Caribbean Passages: A Critical Perspective on New Fiction from the West Indies 9781685858261

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: The Third Wave
2 Olive Senior Country Air & Juggled Worlds
3 Zee Edgell The Belize Chronicles
4 Shiva Naipaul Choreographer of Chaos
5 Caryl Phillips The End of All Exploring
6 Robert Antoni The Voyage In
Bibliography
Index
About the Book

Citation preview

Caribbean Passages

Caribbean Passages A Critical Perspective on New Fiction from the West Indies

Richard E Patteson

ATHR.EE CONTINENTS

Booic.aBh

LYNNE R I E N N E R PUBLISHERS' BOULDER & LONDON

Published in the United States of America in 1998 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 1998 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patteson, Richard F. (Richard Francis), 1947Caribbean passages : a critical perspective on new fiction from the West Indies / by Richard F. Patteson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-89410-851-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. West Indian fiction (English)—History and criticism. 2. Caribbean Area—In literature. 3. West Indies—In literature. I. Title. PR9214.P37 1998 813—dc21 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America Typesetting by Letra Libre (°o)

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 5

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97-36868 CIP

Oh, time's run past the time your hands made bread To this decrepitude; but in the stream Of time I watch the stone, the image Of my mother making bread my boyhood long, Mossed by the crusty memories of bread. Oh may my art grow whole as her hands' craft. Eric Roach, "To My Mother"

Contents

Acknowledgments

1

Introduction: The Third Wave Guanahani, 1 Waves and Echoes, 6

2

Olive Senior: Country Air and Juggled Worlds Summer Lightning: Customs of the Country, 16 Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Discerner of Hearts: The Wider World, 30

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Zee Edgell: The Belize Chronicles Beka Lamb: A Lesson in History, 52 In Times Like These: Growing into Home, 66

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Shiva Naipaul: Choreographer of Chaos Essays and Stories, 84 Fireflies: Illuminating the Void, 90 The Chip-Chip Gatherers: Ropes Across the Abyss, 98 A Hot Country: Too Much Nothing, 107

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Caryl Phillips: The End of All Exploring The Final Passage: The Book of the Parents, 116 A State of Independence: The Book of the Sons, 124 Cambridge: The Book of the Ancestors, 130 vii

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Robert Antoni: The Voyage In

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Short Fiction, 144 Divina Trace: The Tale of Telling, 149

Bibliography Index About the Book

175 183 189

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank (and not for the first time) the staff of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas for its expertise and courtesy and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a grant to do summer research there in 1993. Thanks also to the Caribbean Studies Association and to the Colloquium for the Caribbean Short Story in English (Angers, France), for offering several venues in which I was able to share some of my ideas while this book was a work in progress. I am also most grateful to all of the graduate students who have read and discussed Caribbean writers with me during the past few years, particularly Lena Taylor, Trey Bourn, Dean Karpowicz, and Andrew Watkins, and to my friend and colleague Gary Myers, for his skillful computer midwifery. Special thanks go to Olive Senior, Zee Edgell, Caryl Phillips, and Robert Antoni for supplying photographs of themselves and to Senior and Antoni for providing me with many useful insights and much moral support. The photographs of Olive Senior, Shiva Naipaul, and Caryl Phillips are by Martin Mordecai, Jerry Bauer, and Jillian Edelstein, respectively. A small part of this book was previously published, in somewhat different form, as "The Fiction of Olive Senior: Traditional Society and the Wider World," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 24.1 (1993): 13-33.

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1 Introduction: The Third Wave We flowered in this generation, Triumphantly. Bob Marley, Legend

Guanahani In March 1989 I and several of my students landed on one of the outermost islands of the Bahamas, a sixty-square-mile patch of sand and scrub known as Guanahani to its earliest inhabitants but rechristened San Salvador by Columbus when he first set foot there on October 12,1492. The "naked people . . . very deficient in everything"1 who greeted him have long since vanished, leaving, in Derek Walcott's words, only "the vague sea / where the lost exodus / of corials sunk without trace."2 The Bahamians who greeted us were descendants of African slaves brought to the islands more than two centuries later. Until my own discovery of Guanahani that spring, my interest in Caribbean culture3 had been largely academic, but as we listened to the old folks on San Salvador talk about the back time, as we listened to Mrs. Mabel Morgan rail against prudery while lightly lifting her eighty-year-old feet in a spontaneous dance on her tiny front porch, I knew that I was in the grip of something deeper and stronger than anything purely academic could ever be—the force and vigor of a living oral tradition. Mrs. Morgan's stories, and those of her neighbors, formed a continuous web of references to both past and present, all curling together like an intricate latticework. They seemed to talk about everything: the near-mythic hurricane of 1941, the advantages of bush medicine, the days when the supply boat from Nassau came only once a month, the problems of children grown up and gone off to Freeport to work in the casinos, concerns about the possible effects of tourism on 1

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San Salvador itself, the hardships of slavery as described to them by their grandparents, Bahamian politics since independence, sightings of the fearsome chickcharnie (a creature believed to reside in the tops of towering silk cotton trees), and on and on. During a particularly lively session, when an old gentleman named Scooter was waxing hyperbolic about the great storm of '41, one of my students turned to Mrs. Morgan, who was sipping a can of Kalik beer, and asked, "Was it really like that?" She paused for a moment, as if pondering how to answer such a pointless question, then slapped him hard on the knee and said, laughing, "Don't we make it so?" Mrs. Morgan's response hung in my mind for a long time before I grasped how much more clearly she understood the nature and purposes of storytelling than I myself did. Edward Said has recently written that "stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world," adding that they are also "the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history."4 That first province of storytelling, the familiarization of the Other, has become a standard part of what Peter Hulme calls the "fabric of colonial discourse,"5 while the second—the assertion of identity and the reclamation of history—has proven more congenial in parts of the world emerging from colonialism. In Carpentier's El reino de este mundo, the slave Mackandal practices "the arts of the narrator,"6 summoning an African past into the Haitian present. His storytelling not only precedes the rebellion he leads but makes it possible by creating a new reality in which such an unmistakable assertion of identity can take place. Mrs. Morgan and her San Salvador neighbors, no less than Carpentier's Mackandal, were also constructing a reality, making something so. They wove a world for us, in their stories; they told us who they were. It was only later that I recognized the extent to which the themes that gathered in their words—the tropical landscape, the endless encounter with a problematic past, a society groping toward a sense of itself, the strength of women, the protean powers of storytelling—are revisited again and again in the texts of contemporary West Indian writers. My intention is not to attempt a survey of the whole field of postcolonial Caribbean fiction, but to examine closely the work of five of those writers who practice the "arts of the narrator." For centuries Caribbean literature as such did not exist, although there is a vast trove of texts written about the area by outsiders. Nearly all of these, from Columbus's Journal to Michener's formulaic novel Caribbean, have endeavored to make one of the "strange regions of the world" intelligible to readers in Europe or the United States.7 Some of the more recent examples, like Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga and Madison Smartt Bell's All Souls' Rising, attempt to distance themselves from colonial or neocolonial biases, but none possesses the commanding authenticity of an intrinsic voice. That is

Introduction

3

something only the Caribbean itself can generate; in the West Indies it has evolved very slowly during the past hundred years from a complicated nexus of sources combining a rich Afro-Caribbean oral tradition with the English literature taught in schools. The first great wave of serious, self-conscious West Indian writing crested before World War II and included, among others, expatriate artists like Claude McKay and Jean Rhys,8 as well as the writers of the Trinidad literary "awakening" of the 1930s and 1940s.9 One of the lesser luminaries in that group was Seepersad Naipaul, whose elder son would become a leading figure in the second wave—an immensely talented generation of West Indian writers whose work came to the fore during the quarter century following the end of the war. That period, a time when most of the British colonies were moving at varying paces toward independence, was a kind of golden age, producing as it did not only V. S. Naipaul but George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Earl Lovelace, John Hearne, Michael Anthony, and Wilson Harris. Although most of these writers are still artistically vigorous and productive,10 the third wave belongs to their successors—a large and swelling contingent of younger, postindependence writers from all over the West Indies whose novels and stories have been appearing since the early 1970s. Several shades of meaning cling to the word "passages" in my title: ocean voyages, the unpredictable movements of history, the transitions in individual lives and in the lives of cultures and societies. But the word refers most basically to stories, and particularly to the texts I discuss in the following chapters—passages written by Olive Senior, Zee Edgell, Shiva Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, and Robert Antoni. Admittedly, many fine West Indian writers could be the focus of a study such as this. Names like Erna Brodber, Michelle Cliff, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Collins, Austin Clarke, Pauline Melville, and Roy A. K. Heath 11 immediately leap to mind. But my resolve to explore the textual terrain as closely as possible made hard choices necessary. What led me to settle, finally, on these five storytellers was—in addition to the excellence of their work and the relative lack of critical attention paid to it—the diversity of their backgrounds, perspectives, and artistic strategies. These two women and three men are a variegated group—ethnically, geographically, and experientially12—but they hold in common an intense commitment to an imaginative repossession of Caribbean life and consciousness. Olive Senior emerges from an authentic Jamaican literary tradition that extends at least as far back as McKay's Banana Bottom (1933) and includes, among second wave writers, such luminaries as Hearne, Vic Reid, and Roger Mais. The tradition continues to flourish today, as any reader of Brodber or Cliff will readily attest. Senior is one of the few leading West Indian fiction writers who has not published a fulllength novel, but within the past decade she has become one of the living

