood, and the new post-independence nation as theatre in “Performance and Tradition in Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion: The Drama of the Everyday”. She assesses the importance of performance, masking, and the assumption of different personas in the postcolonial environment, noting that Lovelace uses simple everyman characters to reflect the “false promises and false hopes bequeathed by the national project.” This essay, more so than any other, makes the reader starkly aware that neither of these books makes any attempt to assess Lovelace’s dramatic works; and this is a shame.

In his own contribution to his book, “Novelypso: Earl Lovelace and the Bacchanal Tradition”, Funso Aiyejina establishes an aesthetic against which Lovelace and writers like him, who don’t fit comfortably or snugly within the sub-category of postcolonial writer, can be assessed. Aiyejina looks at Carnival as the literary tradition against which Lovelace must be analysed and assessed. Instead of Spivak, Bhabha, and Said, we should turn our eyes to Shango and Esu to comprehensively understand the techniques and messages that Lovelace conveys. Aiyejina argues that the Western literary tradition cannot adequately deconstruct and determine Lovelace. We must look elsewhere, and that elsewhere is right here. He posits, for instance, that The Dragon Can’t Dance and Salt are not merely novels, but calypsos in novel form, and that throughout Lovelace’s body of work aspects of the Carnival aesthetic (stickfighting, calypso, masquerade, storytelling) have played an important role in shaping and defining the author and his writing. Aiyejina continues in the tradition of literary critics like Harris and Rohlehr to formulate a theory that is more indigenous to Caribbean readers.

B

oth of these books have at least one essay that is a bit idiosyncratic. In the Schwartz volume, Tina Ramnarine attempts a look at the importance of the leitmotif of sound in Lovelace. She considers Salt in relation to Caribbean performance traditions and traces the intersections between creative expression and political vision. Usually scholars discuss Lovelace’s use of stickfight lavways and calypsos in relationship to folk culture, but Ramnarine’s ethnographic perspective on his use of musical performance to further ideas of unity and liberty remains exploratory in tone. Also in Caribbean Literature After Independence, Chris Campbell’s eco-critical take on Lovelace’s novels The School Master and Salt required that he be far more familiar with

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

the topography Lovelace is writing about to really be able to show the relationship between landscape and text, and to properly evaluate the importance of what the author is saying. Often the essay seems to be imposing eco-criticism on an essay that is really about Lovelace’s views on politics, religion, and education. And urban planner Jim Armstrong contributes an essay to the Aiyejina volume about art and creativity in relation to identity. He looks at art as a prescription for post-traumatic stress disorder, and the importance of planning and development. In a very real sense he echoes

In brief Daddy Sharpe, by Fred W. Kennedy (Ian Randle Publishers, ISBN 978-976-637-343-6, 411 pp) Daddy Sharpe, the debut historical novel by Fred W. Kennedy, is a well-researched fictional narrative that recreates the life of the Jamaican National Hero Samuel Sharpe, whose leadership in the “Christmas Rebellion” of 1831 gave impetus to the passing of the Abolition Act in 1832 and eventually led to the end of slavery in the British Empire. Although Sharpe’s involvement in the rebellion was recognised by the Jamaican government in 1975, the details surrounding his life remained in relative obscurity, and Kennedy deserves praise for clarifying the historical record.

The narrative of Daddy Sharpe, told mainly from a firstperson point of view, begins with Sam Sharpe in jail and awaiting his death by hanging. By using a series of juxtapositions with the Anancy story “Bro Tiger Goes Dead” and John Bunyan’s allegorical novel The Holy War as plot devices, Kennedy relates Sharpe’s story to the theme stated explicitly on the first page: “to reveal to you the madness of slavery.” Looping the time frame, Kennedy manages to tell the stories of Sharpe’s mother Mimba and his wife Nyame — with whom he had a child, Juba — and to give a portrait of life during slavery and the hardships endured by New World Africans. Kennedy also reconstructs the stories of Mrs Samuel Sharpe, the wife of the slaveholder after whom Sharpe is named, and Reverend Henry Bleby, an eyewitness to Sharpe’s execution: The sun disappeared behind the clouds and a darkness came over the land. Saddened by his loss, we all left the town square, which some liked to Golgotha, the place of a skull.

This fitting description of Sharpe’s death as a Christ figure is not surprising, for throughout the novel the over-

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many of Lovelace’s concerns with art, the individual, and the environment without necessarily discussing Lovelace.

Both books have their glitches, and could have benefitted from tighter editing. There are instances of misspelling and punctuation errors, and it is even more irritating when the editor of a text is not exacting enough with his contributors. But both volumes are starting-points for assessing and reviewing Lovelace’s contribution to the prose form for Caribbean literature. Now if we could only get someone to say something about his plays.  whelming impression of “Daddy Sharpe” — “daddy” was a term used by Baptists of that time to denote respect for his position as a deacon — is of a pious man: As God is my witness, you must know, Minister, that despite what everyone says, I did not contemplate the shedding of blood and I did not want the tribulation that has been brought down on the heads of my brethren. I did it for freedom’s sake in the name of Christ Jesus.

By combining these various strands from the period between 1814 and 1832, Kennedy gives his reader a muchneeded perspective on the prelude to Sharpe’s fateful decision to lead a peaceful demonstration, before witenssing the turn to violence over which Sharpe has no control: “Our plan for peaceful resistance, which we had worked for so hard, went wrong all in an instant.” The meticulous scholarship that Kennedy demonstrates in reconstructing these events is to be commended, and Daddy Sharpe is an excellent supplement to the study of this period.

As a novel, however, the storytelling in Daddy Sharpe does not match its historicity. Fiction, historical or otherwise, depends upon fully realised characters whose dramatic needs propel the plot and answer the reader’s desire to know what happens next. Although Kennedy creates a portrait of Sharpe as devout Christian, plot elements such as his relationship with Nyame as a possible reason for him not to go to war (or vice versa), or the revolutionary and religious fervour that would lead him to become a martyr, are never fully developed. In a pivotal scene, Sharpe tells us his life is changed after a vision quest in the bush. But instead of compressing the action (even at the expense of historical fact) to demonstrate the consequences of this epiphany, there is a break in the story line with Bunyan’s Holy War, followed by descriptions of two slave owners. And there are no scenes that convince the reader of the immensity of Sharpe’s conversion to the Gospels’ message of freedom. When he does act, Sharpe seems more like a victim of events than an actual leader, so his eventual surrender and martyrdom are almost anticlimactic: Samuel Sharpe and the reader remain bound to the grind of inevitable history.

Geoffrey Philp 19

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

On broken ground

By F.S.J. Ledgister

Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, ed.

Annie Paul (University of the West Indies Press, ISBN 978976-640-150-4, 439 pp)

W

e are in the midst of an age of reassessment.

The Centre for Caribbean Thought’s series of conferences at UWI’s Mona campus on Anglophone Caribbean thinkers like Stuart Hall, Sylvia Winter, George Lamming, and Walter Rodney mark a realisation that the region is mature enough to have ancestors in the age of decolonisation and independence.

Of the major intellectual figures who have shaped academic and cultural life in the West Indies since 1945, few have had the huge impact in as many fields as (Lawson Edward) Kamau Brathwaite — poet, historian, cultural critic, teacher, advisor to governments. Those of us who were students at Mona while he taught there count ourselves lucky to have made his acquaintance and learned from him, inside and outside the lecture-room.