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masters of shorter fiction. Deeply rooted in the soil of rural Jamaica, many of her tales combine the devices of oral narrative with sophisticated plot structures that subvert hegemonic models of authority. The evolution of a uniquely Caribbean culture is central to her fiction, but so is the difficult relationship between that emerging culture and the wider world that presses relentlessly upon it. Although her short stories are among the best being written in English today, she is also a highly regarded poet, and her Working Miracles (1991) is a landmark study of the economic and social condition of women in the West Indies. Like Senior, Zee Edgell also traveled and studied abroad; after returning to her native Belize, she became active in the government, serving for a time as director of the Department of Women's Affairs—experience that found its way into her second novel, In Times Like These. Unlike Senior, however, Edgell virtually founded her country's national literature. Although Belize has produced a scattering of poets and journalists of some local repute, Edgell's Beka Lamb, the story of a young girl growing up in the British Honduras of the 1950s, was the first Belizean novel to win international acclaim and is now widely taught in schools throughout the Anglophone Caribbean. Caryl Phillips, whose recent book, Crossing the River, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, went to England as an infant with his parents and grew up there—doubly displaced as a black man in England and as a member of an émigré community itself separated from home by a generation or more.13 Phillips found in that displacement the "imaginative sustenance" that, as Michael Seidel says, can activate artistic vision: "separation as desire, perspective as witness, alienation as new being."14 All of the protagonists in Phillips's Caribbean novels—The Final Passage, A State of Independence, and Cambridge—are exiles. Tracking their passages has taken Phillips across centuries, genres, and culturally constricted forms of discourse, affording him the perspective needed to witness the array of traumas that have afflicted West Indian history. Although Phillips directly addresses the consequences of expatriation in his first two novels, the exile as defined by Seidel, "someone who inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another,"15 is a useful metaphor for the dislocations of consciousness and identity with which all Caribbean writers struggle, because in projecting their own reality they are projecting a place "other" than the colonial pseudoplace that Caribbean peoples have previously inhabited. Two writers of Trinidad origin, Shiva Naipaul and Robert Antoni, are represented here because Trinidad and Tobago has produced such a remarkable body of literature during the past half century or more. From C. L. R. James to Kelvin Christopher James, the number of talented writers who have emerged from these small islands is little short of astonishing, and Port of Spain has become an important regional center for the

Introduction

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arts. The Trinidad awakening doubtless provided a bit of a head start, but Trinidad's literary culture has been peculiarly enriched by the population's ethnic diversity 16 and invigorated by the traditions of calypso and carnival, which appear to have bestowed on Trinidadians a special gift for mimicry, satire, and make-believe. Shiva Naipaul, whose Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers depict East Indian life in Trinidad with a rare combination of scope and detail, has been neglected for too long. Often dismissed as a lesser version, or even an imitator, of his older brother (and openly reviled by some Caribbean critics on grounds more political than aesthetic), Naipaul has not received the kind of scrutiny his work clearly merits. A s much as any other West Indian writer, Naipaul captures in his fiction the image of a complex society, shaped by centuries of tradition, that is slowly being absorbed into a larger, multiethnic creolized culture. Unlike Samuel Selvon, Ismith Khan, and, more recently, Robert Antoni, who celebrate "the liberating potential of creolization" 17 in Trinidad, Naipaul focuses his attention on what is lost as a new kind of society comes into being. Antoni's Divina Trace, with its multiple narrators and interweaving of Catholic, Hindu, and Yoruba traditions, is a textual embodiment of the creolization process. Antoni retains the best features of European realism—a palpable sense of life lived, of voices actually speaking, of human stories told by human beings—but he also manages to spin a web of storytelling less dependent on rational and teleological categories of thought than on an intuitive, nonrational grasp of reality. The arrangement and design of this book were suggested to me through models of Caribbean poetics described by Antonio BenitezRojo, Edouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris. Their conjectures are vibrantly and appropriately diverse, but they have in common a sense of "Caribbeanness" determined by the conjunction of historical experience and geography. The poetics they evoke is nonauthoritarian, scattered, centerless, but at the same time intricately, insistently connected—part of the same archipelagic discourse. I have accordingly tried not to plant the imperialist flag of an ideology, a political agenda, or even a preconceived, unitary thesis on these five islands: the imaginative worlds of Senior, Edgell, Naipaul, Phillips, and Antoni. I have also tried not to write a literary history per se, or less to do a study of the novel genre. (My inclusion of Olive Senior should emphasize that point.) Instead, my aim is to explore each writer's territory in turn, looking for both marks of originality and signs of kinship to others in the region. What I have found is very similar to what I noticed in the stories I heard first on San Salvador and later throughout the Caribbean: significant differences in attitude and perspective coupled with a consistently recurring pattern of interrelated experiences, motifs, ideas, and images. The patterns neither transcend nor cancel out the differences, but I have found that an exhuberant coherence perseveres

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stubbornly in the face of historically imposed distinctions; consequently, I have gone out of my way to avoid placing excessive emphasis on delimiting categories such as gender, race, nationality, and geography. My broadest purpose is to demonstrate, through a detailed examination of these representative texts, the variety and the cultural cohesiveness of contemporary Caribbean fiction. Most national literatures have tended to explain themselves almost exclusively in terms of coherence, but in the Caribbean, political fragmentation, ethnic multiplicity, and historical discontinuity have proven to be sources of artistic inspiration. In a paradoxical sense, the literature of the West Indies possesses a coherence that not only accommodates diversity but depends and even insists upon it. "Break a vase," Derek Walcott said in his Nobel address, "and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love that took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."18 In the hands of West Indian storytellers, those diverse fragments are coming together to form the lineaments of a culture. Waves and Echoes One of Delano Abdul Malik de Coteau's song-poems proclaims, "Hope dazzling / mih eyes / like a new day / by de sea / an hearing waves / an echoes / of West Indian / Voices / returning."19 Echoes. Returning. Perhaps the most arresting characteristic of contemporary Caribbean writing is the persistence with which its voices continue to imagine and reimagine both the historical and the literary experience of the region. As Antonio Benitez-Rojo observes in his ingenious analysis of the whole area's cultural dynamics: Within the sociocultural fluidity that the Caribbean archipelago presents, within its historiographic turbulence and its ethnological and linguistic clamor, within its generalized instability of vertigo and hurricane, one can sense the features of an island that "repeats" itself, unfolding and bifurcating until it reaches all the seas and lands of the earth, while at the same time it inspires multidisciplinary maps of unexpected designs.20

What Benitez-Rojo describes is not mere duplication, but an endless dialectic of repetition and differentiation, a process embodying, as Edouard Glissant puts it, both relationship and openness. If textual diversity and differentiation in the Caribbean can be explained with reference to historical, ethnic, and linguistic "turbulence," the cohesiveness implicit in Benitez-Rojo's "repeating island" trope has to do with what Glissant calls "the Poetics of the Relation," a "new dimension"21 engendered by the continuous interweaving of those disparate, clamorous cultural traditions. It is, indeed, the very relatedness of Caribbean experience, its "waves an