It was an extraordinary experience for me to read Brathwaite’s poetry as a teenager — The Arrivants was first published as a complete collection in 1973, and I had read Rights of Passage before then — and to arrive at university a couple of years later and see and hear the man himself talking not just about history, as you’d expect of a historian, but about the meaning of culture in the context of the history of slavery, racism, and exploitation. It was even more extraordinary to see that this was something that could be debated intensely; Brathwaite’s poetry and historiography were subjects discussed at the first academic conference I attended, at Carifesta 1976 in Kingston, where I was amazed to see him sitting at the back of the lecture theatre calmly listening as his work was anatomised.

It is the measure of Brathwaite’s importance to the intellectual culture of the Anglophone Caribbean that, three decades later, he can still be the hook on which a huge weight of discourse relating to that culture can be hung. This book is a compilation of papers initially presented at the Second Conference on Caribbean Culture, dedicated to Brathwaite, in 2002. Some examine Brathwaite’s own contributions to West Indian letters, historiography, and cultural studies, and others, influenced by Brathwaite’s work, are independent investigations into Caribbean — often specifically Jamaican — history,

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society, and culture. It is a worthy gift to a great man.

The focus on Jamaica is not altogether surprising, given the Barbadian Brathwaite’s long association with that island — he taught at Mona, and wrote a history of eighteenth-century Jamaica, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (1971). It can occasionally go a little too far, as when, in a brilliant essay on the origins of the African population of Jamaica, historian Douglas Chambers describes the Trinidadian linguist Mervyn Alleyne as a “Jamaican scholar,” presumably because he, like Brathwaite, taught at Mona for many years.

There are twenty-two pieces in the collection, including the introduction by Nadi Edwards, which is both an eloquently meditative essay and a brief summary of the contents of the book. It is also odd, since the introduction should normally be written by the editor of the volume, and Edwards is not listed as the editor, just as a contributor, while the volume contains no contribution from Annie Paul, though her name is on the cover and the title page. Another oddity is the absence from the book of the keynote address by Brathwaite at the 2002 conference, to which Edwards refers in his introduction.

Edwards gives us just enough of a taste to make us want to see what Brathwaite had to say beyond calling the conference a golokwati, a “meeting place,” referring to a Ghanaian market town that functioned as a meeting place for several ethnic groups.

T

he first section of Caribbean Culture contains essays on language and poetry. Ghanaian poet and scholar Kofi Anyidoho provides us with a somewhat pompous appreciation of Brathwaite’s approach to the Caribbean’s African heritage from an African perspective. Maureen Warner-Lewis’s foray into Anglophone Creole poetics needs to be developed into a work of major length. Starting from Brathwaite’s History of the Voice, she manages in a very brief compass to sketch the outlines of a West Indian prosody that links the poetry of Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, Kongo chant, and calypso, among other elements. J. Edward Chamberlin presents an essay showing the similarities of colonial impact in very different parts of the Americas — the Caribbean and British Columbia — the significance of Brathwaite as a poet speaking for and to the particular experience of the Americas, and the importance of story as a means of connecting human beings to each other. Hubert Devonish exam-

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

ines two calypsos sung by the winner of the Pic-O-De-Crop Calypso Monarch competition in Barbados in 2001 as “examples of artistic speech acts that involve discourse about discourse.” Jeanne Christensen seeks to place Brathwaite within a tradition that “challenges the dominant orientation of Western intellectual thought,” and that seeks to recover and revive a transformative “language of myth.”

The second section connects music and poetry. Lilieth Nelson writes with warmth and eloquence about the musical elements in Brathwaite’s poetry, and it is a pity that her essay and Warner-Lewis’s are not closer together, since their themes are closely Kamau Brathwaite related; Nelson’s essay, like WarnerLewis’s, deserves to be expanded into a work of greater length. Donette A. Francis discusses the influence of jazz on Brathwaite — not only on his essay “Jazz and the West Indian Novel”, but on his poetry and his personal and intellectual development as a young man growing up in the Barbados of the 1940s. And Linton Kwesi Johnson’s contribution is one that takes us away from Brathwaite. It’s a brief memoir of the Jamaican dub poet Michael Smith (1954–1983), which discusses dub poetry as a form, and tells us far more about Johnson than it does about Smith (“I did not know Mikey well enough or long enough to say that we were close, but I think that I can get away with saying we were friends”).

There are only three essays in Caribbean Culture that do not focus on the Anglophone Caribbean. In the third section, Elizabeth DeLoughrey examines the “tidalectics” (Brathwaite’s wonderfully punning term) implicit in a region where, as Walcott has it, “the sea is history” — specifically, in stories by Edwidge Danticat and Ana Lydia Vega. And Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo incisively examines Brathwaite’s Dream Haiti, noting that “the shocking experience of the Haitians has led him to question the evolution of the Caribbean region and to redefine the function of its poets and artists.”

Finally, in the book’s fourth section, we get to historiography. Brathwaite’s professional formation, after all, was as a historian, even if for much of his career he has followed other trades, and some of his most important contributions to the culture of the Caribbean have been in this field. Cecil Gutzmore’s essay manages the acrobatic feat of simultaneously praising Brathwaite’s pioneering work as a historian of Jamaican Creole society and critiquing the concept of the “Creole.”

My contemporary at Mona, Glen Richards, on the other hand,

sees Brathwaite as playing a central role in the creolisation of West Indian history, but quite correctly criticises him for having become excessively Afrocentric and forgetting the Asian contribution to West Indian society and culture. Ileana Rodríguez, the only Latin American contributor, discusses creolisation in the wider contexts of mestizaje, hybridity, pluralism, and transculturation, relating the Caribbean experience to broader colonial experiences, particularly the historic Latin American experience, which to Anglophone West Indians always seems so near yet so far away. In her contribution, Leah Rosenberg compares The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica with Indian historian Ranajit Guha’s essay “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” (1981), a seminal work in subaltern studies; she notes that both writers use similar methods of “reading against the grain” in examining the colonial period, and both played foundational roles in developing a subaltern approach to history.

Next, Caribbean Culture looks at how historiography makes the past present.

Verene Shepherd considers accounts of the “voices” of enslaved and indentured women in novels, historical narratives, and court records, arguing that such accounts present a universal stance of resistance to slavery and indenture, even when they’re fictional narratives written by white defenders of slavery.

Douglas A. Chambers presents a very important essay on the peopling of Jamaica by the slave trade that challenges the conventional assumptions about most Jamaican slaves originating in what is now Ghana. Chambers shows that planters in eighteenth-century Jamaica — unlike their neighbours in what was to become Haiti, who preferred to import Africans from the Bight of Benin — had a distinct preference for importing slaves from the Bight of Biafra.

This has, of course, profound implications for the culture and identity of Jamaicans today.

Yacine Daddi Addoun and Paul E. Lovejoy discuss a Muslim tract written in Arabic by Muhammad Kabã Saghadughu in the parish of Manchester around 1820; this is a notable addition to Islamic studies in the Caribbean, and a complement to the already well-known story of Abu-Bakr as-Siddiq. And Veront A. Satchell considers the case of Alexander Bedward and his church in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Kingston, as a significant movement of protest and resistance to colonial rule.

The book’s sixth section examines contemporary Jamaican popular culture. Donna P. Hope takes a close look at

The authors collected in Caribbean Culture are engaged in profound scholarship on ground that Kamau Brathwaite has prepared, whether as poet, as historian, or as cultural critic

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The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

dancehall’s misogyny, seeing what she calls “femmephobia” — a fear of feminisation — as a central element in a discourse that combines fear of predatory womanhood, incarnated as “punaany,” with adoration of the mother. Hope, it seems, has discovered that dancehall culture has enshrined the madonna/ whore dichotomy in its lyrics. Rachel Moseley-Wood takes the film Dancehall Queen as her subject; she sees the film as failing to show dancehall as a subversive site of female empowerment, because it retains a patriarchal presentation of the female dancehall performer.

In the final section, Robert Carr takes a close look at the Jamaican state and the challenge posed to it by the “don system,” which has become a “subaltern state” linked both to networks of globalisation that supersede the state system and to conceptions of masculinity that exclude both women and those men who are defined as womanly or “soft.” This assessment of the state in relation to social and cultural factors, and to violations of human rights both from above and below, is the one piece in this collection that I, as a political scientist, wish I’d written. Bernard Jankee’s brief survey of Jamaica on the internet focuses on three websites — www.jamaicans.com, www.afflictedyard.com, and www.visitjamaica.com — each very different in affect, one being aimed on Jamaicans overseas, one being the product of a Jamaican who is also a significant figure in Jamaican cultural production (but which “is not a very welcoming site”), and the last being focused on tourism.

Kamau Brathwaite might not want to take credit or blame for these essays, but his inspiration is clear in many of them. The authors do more than perfunctorily express their gratitude to him: they are engaged in profound scholarship on ground that he has prepared, whether as poet, as historian, or as cultural critic. That this is more than mere ancestor-worship is, beyond doubt, something that he must contemplate with pleasure.  22

A Surveyor’s Journal For Wilson Harris I took my name from the aftersky of a Mesopotamian flood, birdless as if culture had shed its wings into a ground vulture on the plain.

Beneath the astral plane, a war-ripped sail, rigged to its mast a lantern and a girl who swayed and stared off where the waves raced backwards.

I begged her in signs. She jumped overboard, arms sieving seaweed, eyes netting home.

Dear Ivy, you live in my veins.

Spurned flesh, I couldn’t bridle the weathervane’s shift; it turned and turned into a landfall, and I, panting panther, sleek carnivore of the horse-powered limbs, ran from a reign of terror.

All my despairs in green rain, on leaves I prayed to the mantis, head wrapped in white, reading the “Song of God” over a bowl of beef. Afterwards, I hemmed into my skin this hymn: O lemming souls of the mass migration that ended in drowning O embroidered heart and marigold wrists that brushed the copperbrown field O cargoes that left the dengue jungles and ended on the yellow fever shores O compass points that needled the new to the old, stitching meridians into one tense O reflecting telescope that spied the endangered specimens Clashing head-brass, the vertical man vs the horizontal man, those who lost their surnames to the sea’s ledger, beached up on the strange coast, waiting for the Star Liner to cross that imagined Mesopotamian water, the ship’s bulwarks in sleep, weighed down a spirit-bird, my calm, to never flounder, to walk holy and light on this land.

— Ishion Hutchinson

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

The contender

By Sharon Millar

Sylvester Devenish: Trinidad’s Poet, by Anthony de Verteuil (Litho Press, ISBN 976-95008-8-7, 392 pp)

M

any of us secretly desire to be plucked from obscurity — perhaps to live again in time to come, through the pen of a meticulous researcher, someone willing to sift through the dust of lives gone by, restoring and presenting another era through time’s forgiving sepia filter.

Fr Anthony de Verteuil spends his days doing just that.

An astonishingly prolific writer, since the early 1970s he has been publishing detailed historical volumes with a speed and tenacity that are truly admirable. His specialty is the history of French Creole families in Trinidad, but he has written extensively on diverse aspects of the formative nineteenth century.

With a light and engaging prose style, de Verteuil is a delightful narrator, painstakingly presenting the minutiae of lives past in a way that is both entertaining and instructive. With a heavy reliance on oral history and a hearty sense of humour, his material is seldom pedantic, and it is testament to his indefatigable research that both Trinidadian historians and those of the wider region turn to his works as reliable references.

I picked up Sylvester Devenish: Trinidad’s Poet with all this in mind. This is not the first time de Verteuil has turned his attention to Devenish (1819–1903); in 1986 he published Sylvester Devenish and the Irish in Nineteenth Century Trinidad.

Despite his Irish heritage, Devenish’s social and familial history was strongly French. A prominent member of Trinidad’s French Creole community, he was closely linked by family to the de Gannes family, the Le Cadres, the Begorrats, and the D’Abadies. In this new book, however, de Verteuil’s main concern is Devenish’s poetry and his prowess in verse. Interestingly, de Verteuil recently released another book examining the writing of another prominent French Creole: Leon de Gannes: Trinidad’s Raconteur (2008). Structurally, both books are similar, beginning with a detailed family history then presenting the subject’s original writing. (Devenish’s verse is presented in both the original French and in English translation.) De Verteuil must be lauded for making these literary offerings available to the wider public, as they contain valuable insights into nineteenth-century life in Trinidad and provide additional reference points for the local literary tradition of that dynamic century.

But the subtitle of Sylvester Devenish begs further analysis.

De Verteuil makes a brave leap into the literary gayelle, describing Devenish as “the most outstanding poet Trinidad has ever produced.” By throwing this hat into the arena, he opens Devenish’s work to a whole new level of analysis. The literary and cultural traditions of nineteenth-century Trinidad have been the subject of much animated discourse. This intellectual landscape cannot be examined without recognising emerging new literary voices of the era. Writers such as the black intellectual John Jacob Thomas (Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar, 1869) and Michel Maxwell Philip (Emmanuel Appadoca, 1854) made their mark on the literary climate of post-emancipation society. Joining this clamour in the latter part of the century were oral and written accounts of the newly arrived East Indian indentured labourers, whose stories appeared in chronicles like Journal of a Voyage with Coolie Emigrants from Calcutta to Trinidad (1859), a documentary account by Captain and Mrs Swinton. It is only by acknowledging the changing literary paradigms, which reflected ongoing changes in the rapidly evolving society and the movement toward a dynamic national voice, that we can begin to pull the real worth from de Verteuil’s (and Devenish’s) work.

D

evenish appears fully fleshed and bounding with energy in the book. This seemingly unstoppable man influenced Trinidad society in many ways. His work as the island’s first surveyor general took him to every nook and cranny of the island, as he literally mapped the colony’s topography. Much of his poetry reflects this strong bond with the landscape. In the nineteenth century, poetry was a ubiquitous part of the French Creole social calendar.

Landmark events such as births, weddings, and even funerals were marked by verse, which was often sung. When the price of cocoa was high and the French Creole planters were flush with the proceeds, their children were sent to France to be educated, the girls going to finishing schools and the boys to well-respected establishments where they received a solid education in the classics. Devenish was no different, and had the benefit of an excellent education in France. “While in Paris, Sylvester made the acquaintance of the authors Jules Janin and Honoré de Balzac,” de Verteuil tells us. Not only did he meet them, it would appear that they were happy to encourage his literary endeavours.