Introduction

7

echoes," that makes possible the "unfolding" and "bifurcating" of paradigmatic narrative and thematic patterns in Caribbean literature and gives the region its indisputable cultural integrity. Such patterns have been rippling through and shaping the imaginative space of West Indian fiction writers for the greater part of this century. Their more significant coordinates, when plotted on "maps" like the five chapters in this volume, tend to emerge consistently as networks of relationships rather than as discrete themes that can be understood in isolation from one another. In the Caribbean, context is everything. The question of identity, for instance, recurs quite frequently in contemporary West Indian fiction,22 but it appears in many permutations and is inevitably linked with and dependent upon other conceptual constructs. Some novels and stories (such as Edgell's Beka Lamb) foreground the personal and sociopolitical dimensions of Caribbean identity, exploring the individual's place in the family, the immediate community, and the whole society. Others deal with the issue in more oblique ways, focusing on the recuperation of history (Hearne's The Sure Salvation, Phillips's Cambridge), the wider implications of creolization (Ismith Khan's The Jumbie Bird, Shiva Naipaul's The Chip-Chip Gatherers), or even the ways in which language and narrative contribute to the discovery, inscription, and transmission of cultural identity as a living force (Senior's "Arrival of the Snake-Woman," Antoni's Divina Trace). Important problems like expatriation, neocolonialism (especially U.S. economic influence), and postindependence politics are closely tied to the success or failure of creolization and the building of new societies, while the role of the mother in West Indian family life is related both to concepts of home and community and to the function of storytelling as a primary method of encoding an "unfolding" culture. The essential prerequisite for the realization of a truly posfcolonial culture is the development of a sense of belonging to a place. In the West Indies, centuries of colonial rule resulted, as George Lamming points out, in a fractured consciousness, a deep split in its sensibility w h i c h . . . raised difficult problems of language and values; the whole issue of cultural allegiance between the imposed norms of White P o w e r . . . and the fragmented memory of the African masses: between White instruction and Black imagination... the ambiguities among Blacks themselves about the credibility of their own spiritual history.

"All of this," Lamming goes on to say, "would have to be incorporated into any imaginative record of the total society."23 The construction of a new West Indian sensibility—a collective psychic home—has proceeded very gradually, however; for a long time West Indians tended to define themselves, like Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea, in terms of what they were not. But eventually, spurred on by locally variable factors like the in-

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crease in literacy, the rise of trade union movements, and (after World War II) the introduction of universal suffrage,24 a West Indian identity has emerged, "charted and affirmed,"25 in Lamming's words, by the region's writers—women and men who understand that their first task is to establish unequivocally who they are and where they are rooted. Stories of family life centering on a child's coming-of-age frequently serve in West Indian literature as vehicles for the exploration of the difficult passage from colonial dependency to postcolonial autonomy.26 In a number of stories, such as Beka Lamb, the child's and the society's rites of passage parallel and influence each other. Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin is a prototype for this kind of novel, although his technique and purpose are somewhat different from those of Edgell. Whereas Lamming portrays a "typical boyhood in a generalized West Indian community" in order to foreground "the complex shiftings in the community at large,"27 Edgell employs an almost Joycean particularity to achieve a similar effect. And although Edgell records, as Lamming does, the growth of "political self-awareness"28 in the society as a whole, she pays much more attention to the part the individual plays within that society. Even in Beka Lamb, however, what Edward Kamau Brathwaite labels "the Faustian novel" (one that stresses the triumph of "individual characteristics") is combined with "the alternative tradition of inter-related perceptions"29 espoused most prominently by Lamming and Wilson Harris. This alternative tradition manifests itself in different ways. Sometimes the community itself becomes a kind of collective protagonist, as in Lamming's Castle, Roger Mais's The Hills Were Joyful Together, and, to a lesser degree, Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance. Senior's "Real Old lime Ting" is narrated by a very colorful and opinionated character, but one who, by virtue of her complete anonymity and putative omniscience, speaks as the voice of the community. Antoni's multivocal Divina Trace, through its deconstruction of character as a fixed concept, suggests that the individual ego may not even exist except as part of a social collectivity. It is a virtual truism in Caribbean life that a person's "characteristics" are to some degree confluential with those of the community, so the question of identity nearly always comes down to, in one way or another, the network of relationships (familial, ethnic, political, economic, religious, and so on) in which the individual is enmeshed. For both the child and society the ultimate destination is an independence tempered and strengthened by a mature understanding of that which has gone before, including phases of dependency; it should come as little surprise, therefore, that the figure of the mother is prominent in West Indian literature. The Caribbean mother, a cohesive agent within the family structure for generations, is a culture-bearer and a storyteller—a link to the wider community that includes both the living and the dead. The poet Eric Roach, a native of Tobago, puts it simply in an elegy for his own

Introduction

9

mother: "My poems labour from your blood / As all my mind burns on our peasant stock."30 Among the writers discussed here, Olive Senior, Zee Edgell, and Robert Antoni portray the mother's function most expansively, not just as a conduit between past and present but also as an active participant in the creation of a new, more comprehensively connected Creole society. In doing so they contribute to the destabilizing of fixed gender roles that have been the handmaidens of a colonial system perpetuated in part by reliance on patriarchal authority. One of the most remarkable aspects of the third wave has been the rapidly growing number of women writers from the West Indies whose ranks, as Senior implies, are destined to multiply in the fullness of time: "Caribbean women are only just beginning to find their own voices, to speak for themselves, to name their experiences and to make their own connections."31 While the Caribbean mother's role is interpreted generously and positively in the fiction of Senior, Edgell, and Antoni, the subject is complicated, charged with all the ambiguities one would expect to find associated with a figure so elemental to both psychic and cultural constructs. In several of Olive Senior's stories, for instance, the mother (or mother surrogate) may be a positive or negative influence on the child, depending upon whether she herself is properly rooted in the emerging Creole culture or excessively influenced by the values of either the old colonial system or the materialistic neocolonialism of the United States. Jamaica Kincaid's mother/daughter relationships reflect a similar ambivalence. In Annie John and Lucy, the mother is a formidible figure from which the main character must separate herself to establish an identity of her own, but in both books the mother also contributes to the formation of that identity in positive ways—acquainting the daughter with family history in Annie John and teaching her the importance of independence in Lucy. Lamming's highly influential In the Castle of My Skin explores the negative implications of a mother's attachment to the recent past—the colonial status quo. Sandra Pouchet Paquet argues persuasively that G.'s mother "raises him to advance within the colonial hierarchy of power, not to challenge it." The novel chronicles "the process of individuation that drives a wedge between G. and his mother"32 and culminates with G.'s departure from Barbados, but the wedge itself, from Lamming's point of view, is a necessary part of growing up and growing away from the colonial past. Bertram Francis, the protagonist of Caryl Phillips's A State of Independence, also leaves his island home and stays away for many years, distancing himself from both the island and his mother; but Bertram, unlike G., attempts to suppress his entire past, not just the part of it associated with the colonial order. When he returns to the island on the eve of its independence, he finds that ties to hearth, home, and culture, once severed, are not easily restored. Bertram's identity is eroded because he has torn himself from the familial/cultural matrix—the web

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of relationships—that nurtures a concept of selfhood, and his continuing alienation from his mother is the most visible sign of his anomie. The problem of the past haunts West Indian literature as nothing else does. Wilson Harris's observation that "most Caribbean novelists are aware of the traumas of history and are wrestling with them in some degree or another" 33 is something of an understatement. Everywhere in the Caribbean, colonialism has superimposed a European past on other possible pasts (African, Amerindian, and, to a lesser extent, Asian), submerging and concealing them, replacing the historical continuity necessary for cultural identity with ruptures and gaps. The need to recuperate an authentic Caribbean past has become less an obstacle than a challenge for West Indian writers, but the complexity of the task, as BenitezRojo points out, is compounded by its open-endedness: In order to reread the Caribbean, we have to visit the sources from which the widely various elements that contributed to the formation of its culture flowed. This unforeseen journey tempts us because as soon as we succeed in establishing and identifying as separate any of the signifiers that make up the supersyncretic manifestation that we're studying, there comes a moment of erratic displacement of its signifiers toward other spatio-temporal points, be they in Europe, Africa, Asia, or America, or in all these continents at once. When these points of departure are nonetheless reached, a new chaotic flight of signifiers will occur, and so on ad infinitum.34