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The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

In the nineteenth century, poetry was a ubiquitous part of the Trinidadian French Creole social calendar. Landmark events such as births, weddings, and even funerals were marked by verse, which was often sung Balzac . . . and Janin procured for young Devenish — (who needed to earn money to help support himself at the university) — some journalistic work, particularly that of critical appreciation of the theatre; and this led to his introduction by intimate friends of both, to Chateaubriand . . . at Paris, and Beranger, songster, at Tours. Even up to old age Syl remained fascinated by Beranger’s simple catchy tunes.

Perhaps these eminent connections influenced de Verteuil in his assessment of Devenish’s poetry: Indeed, so outstanding, even dominant, was he as a poet from 1850 to 1900 with no equivalent figure either then or in the present (if we are to except one or two of our calypsonians who might possibly be happy to be classified as poets) that I have had no hesitation in entitling this book as — Sylvester Devenish: Trinidad’s Poet.

The sweeping range of this statement does a disservice to both Devenish and de Verteuil. Poor Devenish has a large claim to live up to; and de Verteuil runs the risk of appearing partisan by not giving a nod to the substantial literary legacy that Trinidad can lay claim to, a century after Devenish’s death. Derek Walcott hails from St Lucia, but much of his work was born in Trinidad. To ignore the Nobel laureate’s presence is akin to ignoring the elephant in the room. It also fails to acknowledge the literary voices that surrounded Devenish in his day.

Despite his sweeping comments, de Verteuil is aware of Devenish’s obsession with rigidity of form, and the fact that he was criticised on occasion “as having the same boring rhythm.” Devenish was an acolyte of Nicolas Boileau, the seventeenth-century French poet, who was himself greatly influenced by Horace. Boileau was preoccupied with maintaining impeccable regularity of his verse. For Devenish to carry on in this mode almost two hundred years later was at odds with literary trends in France. De Verteuil acknowledges that “French poetry in Trinidad lagged behind the times. Even in the 1840s, there was the old adherence to the use of periphrasis and of cumbrous mythological allusions.” But Devenish was comfortable in his regular rhythmic patterns for many reasons, not least of which was his propensity to sing his verse. In fact, many of his poems have an early extempo feel, and Devenish’s sense of humour often takes the form of picong or mamaguy, uniquely Trinidadian varieties of teasing or heckling.

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For much of Devenish’s lifetime, Trinidad’s French Creole community was under social, economic, and cultural assault from the anglicising influences of the British colonial government. The literary scholar Selwyn Cudjoe, in his book Beyond Boundaries (2002), notes that “in many ways the French Creoles used their poems/songs to attack the anglicising tendencies and other perceived threats that were rampant in the society from 1870 through the 1890s.” Cudjoe also takes a closer look at Devenish, or “Papa Bois”, as he was known throughout the country because of his surveying work, which took him deep into the interior of the island. Devenish’s great contribution, Cudjoe suggests, lies in the sheer volume of his work that remains to give insight into the society of the time, and not necessarily in the claim that he was a proficient poet.

He was, Cudjoe argues, “neither a great nor a brilliant poet.”

Devenish’s verse offered a lot of platitudes and showed little originality. Even his political satires, which were more original and personal than his other poetry, turned out to be steeped in techniques that had been developed some two centuries previously. The more he looked to France for his inspiration, the more he became immersed in a past that had little relevance to Trinidad.

Despite this harsh assessment, Cudjoe is remarkably generous in his estimation of Devenish, and eloquently pinpoints the many conflicts that would have pulled at this loyal citizen and good man. While his Romantic contemporaries in Europe had the luxury of flexing and stretching the concept of verse to embrace nature and its powerful and exciting potential, Devenish was all too anchored in the prosaic by the limitations and commitments of his day-to-day life. And when he ran afoul of the Franco-phobic colonial regime and lost his job after decades of devoted service, he was treated shabbily, living the rest of his days on a pension far less than he was rightfully entitled to.

D

evenish was a national figure, widely mourned on his death in 1903. Gregarious and popular, he comes back to life in de Verteuil’s biographical pages, which contain delightful anecdotes that the reader may suspect are made up of one part historical fact and two parts creative license. Describing the birth of Syl — as his young parents, en route from Europe to Trinidad to assume responsibility for the family estate, were forced to lay over in Nantes — de Verteuil writes:

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009 James Sylvester obtained the leave of an Irish friend who was renting the chateau, to give a ball. Gertrude (who was in the family way) opened the proceedings with a minuet, dancing beautifully to the swell and fall of the music; but she had soon to leave the floor to other bounding beauties and was rushed to a bedroom, where in the middle of the ball, to the strains of the music, was born the subject of this story, Peter James Sylvester Devenish, the date being the 9th March 1819.

Anyone familiar with de Verteuil’s previous books will recognise his trademark narrative style, which assumes the reassuring timbre of oral tradition.

He conjures up the feeling of sitting on any Caribbean verandah, listening to the elders recounting family lore. As a much-respected Catholic priest and a member of a prominent French Creole family, de Verteuil is privy to information that might otherwise be lost if not documented in his books. This privilege is a double-edged sword, as his narrative voice tends to slip into the rambling style of oral historians and, especially when he describes large French Creole clans, it is often difficult to keep the dates, names, and convoluted familial relationships straight. The reader is forced to go back and forth within the text to clarify and check accuracy. Minor errors that would have been picked up by a scrupulous editor are a reminder that most of de Verteuil’s books are selfpublished, and probably do not have the luxury of professional editing.

Which raises another key point: the print runs of most of his books are limited. Once out of print, they can be difficult to source. De Verteuil’s readers may find themselves willing to forgo criticism on the basis that the documentary value of his books far outweighs their flaws. 

Read the CRB archives online at www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com

In brief Into the Mosaic, by Marlene St Rose (Athena Press, ISBN 978-1-84748-1849, 228 pp) The historical novel can be an exciting glimpse into a time or location that has gone the way of the dinosaur, bringing the dusty past to vivid, pulsing life. On the other hand, a badly done historical novel can be as dusty as the past it tries to illuminate, failing to create believable characters, dialogue, or settings in favour of tedious repetition of historical detail.

To her credit, Marlene St Rose has succeeded to some extent in avoiding the latter trap. Her novel Into the Mosaic seeks to tell the story of the Indian immigrant’s success in the Trinidadian community. That story is admirably researched and adequately told. As a historical narrative, it succeeds, even as it fails as a novel because it utterly lacks cohesive conflict. St Rose, a Trinidad-born English teacher who has made her career in St Lucia, traces the history of the Khan family from arrival on an immigrant ship to their absorption “into the mosaic” of the multicultural island of St Rose’s birth. The Khans achieve success in business, acceptance into the middle class, and high position in the missionary Canadian Presbyterian church in the island — through sheer hard work, good thinking, and sacrifice, the novel says. Each character is a shining example of the above, whether it be the teenage girl who marries an old man for his

money (sacrifice), the studious boy who gives up his name and his family for the opportunity to study more and become part of the Presbyterian establishment (hard work and sacrifice), or the clever agriculturist who parlays his love of the land into a large farm and lumber concern (hard work, good thinking, and sacrifice).