Benitez-Rojo concludes that although the novel of the Caribbean undertakes a search for "a hypothetical center or origin," that point remains "in continuous displacement."35 For this reason, the number of routes to that purloined past is virtually inexhaustible and the ultimate goal is unreachable, but the voyages in search of it have nonetheless yielded up bountiful treasures. Two approaches discussed in the following pages are particularly inventive. Caryl Phillips's Cambridge is an artful collage of documents that seem to speak of a lost presence from across a gulf of centuries, and Robert Antoni's Divina Trace summons up a Caribbean past that is literally and self-consciously created by the collective voices of an increasingly creolized community. "Creolization" is a term that has been variously defined, but all agree that it is fundamental to Caribbean identity and destiny. Edward Brathwaite, who has given the matter much careful thought, explains the origins of Jamaica's Creole society in terms of a series of interactions between a dominant group (Europeans) and a subordinate group (African slaves). In Jamaica, people from Britain and Jamaica-born blacks "contributed to the formation of a society which developed, or was developing, its o w n . . . character or culture which, in so far as it was neither purely British nor West African, is called 'creole'—and that culture is part of a wider New World cultural complex."36 The "wider complex" has

Introduction

11

come to include many components in addition to British and African; indeed, as Glissant remarks, "infinite varieties of creolization" are now "open to human conception"37 in "a métissage without limits."38 Glissant sees the process as an adventure, and Wilson Harris goes even further, asserting that creolization offers a liberating alternative to models of cultural identity predicated on homogeneity. The "capacity exists," he explains in his trademark rainforest prose, "to transform claustrophobic ritual by cross-cultural imaginations that bear upon the future through mutations of the monolithic character of conquistadorial legacies of civilization."39 Although the development of Caribbean creole identity has important geopolitical and economic consequences, it is in the area of the arts, especially the "arts of the narrator," that the transformational effects of "cross-cultural imaginations" have been most brilliantly realized. For Caribbean writers of the third wave, engaged as they are in fashioning a culture as well as charting and recording it, that "métissage without limits" offers a limitless range of creative opportunities.

Notes 1. Christopher Columbus, Journal, trans. Cecil Jane (New York: Bonanza Books, 1989), 23. Present-day San Salvador, called Watling's Island for many years by the British, who eventually laid claim to the whole Bahamian archipelago, is thought by many historians to be the site of the Columbus landfall, but the National Geographic Society has suggested Samana Cay as the true site, and others have made a case for Grand Hirk Island. The debate continues, but the preponderance of evidence still points to Watling's. The name San Salvador was restored in 1926. 2. Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 114. 3. Throughout this book I use the word "Caribbean" to refer to a cultural region that extends from the Bahamas in the north to Guyana in the south, and from Guyana westward all the way to Belize, on the coast of Central America. The terms "West Indies" and "West Indian" refer, in accordance with common usage, to the English-speaking areas—current or former British colonies— within this region. The two designations are often used interchangeably. 4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), xii. 5. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 46. Needless to say, neither of these imaginative exercises is limited to any particular culture; both are instead fundamental acts of the human mind. 6. Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (Barcelona: Biblioteca de Bolsillo, 1991), 15. 7. Peter Hulme's Colonial Encounters, which treats (among other such paradigms) Columbus's account of his meeting with indigenous Americans, The Tempest, and Robinson Crusoe as excellent starting points for exploring the long history of extrinsic interpretations of the Caribbean. 8. Rhys and McKay were contemporaries (both having been born in the 1890s), but Rhys's long career extended well into the second wave of the postwar period, and her most distinctively Caribbean work, Wide Sargasso Sea, was not

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published until 1966. Obviously, these generational divisions, like much else pertaining to Caribbean culture, are somewhat fluid. 9. For an excellent discussion of this literary flowering, which occurred a full generation earlier than anything equivalent in most of the West Indian colonies, see Reinhard W. Sander, The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). Kenneth Ramchand's The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Heinemann, 1983) is still the definitive study of the historical development of West Indian fiction, but very useful information on the earlier periods (the first and second waves) can also be found in Michael Gilkes's The West Indian Novel (Boston: TWayne, 1981) and in West Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1979), a collection of essays edited by Bruce King. Of particular interest are the first five essays, including King's introduction. 10. A case in point is V. S. Naipaul, who, after being widely criticized for years as being overly critical if not contemptuous of Caribbean society, surprised many by publishing in 1994 A Way in the World, one of the most subtle and thorough accounts ever recorded of a Caribbean consciousness seeking to define itself Naipaul's strategy is to employ a series of "masks"—people from his own past, historical figures, fictional characters—both to explore his ambiguous identity in a world of "colonial incompleteness" and to stitch that identity into the variegated fabric of West Indian history and culture. The book is bound to become a primary text in Caribbean studies. See A Way in the World (New York: Vintage, 1995), 252. 11. Although Heath is older than most of the writers of the third wave, his fiction did not begin to appear until the early 1970s. 12. I have taken some pains not to discuss these artists primarily in terms of ethnic or gender contexts, preferring to let their novels and stories express on their own terms such distinctions in perspective as may arise from those categories. 13. The expatriates in Phillips's fiction, like those in the work of Rhys, Lamming, Selvon, and many other West Indian writers, are primarily those living in the United Kingdom, but there is a growing body of literature that focuses on the experience of people from the Caribbean who have gone to the United States or Canada. Michelle Cliff, Paule Marshall, and the Jamaica Kincaid of Lucy fall into this category, as do several young novelists whose families emigrated from non-Anglophone areas of the Caribbean like Cuba (Cristina Garcia, Oscar Hijuelos), the Dominican Republic (Julia Alvarez), and Haiti (Edwidge Danticat). 14. Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), x. 15. Seidel, Exile, ix. 16. Demographics in Trinidad and Tobago is not an exact science, but experts generally agree that the population is about evenly divided between East Indians and blacks, with each group composing approximately 40-45 percent of the population. People of mixed ancestry and whites round out the total. None of these categories should be regarded as wholly exclusive of any of the others. 17. Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 111. Gikandi is referring only to Selvon in this passage, but the characterization applies equally to Khan and Antoni. 18. Derek Walcott, "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory," The New Republic 26 December 1992:26-32. 19. "Motto Vision 1971," in Paula Burnett, ed., The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English (London: Penguin, 1986), 55. 20. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James E. Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 3. © 1992 by Duke University Press.

Introduction

13

21. Edouard Glissant, "Beyond Babel," World Literature Today 63.4 (1989): 561. See also Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 139. 22. As Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, puts it (stating the self-evident), "One of the most clearly and frequently seen regularities of the Caribbean novel is its reiteration of the theme that has come to be known as 'the search for identity' or 'the search for roots' "(p. 186). 23. George Lamming, Introduction to In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), xxxvii. 24. Social factors seem to have been especially important in the development of a viable literary culture in Trinidad—earlier than in other islands. As Reinhard Sander explains it, while many of the early Jamaican writers (H. G. de Lisser is a case in point) were part of the ruling elite, the Trinidad writers of the 1920s and 1930s were "ostracized socially" in large part because of their links with the working class. See Sander, The Trinidad Awakening, 5-8. 25. Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, xxxvii. 26. Some of the best-known examples, in addition to those mentioned above, are V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street, Ismith Khan's The Jumbie Bird, Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando, Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey, and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John. 27. Paul Edwards and Kenneth Ramchand, Introduction to Michael Anthony, The Year in San Fernando (London: Heinemann, 1985), vi. 28. Edwards and Ramchand, Introduction to The Year in San Fernando, vi. 29. Edward Brathwaite, Introduction to Roger Mais, Brother Man (Oxford: Heinemann, 1974), xix. 30. Eric Roach, "To My Mother," in Stewart Brown, ed., Caribbean Poetry Now (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 13. 31. Olive Senior, Working Miracles: Women's Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 4. Senior's study also contains a wealth of information about the economic contribution of women in the West Indies. 32. Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Foreword to George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), xv. 33. Ian Munro and Reinhard Sander, eds., Kas-Kas: Interviews with Three Caribbean Writers in Texas (Austin, TX: African and Afro-American Research Institute, 1972), 46. 34. Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 12. 35. Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 187. 36. Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), xiii. See also Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 43-47. 37. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 140. 38. Glissant, "Beyond Babel," 561. According to Simon Gikandi, "Creolization has come to represent a unique kind of Caribbean modernism, one that resists the colonizing structures through the diversion of the colonial language and still manages to reconcile the values of European literacy with the long-repressed traditions of African orality." See Gikandi, Writing in Limbo, 16. 39. Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), xv.