The conflict in the novel is embodied in the circumstances over which the characters must triumph. Those difficulties — while not negligible — are just not significant enough to give the novel teeth. There is no villain, no self-doubt, no evil. There is only poverty and the same hard choices that we all have to make in our own lives, and, sadly, that’s not interesting enough to carry the story.

What St Rose does well, however, is evoke the times about which she writes. With a very nice touch she describes the various settings of the tale, from late-nineteenth-century cocoa estates in the Maracas Valley to the mid-twentieth-century streets of the emerging town of San Fernando, and various points in between. There is a palpable sense of this being a family’s history, which, coupled with the almost reverent tone of each characterisation, makes one suspect this is the story of the author’s own family, rather than the purely researched product of her imagination.

And despite its shortcomings, Into the Mosaic would be a useful addition to the library of anyone interested in Indo-Caribbean, Presbyterian, or Trinidadian history.

Lisa Allen-Agostini

There is a palpable sense of Into the Mosaic being a family’s history, which, coupled with the almost reverent tone of each characterisation, makes one suspect this is the story of Marlene St Rose’s own family 25

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Conversation

“Where the borders are” Leonardo Padura talks to Gavin O’Toole about the line between journalism and literature, and freedom of expression in contemporary Cuba Leonardo Padura, one of Cuba’s most celebrated contemporary writers, is perhaps best known for his prize-winning Havana Quartet, a series of crime novels featuring Inspector Mario Conde. (In his most recent novel published in English translation, Havana Fever (2009), Conde investigates a forty-year-old murder after he becomes obsessed with a beautiful singer who died in mysterious circumstances in the 1950s.)

Padura has also written historical works and essays, and is a journalist. Reviewing three of Padura’s novels in the August 2007 CRB, Brendan de Caires argued that “he started out trying to write a new kind of detective story . . . but after attaining that modest goal, he kept on writing until he had produced a series of complex and surprising literary novels.” On a recent visit to London, Padura spoke to Latin American Review of Books editor Gavin O’Toole.

Their conversation is translated from the original Spanish. A longer version of this interview was originally published on the Latin American Review of Books website, www.latamrob.com.

Gavin O’Toole: You have often referred to the importance of your experience as a journalist to your literary development, and many Latin American writers have been journalists. What are the reasons for this relationship between journalism and literature in Latin America?

Leonardo Padura: Writers — in the world, but particularly Latin America 26

— in general need to have two jobs: literature is a second job often done on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, because royalties are insufficient to live on. In the Latin American case, journalism has been very generous in taking in writers, I think — looking at this from a distance, journalism has been a generous profession. Often in newspapers, certain writers, as was my case, have had certain privileges that allow us to do a different type of journalism, that give us to time to write.

I began working on a cultural magazine where I wrote book and theatre reviews, and I worked there three years, but it was at that time I started to write.

I wrote several stories and a small novel that was published several years later.

In that period in Cuba, books took a long time to come out — it took four or five years from handing the manuscript to the publisher to reaching the bookshop. In 1983, when I was nearly finishing this novel, I began working at a newspaper, and I worked there six years. This was called Juventud Rebelde, it comes out in the afternoons — an evening paper. In those years, however, I did not have time to write, because I dedicated myself completely to journalism and writing long reports, above all about historical themes, historical characters, lost legends of Cuban folklore that needed a lot of research.

Writing these was a little different because they were like stories; I could

not write literature per se, but it was a stage during which I wrote essays, practised the skills of literary writing.

First, I got to know a great deal about the history, geography, and atmosphere of Cuba, because the job took me across the country, and, secondly, I had time to write those works, elaborate on them, seek out an angle, a distinctive perspective. In 1989, when I left the newspaper and went to work at another literary magazine and I again had time to write, I became aware of everything I had learned in those years at the newspaper.

So in the 1990s, I began to work at this other literary magazine called La Gaceta de Cuba, and immediately I wrote the novel Pasado Perfecto, which here is translated as Havana Blue, and it was something that I had been building up inside. I wrote the first version very quickly — in three months — then I worked on it a great deal, but it was like a necessity for me to write, and I realised that I had learned how to write while working on the newspaper.

I believe Hemingway was right when he said that the writer at a given moment of his career must leave newspapers. So that’s what happened to me: journalism was absorbing all my possibilities, all my time, my intelligence at that moment. When I separated myself from the newspaper, I realised that was a moment in which I had matured in age and knowledge sufficiently to write.

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

GO: You have spoken of the advantages of making a career as a novelist after or through journalism, but what are the disadvantages? Are there any obstacles to do with the writing style of journalism, or disadvantages of having been a journalist, in terms of developing a novelist’s perspective?

GO: Obviously you are in a privileged position to observe Cuban journalism.

Journalism elsewhere has problems, often because of market pressures. But what condition is Cuban journalism in? Is it healthy in terms of freedom of expression, or do you see pressures to restrict what people are writing?

LP: No. I don’t think so. I think that one has to learn to differentiate the distinct languages one works with. For example, I have also written books of essays, I have written a book of essays about about the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, a writer of the Conquest era; two books about Alejo Carpentier; one about crime fiction, above all Hispanic-American crime fiction; various essays of one type or another; and I have always taken forward, side by side, the essay, journalism, and literature, the novel, alternating between one and the other . . .

I know when to stop when I must do journalism, essays, or novels. Because just as journalism gives an immediate take on reality, the novel must provide a permanent gaze. So one has to have at any given moment the capacity to know what particular thing is important at that moment, and upon what to reflect as a journalist, and which of these things can change in a future that is more or less new and would not be interesting in a novel.

I think one has to know where the borders are, no? The frontiers between one form of language and another.

LP: New Internet technologies have created a problem for the Cuban propaganda system, because for forty years there has only been one type of journalism in Cuba. In Cuba, the newspapers, the magazines, radio stations, television, all belong to the state. And

GO: Is it difficult to change between language and mentality in terms of form?

LP: Sometimes it is difficult, and at other times one does not achieve it.

Sometimes one passes from one terrain to the other, but in the case of the novel I work a great deal on the text, trying to clean it, and, in the case of journalism, I use many literary resources. I like my journalistic writing to be contaminated with literature, personalities, forms of language, culture, that are not always common in journalism.

ticipative. But something immediately happens, and the “shell” shuts again.

It closes down again and we’re back to this dull journalism, so non-analytical when it comes to reality.

I would say that within fifty years, someone reading a Cuban newspaper and reading one of my novels would, well, say that here are two different countries. Because in this book are situations from Cuban life that never appear in this newspaper. And it is not because the newspaper should be written like a novel, or the novel should be written like a newspaper, but that what is needed is a journalism much more

“New Internet technologies have created a problem for the Cuban propaganda system, because for forty years there has only been one type of journalism in Cuba” in Cuba the state, government, and party are the same. And the government, the party, and the state think like Fidel Castro. As such, there is only one type of thought, and more than media of communication and information they have been converted into media of propaganda.

The Internet has broken this down, and there have appeared alternative routes, at times very narrow, at times very complicated, because having access to the Internet in Cuba is not easy.

Not everyone has it, but these routes exist.