Olive Senior

2 Olive Senior Country Air & Juggled Worlds

My mother's womb impulsed harvests perpetually. She deeply breathed country air when she laboured me. Now against the rhythms of subway trains my heartbeats still drum worksongs. Some wheels sing freedom, the others: home. Still, if I could balance water on my head I can juggle worlds on my shoulders. Olive Senior, "Ancestral Poem," from Talking of Trees

15

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Caribbean Passages

Summer Lightning: Customs of the Country During thé past few decades it has become increasingly evident that the old colonial order in many parts of the world has yielded to a "neo-colonialism of center and periphery" in which, as Wlad Godzich explains it, "the former colonial powers together with other economically dominant nations constitute the core whereas the former colonies form the periphery. The latter admits of measurement in relation to the core as an index of its degree of development, where it is of course implicit that the core's own development is normative and somehow 'natural.' Nowhere is this more true than in the Caribbean, where, in Olive Senior's words, "a new center-periphery system is evolving which is based in Washington and a new cultural system is evolving located somewhere between Dallas and Hollywood."2 The problems inherent in the literary expression of cultural identity come into particularly sharp focus in the twelve nations of the English-speaking Caribbean, where the lingering pull of the old colonial power, Great Britain, is so forcefully augmented by the looming presence of the United States. To a certain extent, West Indian writers have had little choice but to define themselves within the "empowered" or "dominant" discourse of the West. Even though they have adopted different points of view (and often critical political stances), their linguistic medium, their genres, and even their audience have tended to be primarily "Western." Through the frequent use of Jamaican English and a shrewd reliance on the devices of oral storytelling, Olive Senior succeeds, to a greater degree than most, in finding a voice that is somewhat different from standard forms of European discourse. In her three volumes of short stories and novellas, she has already established herself as one of the most talented artists currently working in that genre and a major force in the development of a postcolonial West Indian literature. Senior's astute deployment of Jamaican creole in dialogue within stories narrated in standard Jamaican English3 does not mark her originality or significance; this is an old, reliable device employed by many writers from both the Caribbean and elsewhere. Moreover, inasmuch as those fragments of dialect are subsumed into and dominated by the language of the narrator, a colonial situation, with regard to the two forms of discourse, still prevails. The language of narration in effect works as a corrective, reducing the dialect language to the status of a variation on a norm and thus marginalizing it. But this situation does not obtain when writers tell stories entirely in Jamaican English or some other creole dialect, as V. S. Reid and Samuel Selvon (among others) have done. Some of the difficulties in-

Olive Senior

17

herent in such a project are formidable. Kenneth Ramchand observes that "few West Indian authors reproduce dialect precisely in their works" but calls Reid's efforts in New Day "a convincing extension of the familiar."4 And Selvon, speaking of Moses Ascending, says, "I experimented . . . with using both this (modified dialect) and an archaic form of English which is not spoken anywhere today." Moses' language in that novel is, as Ramchand says, also a kind of "successful invention"— successful because it evokes real creóle speech but remains intelligible to a wider audience. But the exclusive use of "pure" dialect, Selvon argues, "would have been obscure and difficult to understand." He goes on to say that "Standard English or 'proper English' is also used as a part of [West Indian] dialect in certain phrases or words."5 When that happens, parts of the formerly dominant language are themselves subsumed into a new vernacular. As Ramchand has written more recently, "Once there came into existence a class of West Indians who combined Standard and dialect in their linguistic competence, the two registers became open to influence from each other."6 This is the point at which Olive Senior enters the picture. Clearly, the search for an authentic voice for the expression of the "matter" of the West Indies has been in progress for decades, and Senior does owe a considerable debt to distinguished predecessors and older contemporaries like Selvon, Reid, John Hearne, and Roger Mais. Her truest precursor, however, is not a fiction writer at all, but Louise Bennett, the mother of modern Jamaican poetry. Like Bennett, Senior is also a poet, and like Bennett, her most startlingly poetic effects often result from her use of dialect. In fact, it is Senior's command of the various registers of Jamaican English, combined with a poet's ear and a flair for figurative language, that gives her prose its distinctive character. In several of the stories in her first book, Summer Lightning, a version of vernacular speech—one not so obviously "invented" as Reid's or Selvon's—is the norm rather than the deviation. The language of these tales, their diction, figures of speech, and humorous asides, draws the reader almost physically into a sense of intimacy so intense that it must be experienced rather than described. Senior's importance as a writer does not rest solely upon those stories, but they are among her best, and her bold placement of them alongside stories narrated in standard English is a signal confirmation of her status as a leading postcolonial writer. The dialect stories in a sense validate the others, and the polyphonous voice that emerges moves from one form of discourse to another with facility and commanding assurance. The most immediate effect gained is one of exact verisimilitude, for Senior's prodigious mastery of the varieties of English speech in Jamaica, the "continuum" of Jamaican English, is a brilliant reflection of the linguistic versatility in daily life that is a hallmark of Caribbean creóle

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culture. On a deeper level the medley of discourses that constitutes her two short story collections represents the countercolonization of a language once associated exclusively with hegemonic authority. Yet even though Senior accomplishes this linguistic feat, she is still the product of a society whose educational, economic, religious, and political institutions are predominantly European in origin and character; she still must traverse what Simon Gikandi calls "the European terrain of the modern."7 And the genre in which she chooses to work—the written fictional story created for its own effect—if not entirely a European or American invention, is at least intimately connected with that cultural matrix. Wilson Harris, along with many others, has roundly criticized the Anglophone Caribbean's most celebrated man of letters, V. S. Naipaul, for his allegiance to "the mainstream tradition of the English nineteenth-century novel."8 Naipaul and others like him, Harris insists, employ "a 'coherency' based on the English social model to describe a native world."9 Harris decries the use of that literary form to render "invalid" the native world and to pander to the wider audience outside the Caribbean by supporting Western notions of superiority. Gikandi addresses this question in a more general (and more gentle) way: "In arguing for a Caribbean modernism that contests colonial history, I am well aware that this modernity and its forms may still be imprisoned in the very European paradigms it seeks to negate."10 But surely (whatever one may think of Naipaul) Olive Senior's fiction does not aim for or achieve the effect Harris describes, and it is hardly imprisoned in alien paradigms. Although her studies of family relationships are as conventionally realistic as Naipaul's work, they are actually subtle attacks on systems of power that parallel those underlying colonialism itself. Moreover, her tales owe as much to a tradition of oral storytelling in Africa as to the genre developed by Poe, Chekhov, and de Maupassant. Placing the issue in a general historical perspective, Edward Kamau Brathwaite explains, "We must recognize that our literature began on the slave plantation with imitation Euro-writing by Europeans and white Creoles on the one hand, and the often unremembered sound-poems, stories and religious litanies of the slaves, on the other."11 Olive Senior does recognize this; reflecting on her childhood, she has remarked, "My major influence then was the oral tradition Later came formal exposure to 'English' literature in high school" (Interview, 480). The single word "later" speaks volumes about the subordination of the written and the "formal" to the oral and the vernacular in the genesis of Senior's stories, and their final manifestation as works of literature, like many of Louise Bennett's poems, is marked by a spoken quality, a sense of a personality telling the story, that emerges from and vitalizes the written text. Olive Senior has herself offered the most succinct description of her fictional world. The stories of Summer Lightning, she says, focus on Ja-

Olive Senior

19

maica, the "harsh and gentle island"12 of her childhood, and emphasize the problems and perspectives of poor rural children, whereas those in Arrival of the Snake-Woman (as well as the stories in her latest collection, Discerner of Hearts) are more expansive, involving characters "of different races and classes," rich and poor, in both rural and urban settings. But all three collections are explorations of Jamaican experience and identity within a larger network of competing cultures. "I want people to know," she states, "that 'literature' can be created out of the fabric of our everyday lives, that our stories are as worth telling as those of Shakespeare—or the creators of Dallas" (Interview, 484). An awareness of that enveloping, sometimes corrosive larger culture is never very far in the background of Senior's stories precisely because the problematic relationship between the isolated, enclosed societies of the West Indies and the wider world is such a pervasive fact of Caribbean life. It is striking how insistently that wider world encroaches upon the rural and traditional in Senior's fiction. The collision occasionally occurs when an outsider appears in a rural village (as in "Arrival of the SnakeWoman") and initiates a process of change that may or may not be beneficial.13 More common is the plot involving the return of a native who has been altered in some important way by exposure to the outside world. Several times in Summer Lightning (and most recently in Discerner of Hearts) Senior employs variations on this formula. One of the most disturbing instances is "Country of the One-Eye God," which incorporates two of Senior's most persistent motifs: the intrusion of a disconcerting outside element into an isolated, rural society and the dangerous consequences that can result from the breakdown of traditional family structures. At the beginning of the story an old woman, Ma Bell, hears that the grandson she has reared from infancy—now a convicted thief, murderer, and rapist—has escaped from jail. Fearing that he intends to return home and steal the money she has been saving for her funeral, she awaits his expected arrival with mounting anxiety. It is important that she regards Jacko as the distillation of "every evil deed, evil thought, of all the generations"14 because in her mind this unique capacity for wickedness sets him apart from the rest of the family. As she tells her seventy-year-old nephew Jacob: "Nobody in this family was ever a criminal. Nobody ever a thief. And I can go back five generations to my mother Iris Jestina Howell born in 1884 the same year as Bustamante and to her mother Myrtelle Dawkin Nathan bom 1863 and fe her mother Lucilda who was born a slave and get her emancipate from Queen Victoria with the rest of the slave them 1838. And on your side of the family my lawful husband Nathaniel Jacob Sawyers and his father Isiah Sawyers and his father Lemonius Sawyers that go to Colón in 1849. All their generation. Not one is robber." (p. 18)

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This speech, with its references to emancipation, to the great waves of emigration, and to the independence movement spearheaded by Alexander Bustamante, is a veritable encapsulation of Jamaica's history, and it also unmistakably implies that the strength of a nation depends on the integrity of the families that compose it. But the family circuit has been broken, not just by Jacko but by his parents, who emigrated to the United States years before and never sent for him. Ma Bell reluctantly admits that "the world all cata-corner and moving off course" (p. 19). Senior draws the narrative to a close abruptly, with Jacko holding a gun on his grandmother, demanding her money, and mocking the "one-eye God" to whom she prays for deliverance. The terrible probability of violence lurks just beyond the last page. As Barbara Lalla puts it in a perceptive analysis, the story "conveys fragmentation of values and dissolution of communication lines in a situation where a culture has split and where its conventional and radical offshoots intersect again, tragically."15 "Ascot," the story that immediately follows in the collection, is in some ways a comic variant on "Country of the One-Eye God." In similar fashion, it begins by delivering background information on the character who has been away. The narrator's father calls Ascot" 'a livin criminal' " for having treated " 'him family like they have leprosy' " (p. 26). The narrator herself, a young woman named Lily, quickly sketches in—with broadly humorous strokes—a portrait of Ascot as a pretentious ne'erdo-well who has spent several years in the United States drifting from one job to another. Like Jacko, he has veered away from the values and mores of his rural village, but not nearly so far away. He is a "livin criminal" only to "Uncle Jackie," as he calls Lily's father, much to his annoyance. His greatest offenses are laziness, vanity, and petty theft. A s a boy he stole a bunch of bananas from Lily's father, an act for which the old man has still not forgiven him. Since boyhood he has desired nothing more than to be a "big shot," a role he conceives of in decidedly Eurocentric terms. A s Lily puts it, "But mark you, from Ascot small he used to tell me how him life ambition was to dress up in white clothes and drive a big white car" (p. 29). When Ascot finally returns to Jamaica and appears at the house of Lily and her parents, he is indeed dressed in white and driving a white rental car. He is also accompanied by an American wife who "say hello in this deep American accent" (p. 31) and who is "just finishing up her Master Degree" (p. 32). All agree that Ascot has come up in the world, but his financial and social successes have not been matched by moral growth. A t first he attempts to convince his wife that he is a member of Lily's prosperous family; when that ruse fails, he repeatedly slights and insults his mother, Miss Clemmie, and her younger, darker children. Ascot, whose features are largely Caucasian, has always thought of himself

Olive Senior

21

as belonging to the larger, white world. Maintaining that self-image necessitates distancing himself from his own mother, but Miss Clemmie, despite the humiliation, remains intensely proud of him. The other neighbors in the district are also quite impressed when they hear about Ascot, but Lily knows better: Next day it all over the district how Miss Clemmie have daughter-inlaw with Master Degree and how Ascot prosper and hire big car and staying at hotel in Kingston. But is only me one Miss Clemmie did tell how there was not a bite to eat in the house that day and Ascot never even leave her a farthing. This vex me cant done especially how he did gormandise up all Papa food. So right then and there I start tell her what kind of good-fe-nutten Ascot is. And is only afterward that I realise that Miss Clemmie not listening to a word I saying. "Dat Hascot. I did always know he wudda reach far yu know," she say almost to herself and her eyes shining like ackee seed. (pp. 34-35)

Lily's disapproval, as well as that of her outraged father, casts a cloud over Miss Clemmie's parental pride, strongly suggesting that too casual an adoption of the materialistic and racist values of the West is a high price to pay for Western prosperity. "Real Old Time T'ing" displays the contrast between traditional values and outside corruption less starkly. Like "Ascot," this story is told entirely in Jamaican English, the narrator being an unidentified member of the community. Her commentary on the action and her sardonic asides dramatically enhance the spoken quality of the tale, linking it firmly to an oral tradition that predates the short story by many centuries. The comic plot has to do with one Papa Sterling and his upwardly mobile daughter Patricia, who has married a successful Kingston lawyer, but, the narrator editorializes, "we wont go into all the ups and downs she did have in her life before that piece of luck drop into her lap" (p. 54). Although Patricia, to her credit, continues to come to the district to visit her father, she decides that he needs a new house, "for it look bad how [he] living in this old board house it dont even have sanitary convenience" (p. 54). Much of the story's considerable humor derives from Patricia's conflict with Papa Sterling's third cousin, Miss Myrtella, who has lived in England and speaks with a "foreign" accent. One of the funniest effects in the story is the narrator's effort to mimic Miss Myrtella's British English through her own Jamaican dialect. Miss Myrtella has acquired, along with her accent, a number of antiques, and when Patricia, who is intent on "finding her roots" (p. 54) by buying all the "old time ting" she can find, offers to purchase some of them, Miss Myrtella responds acidly, " 'You seem to forget that this his my ouse. Hit his not ha store you

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know.' " Patricia is so annoyed that she "grab up her handbag and flounce out of the house" (p. 62). Some time later Papa Sterling's new home is finished, and Miss Myrtella, whom Patricia did not invite to the housewarming party, shows up anyway as Papa's new bride. Patricia, whom everyone expects to explode with rage, swallows her pride and kisses her new stepmother, realizing that she now stands to inherit "all kind of old time ting" (p. 66). Patricia's acquisitiveness is a less serious offense than Ascot's egotistical pretense and crass ambition, and her greed is, after all, balanced by her generosity (albeit self-serving) to Papa Sterling. In "Ascot" people can get hurt when the modern and the traditional collide, but "Real Old Time T'ing," with its gentle mixture of old and new, urban and rural, England and Jamaica, implies that such things can and perhaps must coexist in the construction of a distinctive Creole culture. Only rarely does Senior present Western influence as an unalloyed evil, or even as a factor wholly extraneous to Caribbean experience. Although she clearly recognizes the destructive potential in headlong assimilation of Western (especially American) ways, she also implicitly acknowledges the interpénétration of the cosmopolitan and the insular as an essential element in the process of creolization. Growing up "racially and socially a child of mixed worlds, socialized unwittingly and simultaneously into both," Senior recalls that those worlds "embodied the polarizations of race and class" but "at bottom could not be separated." The process, she readily admits, leaves a substantial measure of alienation in its wake, and she speaks eloquently of the conflicts that she and other West Indians have endured: "contradictions inherent in race and class, in poverty and wealth, power and powerlessness, European values versus indigenous values rooted in Africa." Senior perceived early in life that those contradictions "were manifested in the word, in the politics inherent in the spoken word versus the written, in Jamaican creole versus the language of the Bible, Shakespeare— and the schoolroom" (Interview, 481-482). The sense of displacement that can accompany creolization as a new culture gradually, often painfully, emerges is the dramatic impetus of many of Senior's stories, and clearly her command of voice is one of her most effective means of transcending and transforming that kind of anomie. Other such strategies in Senior's fiction are concerned more with the architecture of family relationships than with language, but they, too, bear directly on the connections between power and identity and often have distinctly political implications. One of the most frequently recurring of these strategies is the imaging of childhood alienation as both a product of and a metaphor for the displacements of colonialism. Senior, who grew up with relatives, maintains that the stories told from