I think that for many years one of the great problems of the Cuban intellectual world is that there has not existed a much more open form of journalism, more critical, more complex in terms of its perspectives on reality. We are also talking here about a journalism that would be contrary to the government — one might say a journalism that, while in favour of the government, has a critical perspective on real things. Every now and again there is a congress, a meeting, a speech in which journalists are asked to be more critical, more par-

reflective of reality — and that does not exist in Cuba.

GO: Are things changing?

LP: There have been small changes since Fidel’s illness. I have just read on the Internet recently in the Spanish newspaper El País that at the Havana Book Fair an alternative book was released whose author was warned not to launch this book. He did so anyway, and nothing happened. In another era, this would not have happened.

That is, many perspectives have been changing — in the cultural world above all — beginning in the 1990s, and what Cubans most expect now are changes in the economy, in the Cuban economic system. People are not proposing many political changes, but economic changes, because the main problem in Cuba is how to sort out the daily economic hardships of people. Raúl Castro himself has admitted that, in Cuba, wages are insufficient to live on. So if in a country where there is one fundamental employer — because only four or five per cent of Cubans are independent 27

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

workers and the rest work for the state — the state itself admits that the salary it pays people is not sufficient, then there is clearly an economic problem, a relationship that has been broken.

The people need — I think — to earn four or five salaries in order to be able to live more or less normally, and it is from that which derive all the survival alternatives that people employ. Someone who has family in Miami who sends them money, someone doing a second job, another who makes a small business of whatever he can, and one way or another they sort themselves out. No matter what, there is an important tier of the population (I am not sure how large) that lives in conditions of poverty — because in Cuba there is no misery, in Cuba everyone eats, everyone goes to school, to the doctor, and there is not this indigence that exists in other Latin American countries. But these people do live in a certain degree of poverty.

GO: In this fiftieth year of the Cuban Revolution, would you say that Cuba is the closest we have come to any utopia, or that the effort to create utopia in Cuba was mistaken?

LP: I don’t know if we are more or less close than others. I don’t know if it was all a mistake or not. What I do believe is that Cuba made a revolution that helped many people to improve themselves, many people to have a better life, but that at a given point in this process the same revolution became incapable of providing these people with new choices — because if I teach you how to use a computer and I tell you that the Internet is a powerful tool of knowledge, but later I do not give you access to an Internet account, I am blocking this modern development, no?

So the relationship that exists in Cuba between the things that have been positive and those that have not been, or have been definitively negative, is very contradictory. 

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Herd instincts

Even in the age of the spreadsheet and the sponsorship deal and the masquerader satisfaction survey, mas — the central phenomenon of Trinidad Carnival — retains the capacity to surprise. Witness the apparition, on Carnival Tuesday, 2009, of this ragtag herd of cows, with their staring skull-blank faces and stark horns, straying through the streets of Port of Spain and interrupting the flow of polychromatic spandex and spangles.

Conceived by the artists Richard “Ashraph” Ramsaran and Shalini Seereeram, designed and built in no more than the five days before Carnival, T’in Cow Fat Cow took its original inspiration from a song by the rapso group 3Canal, an angry denunciation of power, greed, and social inequality: “Fat cow, the butcher calling you . . . in the pot you going to go.” But the band’s two dozen masqueraders, many of them artists and

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Portfolio

Opposite page, above: one of the cardboard headpieces at the mas camp. Opposite page, below: T’in Cow Fat Cow at the Savannah judging point. Above: the herd downtown, near Woodford Square. Right: musician Roger Roberts of 3Canal dancing on New Street

actors, articulated a variety of themes through the simple costumes — headpieces made from cardboard and paint, and ordinary white clothes splotched with black. For some, the band — assembled with volunteer labour, using discarded and recycled materials — was a commentary on the commercialisation of mas. Others discerned an environmental message. Each cow brandished a punning placard, borrowed from the tradition of old mas, some of them making fun of politicians (Patrick’s National Moovement), or with slanted references to international affairs (Dow Cow, Cownter Insurgency). One cow was festooned with a feather boa, another with black Mardi Gras beads. The gilded Emperor Cow was king of the band and golden calf at the same time.

The cows were not early risers, and it was eleven on Carnival Tuesday morning before they set out from their mas camp in Woodbrook, to the jangle of bells and a chorus of moos. The cardboard headpieces wilted in the intermittent rain, and the herd made fre-

quent grazing stops. Still, they moseyed round the whole parade circuit — in record time, squeezing past slow-moving larger bands downtown — and, though officially unregistered for competition, crossed the stage at four judging points, to the bemusement of the official announcers. Spectators on the street squinted to read the placards. At the Savannah judging point, the traditional climax of the parade route, the cows pranced past the TV cameras, making up with their enthusiasm for the small size of the herd. By five in the afternoon the band, re-nearing their starting point, began to split apart, and in their twos and threes the cows disappeared into the larger herd of las’ lap revelers.

But that was not the end of the bovine story. Two months later, the cows reappeared on the streets of Port of Spain. Dressed in black, with bloodred tears running from the headpieces’ eyes, and the masqueraders’ mouths bound with red cloth, they marched to Independence Square and sat silently among the decorative flowerbeds. It

was the day before the opening of the controversial Summit of the Americas, hosted by Trinidad and Tobago at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and the temporary suspension of civil freedoms in the capital (thanks to a security lockdown around the summit venue).

Through a printed manifesto, the cows declared: “We represent the voiceless. The many thousands of Trinbagonians . . . whose tax dollars are being invested in a display that does not address their most urgent concerns . . .

Who is listening?” But the more eloquent message was the medium itself, the spectacle of these stray cows lost in the shadows of Port of Spain’s latest skyscrapers. Red letters spelled out the rechristened band’s new name: The People Must Be Herd, a pun poised between the ideal of participatory democracy and the reality of a society stumbling mindlessly under the prods of cowboy politicians. Even Prime Minister Patrick Manning, famously oblivious to public opinion, might get the joke.

Nicholas Laughlin 29

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Influences

Prosimetrum* Fred D’Aguiar contemplates the elasticity of time and space in the fiction of Wilson Harris

W

ilson Harris told me a story in the late 1980s while we walked in a tree-lined street divided by a trench in Georgetown.

Harris said, in the quiet tone of meaningful confession, that when he was a schoolboy in the early 1930s a friend of his fell into this very trench we were now walking beside, and his friend climbed out wet and apologetic, feeling bad for making a fool of himself by his own clumsiness. Harris said he felt terrible, because it was he, in fact, who had nudged his friend into this trench, and though he regretted doing so the moment his friend tipped into the water, he could not do anything in time to save his friend from his tumble, nor was he able, back then, to confess to his friend that the fall was not an accident.

The adolescent he was at that time just couldn’t bring himself to own up to what had actually happened. So his friend went on believing in his self-professed clumsiness, and the deliberate action instigated by Harris himself that resulted in the embarrassing tumble became entrenched in memory.

We walked on in silence for several yards. I looked hard at dry cracks in the mud-bed, and my eyes flicked from * A prosimetrum (Latin) is a literary piece made up of alternating passages of prose and poetry.

30

one crumbling mud-bank to the other.

Perhaps the water table that fed it had sent the contents elsewhere, caused by some geological tilt away from the area, so that now, fifty years after his friend’s baptismal event, all I could see was a dry space.