Olive Senior

23

a child's perspective in Summer Lightning "express some of the powerlessness, frustrations, and lack of understanding by the adult world . . . I myself felt as a child" (Interview, 484). But her tales of childhood in Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Discerner of Hearts, as well as those in Summer Lightning, are more than autobiographical. In many of these stories, children live with people who are not their natural parents (or occasionally with parents who are distant and uncaring). More often than not, as in "Summer Lightning" or "Bright Thursdays," the child's real parents are less well off financially, less educated, or less "cultivated" than the surrogate family. Frequently, too, the child or her natural mother is a dark-skinned Jamaican, whereas the adoptive family is light skinned or even white. In almost all cases authentic parents or parental figures are for some reason absent or placed at a distance from the child. The foster parents are suffocatingly present, but they embody different (more European) values and exercise a kind of authority closely associated with the schoolroom and the established church. Senior's stories are not simple allegories, however. It is far less useful to see family relationships as a disguise for colonial politics in her work than to understand both structures as analogous, and sometimes interrelated, systems of power dynamics. "The Boy Who Loved Ice Cream" is a good example of how adroitly Senior can explore the disposition of power within a family, touching lightly on political implications without resorting to the use of a rigid allegorical framework. This story differs from most of Senior's fiction in that it focuses on a child who lives with his natural parents yet still experiences a considerable degree of estrangement and helplessness. The plot is tightly woven and deceptively simple. Against a backdrop of understated tension between his father and mother, a young boy named Benjy embarks with his family on an excursion that for him will take on the aspects of a romantic quest. But like that of the boy in Joyce's "Araby," Benjy's enterprise ends in failure and disappointment as it is enveloped by the grim world of adult problems and adult oppression. The object of the quest—ice cream—is to be found at the Harvest Festival Sale, a fair held in the village of Springville, some distance from the family's rural home. Benjy has heard about this miraculous substance from his elder sister Elsa, but he has never seen any, much less tasted it. Senior makes clear at the beginning of the story that for Benjy ice cream is more than just an unfamiliar food: "The very words conveyed to him the sound of everything in his life that he had always wanted, always longed for, but could not give a name to" (p. 86). His need for ice cream, explicitly suggestive of other needs, structures his day at the Harvest Sale. Benjy's father, the one person with the power to buy him ice cream, is a stern, jealous, and somewhat insecure man

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Caribbean Passages

"firmly wedded to the soil" (p. 88) who distrusts "the town folk" with "their arrogant manners and their tough faces" hiding "a knowledge of the world he could never have" (p. 96). The boy's mother, however, mixes easily with the townspeople and is eager to "hear all the n e w s . . . happening out there in the wide world" (p. 88). These contrary impulses are delicately paralleled in Senior's sketches of two important subdivisions of Jamaican society, maroons and Anglicans, which represent the two poles between which is arranged the dynamic force field of Jamaican Creole culture. The Harvest Festival Sale brings to town "the mountain people," who are "regarded as 'dark' and mysterious" (p. 90) by the residents of Springville. These are descendants of escaped African slaves who have maintained their traditional ways in isolated communities. Contrasted to them are the Anglicans, pillars of the establishment and "the most prosperous people in the area" (p. 91). Senior subtly delineates these two segments of the population: the one group deliberately setting itself apart from colonial society; the other becoming thoroughly assimilated into the colonial power structure and cultural milieu. Between them lies the changing, evolving society of Springville and its environs, just as between the father who clings to the soil and the mother who embraces "Progress" (p. 88) stands Benjy, an impressionable child growing into an uncertain, complex future. From the beginning of the excursion to town, differences between Benjy's parents portend trouble. The father is suspicious of his wife's conversational skills, seeing her gregariousness as "common" (p. 95) and perhaps a sign of something worse. He has always kept his distance from Benjy because he suspects, completely without foundation, that the child may not be his. The boy has an artistic temperament and frequently pauses to admire "marvellous colours and shapes" (p. 87), which causes his father to regard him as "mampala" (p. 86).16 Consequently, Benjy lives "in a constant state of suspense over what his father's response to him [is] likely to be" (p. 85). The mother, too, lives in suspense, never knowing when her husband will be in one of his jealous moods. All day at the sale Benjy's anxiety about the ice cream is counterpointed by his father's equally anxious surveillance of his mother. Just before they prepare to leave, the father buys Benjy an ice cream cone, but seeing his wife talking to another man, he grabs the boy, causing him to drop the ice cream before tasting it. The ice cream, for Benjy "the one bright constant in a world full of changeable adults" (p. 86), is destroyed by that world, and with it perishes much else. "Everything... that h e . . . had always longed for" (p. 86) melts away in this sudden epiphany. Left alone and confused as his father runs angrily toward his mother, Benjy "cannot understand why the sky which a minute ago was pink and mauve just like the ice cream is now swimming in his vision like one swollen blanket of rain" (p. 99).

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The more typical plot structure in Summer Lightning is found in "Bright Thursdays," in which a young girl named Laura lives with her affluent grandparents in "a big house with heavy mahogany furniture" (p. 36). Laura is the illegitimate child of their son and a servant girl who is both poor and black. The story's pronounced preoccupation with skin color emanates from Myrtle, Laura's mother, who has tried to "improve" the girl's complexion by rubbing cocoa butter into it, and from the grandmother, Miss Christie, who is acutely embarrassed by the dark little child she has agreed to raise. Here Senior is casting into fictional form a continuing social problem about which she has spoken quite plainly elsewhere.17 Laura herself is embarrassed and alienated not only by her skin color but by the difficulty she faces in learning and remembering "the new social graces that Miss Christie had inculcated in her" (p. 52). Franklin W. Knight points out that race and color are not the "simple watertight" compartments in the Caribbean that they have been in the United States. They are instead "characteristics that blended with others to produce changeable categories."18 Or as Mark Kurlansky puts it, "Nothing in the Caribbean is ever simply a question of someone's race."19 Race is clearly an important component in the way Laura is defined by her family, but education, or at least learning "the social graces," forms part of the definition as well. When Laura's father arrives for a visit from abroad (like Ascot, with an American wife in tow), she suffers "a two-fold anxiety: not to let her mother down to Miss Christie, and not to let Miss Christie down in front of this white woman from the United States" (p. 52). But Laura's greatest desire is that her father "attend her, acknowledge her, love her" (p. 52). Instead, he first ignores her, then angrily dismisses her as "the bloody little bastard" (p. 53). With that, Laura silently declares herself "an orphan," and the clouds, which she has always associated with her fears and insecurities, seem to disappear. This conclusion is very similar to that of "Confirmation Day," in which another little girl declares her independence from a patriarchal god who sits in judgment among the clouds: "I know instinctively that not the reeds in the river not the wine nor the blood of Christ nor the Book of Common Prayer can conquer me. And not a single cloud of god in that sky" (p. 84). Senior's "Ancestral Poem" expresses the sentiment still more directly:

One day I did not pray. A gloss of sunlight through the leaves betrayed me so abstracted me from rituals.