I had no idea at the time why I said the three things that I then said to Harris, but they came to me right away. First, I suggested to Harris that he should push his friend, again, since this time, meaning right then and there, no harm would be done in what was now a dry place. Second, I speculated that he, Harris, might look at his friend, falling, back then, from the vantage point of the present, and somehow reach back in time and grab his friend’s arm, just in time to save him from getting soaked. And third, should both those methods fail to appeal, or the rescue not work out, somehow Harris could confess to his friend what he had done, again across time, the moment his friend climbed out of the trench.

Of course, he might opt simply not to push his friend at all, by suppressing the awful adolescent impulse with the restraint of an adult sensibility, again exercised across time in this shared space.

Harris laughed and nodded in recognition of his own imaginative procedure in his fiction, as it was being dished back to him by one of his readers. So where did all that magic talk of bending

time and stretching space and reversing history originate?

I’d spent the months before the trip to Guyana re-reading Harris’s fiction, essays, and poetry, and gleaning from them his theory about the elasticity of time and space, best articulated in his 1987 novel The Infinite Rehearsal.

Harris’s idea of infinite rehearsal treats memories, images, and dreams as unfinished dramas ripe for contemplation.

His theory bears some relation to the existentialist notion of perpetual return, but differs in the effect of the experience on the subject, who remains somewhat fixed in Nietzsche’s theory. For Harris, each return to a memory, image, or dream yields new insights, and each time the viewer or thinker participates in the recall or act of gazing — from a necessarily partial because particular viewpoint — that person changes a little. There is no possibility of easy closure. The artistic compulsion to look and keep looking at this rich source of self-knowledge creates the sense of a revisionary potential when it comes to apparently fixed realities. The process of writing becomes an interactive one. The imagination of the writer changes as a result of this deliberate act of exposure.

There is the promise of a deepening sensibility. Ceaseless exploration of earlier discoveries leads to more complex accounts of them.

Something happens to time itself.

Time switches from a linear narrative

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

to a lyrical sense. Rather than seeing a past that is gone and out of reach, and the fact of a future always presenting itself, there is, instead, a defiance of the linear. The march forwards may be stalled. The backwards gaze proves not only useful but capable of altering what happened in that past. This idea of time as a continuous present — that is, no past, present, and future continuum, but somehow the past and the future in the present — appeared in Harris’s first novel, The Palace of the Peacock (1960), and continued as an imaginative procedure through twenty-five novels to his latest, The Ghost of Memory (2006).

But if time loops around on itself, if time can be stretched and torn in places, to open rehearsals of memory and provide imaginative spaces for the writer to stage these acts of retrieval of hidden facets of memory, it is worth looking at Harris’s view of what happens to place when geography is subjected to the same pressure of intuition, sensory perception, recall, and imagination.

When that adolescent friend of Harris fell into that functioning trench back in the early 1930s, he set up a traumatic memory in Harris, who was responsible for the event. If the memory was treated as over and done with, though memorialised, it would be in a storage room in the nervous system which occasionally spilled over into a nightmare or a momentary wash of guilty recall. But in Harris’s original mind the memory becomes an occasion for a return to the past — it presents a portal which pierces maps and transforms a landscape into a place with layers of memory as much as rock strata. All of which begs the question about how this way of looking at reality as perpetual drama came about in the first place.

T

raditional biographical data about Harris tell us he was born in New Amsterdam in 1921, trained in Georgetown as a surveyor, and from the late 1930s took part in, then led, expeditions into the interior of Guyana, to survey rivers and the areas around them. Armed with the-

odolite, pen, and notepad, the rational surveyor encountered a dense rainforest interior which belied the measurements and readings of his rational instruments and sequentially trained mind. What he discovered on these trips forced him to search for a method to match his encounters with sudden rainfall juxtaposed with blinding sunshine, river depths of such marked

look at it. While synaesthesia might be the occasion for one sense perception to supply another with a language for interpreting the world, in the case of Harris, one art form instructs another about the world. Painting and fiction engage with the same things, but from different viewpoints. The fiction writer sees a painting and connects the figures depicted in it with history, myth, and

There is always a pressure about time in Wilson Harris’s works, a feeling of urgency about a world presented as in an emergency, a culture too caught up in its own blind excesses to appreciate the dangers of its actions difference in such close proximity that he doubted his instruments, local Amerindian tribes who historicised the place in purely mythical terms, and, ultimately, a landscape imbued with qualities of a powerful character and God or gods, able to mould perception and resist categorisation.

Harris’s language altered as a result.

Landscape became instructive not simply in terms outlined by the Romantics, whose great legacy remains that landscape is a thing we can benefit from by knowing about, a cathedral of sorts for spiritual renewal. But for Harris that landscape enacts perception, governs it, steers it into new mental terrain. This transformative aspect of landscape was bound to alter Harris’s language, since the way he talked about place had to be part and parcel of his discoveries about the power of Guyana’s rainforest interior. When allied with time, this sensory reception of a place turned out to be a literary practice, a theory about fiction, an account of the intuitive imagination, and therefore a new type of fiction.

Inevitably, Harris’s art of fiction reaches across to other art forms to make the case for his view of time and place. The Ghost of Memory examines how a work of art shapes the life of someone who takes the time to really

current affairs. The arts, far from being abstract, appear to engage with society, admittedly by keeping the social and political at some necessary distance, and, with a degree of operational diffidence, that nevertheless suggests solutions to social problems.

There is always a pressure about time in Harris’s works, a feeling of urgency about a world presented as in an emergency, a culture too caught up in its own blind excesses to appreciate the dangers of its actions to life on the planet, and a planet used and abused to its breaking point. The one redeeming quality about this world is its predisposition towards other worlds by certain of its subjects, principally artists. Artists have access to a human antiquity preserved in the harmonious environmental practices of certain so-called primitive tribes and past civilisations.

Harris argues that these good deeds have been discarded or largely ignored by arrogant modernity.

The painting with its multiple narratives and perspectives spread across the flat canvas becomes an interpretive field for repeated scrutiny, much like the novel invested in probing the relationship between image and the ideas embedded in it. One thing suggests another and another and another 31

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

in a linked chain of meanings. Hence the child in The Mask of the Beggar who meets the poor man in the street and cannot shake the man’s desperate face from his mind morphs into that homeless man as a stand-in for an elder from another ruined civilisation. The child who witnesses that face becomes the artistic mind forced to resolve what the encounter might mean for his adult

event with the advantage of hindsight, foresight, insight, intuition, and whatever else we wish to call the creative act of imagination invested in myth, recall, sensory stimulus, and place. It occurs to me that I reacted to Harris’s admission to me exactly as he would have wanted someone who read his work to react: as a demonstration of my understanding of his imaginative procedure as

Harris’s quadrupled banks of space — analogously presented as a river, a living stream of thought and phenomenon — gesture to quantum mechanics, where vast geographical polarities exist in instantaneous parallels life and for the times he lives in. If the Beggar of the novel is Odysseus, returned in disguise to his kingdom and unrecognised by his countrymen, then the needs of the poor in a rich society surely should be a call on the conscience of the privileged to do something about the inequitable distribution of scarce resources. It signals, as well, how the past can be a stranger to the present just when the present needs to know that it is connected to the past.

The adolescent who fell in the trench all those years ago and climbed out wet and sorry for the embarrassment planted himself in Harris’s memory. In the intervening fifty years, that incident languished with Harris until I walked with him along the same patch of ground. I cannot argue for past incarnations in present-day bodies, nor for the odd magic of synchronicity of time and events, but I may have spoken on behalf of that boy who fell. I took his place in a forum welcomed by Harris, the man who, back then when he was young and impetuous and mischievously playful, pushed that boy into the trench. As the young man that boy may have become, I walked that same road that was not the same road, in a different time that was the same time, and enabled a rehearsal of the rudiments of that past 32

Guyana’s most original and compelling writer.

In 1990, Harris published a novel titled The Four Banks of the River of Space in which figures from Amerindian myth pop into the contemporary world and challenge the novelist who is susceptible to these intrusions between myth and history, and where a continuum forms between landscapes imagined and real. Harris’s quadrupled banks of space — analogously presented as a river, a living stream of thought and phenomenon — gesture to quantum mechanics, where vast geographical polarities exist in instantaneous parallels. This makes me imagine the trench with two young men running along its dry, crenellated bed. One is Wilson, the other is that boy, and they are looking at two older men. One is Wilson, the other is me, as we walk along the bank, and the water that was there in the trench is suspended below us, above us in cloud, and all around us as moisture. I am looking at all this now in Virginia, and Wilson Harris may be thinking about it too in Chelmsford, England: that’s at least three rivers and twelve banks, right?  This essay was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 2008.

Call for applications:

Vera Rubin Residency for Caribbean Writers at Yaddo Yaddo, the artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York, welcomes creative artists working in all disciplines, including literature. Visitors receive room, board, studio space, and the opportunity to work without interruption for up to two months in a supportive community. Applications are reviewed by panels of professional artists highly respected in their fields.

The Vera Rubin Residency for Caribbean Writers was formed to help Yaddo carry out its mission internationally by serving writers from the Caribbean. The residency provides round-trip transportation from the writers’ homes to Saratoga Springs, as well as underwriting the expenses of their visits.

The deadline to apply for residencies from October 2009 to May 2010 is August 1, 2009. Applicants outside the United States should ensure they allow adequate time for their packages to arrive.

For further information, or to download application forms, visit www.yaddo.org.

Support the CRB The Caribbean Review of Books is a registered non-profit, depending on the support of its readers and other donors. Support Caribbean literature’s journal of record by subscribing, or make a donation via our website: www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009

Also noted Other new and recent books Molly and the Muslim Stick, by David Dabydeen (Macmillan Caribbean, ISBN 978-0-2300-2870-8, 179 pp), the sixth novel by the Guyana-born writer, traces the progress of a young woman born at the end of the First World War, from a grim mining town in the north of England to Coventry in the aftermath of the Blitz — and thence to the interior of Guyana, after the apparition of a mysterious stranger. When the “boy-man” she calls Om turns up on her doorstep, trailing leaves and twigs, Molly’s already unconventional life takes a turn for the truly fantastic — or perhaps the truly lunatic.

Songster and Other Stories, by Jennifer Rahim (Peepal Tree Press, ISBN 978-184-523-0487, 145 pp), a collection of short fiction by the Trinidadian writer best known for her poems (Mothers Are Not the Only Linguists, 1992; Between the Fence and the Forest, 2002). Set mostly in contemporary Trinidad, these blunt, sometimes fierce stories survey a Caribbean reality far removed from the fantasies of tourist brochures and nostalgic novelists alike. “My island, which is my home, is the place that hurt me,” says the narrator of the final piece.

“My home is a word without end, and its meanings thunder like the arrival of this sea.”

The River’s Song, by Jacqueline Bishop (Peepal Tree Press, ISBN 978-184-523-0388, 181 pp), a heartwarming coming-ofage story set in Jamaica, by the former editor of the literary journal Calabash. As the novel opens, Gloria, the bright, lively daughter of an ambitious working-class mother, wins a scholarship to a prestigious girls’ high school. As Gloria grapples with Jamaica’s social realities and her own adolescent sexuality, she learns that the route to freedom and selffulfillment is not often a straightforward channel. “I envied the river’s certainty, the sense that it knew where it was going on its tried and true path to the sea.”

Writing Life: Reflections by West Indian Writers, ed.

Mervyn Morris and Carolyn Allen (Ian Randle Publishers, ISBN 978-976-637-329-0, 171 pp), a collection of essays by a range of Anglophone Caribbean writers, all considering “the writing life,” in all the meanings of that phrase — plus poems and stories by four more writers best known for their live performances. All the contributors — Derek Walcott, Erna Brodber, Olive Senior, Cecil Gray, Merle Hodge, Mark McWatt, to name just a few — participated in a conference at the University of the West Indies Mona campus in 2006.

The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Labourers and African Slaves in Cuba, by Lisa Yun (Temple University

Press, ISBN 978-1-59213-581-3, 311 pp), a groundbreaking analysis of the system of indentureship that brought over one hundred thousand Chinese labourers to Cuban sugar plantations in the mid-nineteenth century, where they toiled alongside African slaves. In 1874, the Chinese government sent a commission of enquiry to Cuba to investigate complaints of brutal treatment. The commissioners collected testimonies from 2,841 “coolies”; Yun engages this remarkable archive in “a deep and lengthy process of disclosure, one of unfixing entrenched binaries: slave versus free, black versus white, East versus West, Pacific versus Atlantic.”

Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States: Essays on Incorporation, Identity, and Citizenship, ed. Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants (Temple University Press, ISBN 978-159213-954-5, 261 pp), a collection of data-rich papers, originally presented at a conference in Paris in 2002, contributing to the burgeoning field of Caribbean migration and diaspora studies. The authors — sociologists and anthropologists — focus on the Hispanic, French, and Dutch Caribbean as they examine “issues pertaining to incorporation, citizenship, and identity formation among immigrants who move between a geopolitically strategic, albeit subordinated, area of the world and core zones.”

Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, by Michael E. Veal (Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 08195-6572-5, 338 pp), a historical analysis of the evolution of Jamaican dub which argues that “the production style of Jamaican music has helped transform the sound and structure of world popular music.” Veal believes that “the sounds and techniques of classic dub,” which developed in Kingston recording studios in the 1970s and 80s, “have been stylistically absorbed into the various genres of global electronic popular music.” He examines the specific styles and techniques of individual Jamaican sound engineers like “Scratch” Perry and “King Tubby” Ruddock, situates dub in the wider continuum of Jamaican popular music, and claims it as a vital ancestor of contemporary “remix culture.”

A History of the Turks and Caicos Islands, ed. Carlton Mills (Macmillan Caribbean, ISBN 978-1-4050-9894-6, 300 pp), a useful reference book compiled by a former minister of education, covering the landscape, flora, fauna, and political and social history of these northern Caribbean islands.

More than a dozen authors contribute chapters on subjects including slavery and shipwrecks, and Mills himself wrote “The Road Ahead: The Constitutional Debate”; that road seems recently to have doubled back on itself, after the British authorities suspended the territory’s internal self-government and began an investigation into alleged corruption

by Premier Michael Misick.

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