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And discarded prayers and disproven myths confirmed me freedom.20 In both the stories and the poem, liberation from authority figures and the ideologies they embody—the deconstruction of repressive cultural and psychological codes—is a necessary prerequisite for the construction of an adult identity, whether for an individual or for a society as a whole. The plot of "Summer Lightning" turns on some of the same problems but with an added dimension of terror. The central character is a little boy living with a prosperous aunt and uncle (called impersonally "the aunt" and "the uncle") who seem cold and forbidding to him. The two characters who pay attention to him are Brother Justice, a Rastafarian farm hand, and a peculiar old friend of the uncle who is a frequent houseguest. In this haunting, Capote-like tale, the child is doubly distanced (both from his real parents, who appear to be dead, and from his parental surrogates) and is also threatened by a strange outsider. The boy, the son of the aunt's sister "who had made [a] disastrous marriage" (p. 5), comes from a lower social class than his new guardians: "In that big house with the perpetual smell of wax, the heavy mahogany furniture, the glass windows, he felt displaced" (p. 5). The two men who take some notice of the boy, Brother Justice and the houseguest, embody safety and danger in the boy's imagination. The child is too young to understand the nature of the houseguest's interest in him, but Brother Justice, who has worked on the estate all his life, remembers only too well that years before the man "used to watch h i m . . . the way he should be watching a woman" (p. 7). Now the man is back for one of his visits, and there is again, after a long interval, a young boy on the premises. Brother Justice is deeply disturbed but says nothing. The story ends, like "Country of the One-Eye God," in a state of suspended action, with the old man hovering over the boy and the boy hoping for Brother Justice to come and rescue him. The outcome is less important to the meaning of the story than the configuration of characters. The aunt and uncle, members of the wealthy establishment associated with the old colonial order, are only substitute sources of authority. They lack the legitimacy that the boy's real parents would have and which the boy now invests in Brother Justice, whose Rastafarian religion, indigenous to Jamaica, is a mark of his authenticity.21 The aunt and uncle's inappropriateness as parental figures is made abundantly clear by their attitude toward the two other adult characters in the story. The menacing old man comes from the same elite social class and is repeatedly made welcome over the years. Brother Justice, a man of

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working-class origins (his father also worked on the estate), is trusted by the boy but disliked by the aunt because, as a Rastafarian, he has "lost that respect for them which had been inculcated in men like him for centuries" (p. 6). It is not too great an interpretive stretch to see "Summer Lightning" as a parable of a society poised between an enervated, even decadent colonial order and one that derives its legitimacy and strength from the soil and the people who work on it. The boy's fate, like that of Jamaica itself, hangs in the balance. Perhaps none of the stories in Summer Lightning more powerfully expresses Senior's commitment to exploring the possibilities of a truly Caribbean discourse than "Ballad," an elegiac reminiscence of a woman who has been a positive and necessary force in the life of the narrator, a girl named Lenora. The account is a self-consciously "told" story. On occasion, Lenora even addresses her audience directly, and throughout, the language is her natural Creole speech. But more important, this telling is a substitute for the composition about Miss Rilla that Lenora has been forbidden by her teacher to write: Teacher asked me to write composition about The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Meet and I write three pages about Miss Rilla and Teacher tear it up and say that Miss Rilla not fit person to write composition about and right away I feel bad the same way I feel the day Miss Rilla go and die on me. (p. 100)

Miss Rilla, it seems, is not considered a fit subject by the guardians of polite society—at least not a fit subject for the written discourse that encodes that society's European-derived ideologies and values. It is appropriate that the battle lines are drawn in this way and that Lenora instinctively turns to the tradition of oral storytelling for her tribute, because in the process of finding that authentic voice to describe Miss Rilla, she discovers herself and her own voice as well. Senior makes clear on the first page of the story that Lenora's extended version of a ballad is to be contrasted with the sort of composition Teacher has assigned. Lenora associates the ballad with "people in the old days" (p. 100) and with the improvisational songs that her friend Blue Boy used to play, music "he did make himself and this music tall and pale and thin just like him and not like anything you ever hear over Mass Curly radio" (p. 100). The difference between the two forms of cultural expression could hardly be more stark. Lenora's ballad, no less than Blue Boy's musical compositions, is like her because she makes it herself, and it is unlike the kind of formal essay assigned by Teacher, with its extrinsically derived rules and regulations. Moreover, Blue Boy's

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melodies also counterpoint Lenora's growing awareness of sexuality as a form of self-expression that for Miss Rilla constitutes a small personal insurgency conducted against an excessively prudish, restrictive, and judgmental society. This connection becomes explicit when Lenora asks Blue Boy about his suspicious relationship wih Miss Rilla: Then he say that I not to mind is only that Miss Rilla like him to come and play some special kind of music that only she would like and when he go down there he get plenty food to eat so I not to mind. And he tell me how Miss Rilla enourage him with his music, (p. 128)

"That Blue B o y ! " Lenora exclaims at one point. " H e was my friend because he never tease me about my red head and he used to play music so sweet I would follow him anywhere" (p. 126). In telling a story whose structure mirrors only her own state of mind, Lenora follows Miss Rilla into rebellion, but she follows Blue Boy into art. Miss Rilla herself is a suitable subject for Lenora's spontaneous discourse because she, more than any of the story's other adult characters, embodies the island's folk culture. Throughout the telling of her ballad, Lenora grapples her way toward a recognition that this woman who is scorned by her family and her teacher is her true spiritual mother. Lenora lives with her father and her stepmother, MeMa, but she gets no affection or nurturing from them. Speaking of MeMa, she says, "I know that she dont love me like her own children but that Miss Rilla love me because she dont have no other children to love" (p. 102). And whereas Lenora's home life is filled with violence and abuse (as is that of practically everyone she knows), Miss Rilla and the man with whom she lives, Poppa D, are "nice to one another" (p. 118). In objective terms, the conduct of the churchgoing, "respectable" members of the community is no more exemplary than that of Miss Rilla, but she has had a number of men in her life, one of whom, years before, shot and killed another. This scandal looms in her background and fixes her forever in the community's eyes as a "bad" woman. MeMa and her neighbors "talk about the wicked thing that Miss Rilla do and how she is harlot" (p. 113). To Lenora she is something else entirely. Even very early in the story, Lenora has enough understanding of the importance of the relationship to describe her friend's death like this: " O Lord. No more laughing. No more big gold earring. No more Miss Rilla gizada 22 to cool down me temper when MeMa beat me. All the sweetness done" (p. 104); and a bit later she recalls that when Miss Rilla was not laughing "her eyes big and shiny like ackee seed only them sad sad like picture I see all the time of Mary Jesus Mother" (p. 113). The refusal of people like MeMa to look beyond the scandal and see Miss Rilla's positive qualities subtly reveals

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how thoroughly they are indoctrinated in the values of the privileged class, the values of church, school, government, and the entire colonial order. Miss Rilla displays values they find threatening: goodness, decency, generosity, and humor, all unencumbered by any trace of a strict puritanical moral code. Indeed, her conduct seems to exemplify what Michael Dash, discussing Edouard Glissant's early work, calls "a Caribbean sensibility based on a convulsive, unregimented ideal and not the symmetry and order" 23 that Glissant identifies with Europe. In "Ballad" the community's allegiance to European notions of symmetry and order manifests itself in conventional, restrictive mores transmitted through the two established institutions of school and church. At school Lenora is one of her teacher's favorites, but after Miss Rilla's death, she finds it hard to concentrate on her studies and her schoolwork suffers. MeMa beats her, telling her that the teacher likes her only because she is darker than MeMa's own children "and everybody saying how black man time come now and they all sticking together" (p. 109). She adds, "Everybody know this country going to the dog these days for is pure black people children they pushing to send high school. Anybody ever hear you can educate monkey?" (pp. 109-110). MeMa, who has earlier denounced Lenora's friend Blue Boy as "pure Coromantee 24 nigger" (p. 101), is fearful that the old order, in which light-skinned Jamaicans like herself and her children enjoyed social dominance, might be passing. Both Teacher and MeMa, in different ways, represent the establishment, although Teacher, with his more democratic notions about education, is certainly the more sympathetic of the two. What has kept Lenora going, however, has not been Teacher's encouragement but that of Miss Rilla, who wanted her to stay in school to liberate herself from the familiar cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and male domination. The established church is not attacked so directly in "Ballad" as it is in some of Senior's other stories, but Lenora does move clearly away from revealed religion as she reflects on Miss Rilla's ostracism by the society that practices it. Earlier in the story Lenora has expressed concern about Miss Rilla's fate, saying, "And sometime I not so sure that she really gone to Heaven at all since from the time I know her she never even go to church" (p. 115). But by the time she comes to the end of her journey of self-discovery, she is able to turn her back on any belief system that excludes the only real mother she has ever had. As for Miss Rilla "down there burning in hell fire," Lenora boldly asserts, "I dont believe that at all. I believe that Miss Rilla laughing so much that Saint Peter take her in just to brighten up heaven" (p. 134). Telling the story of Miss Rilla in her own words has enabled her to reject received authority in favor of a kind of wisdom found neither in church nor in Teacher's "verb and things" (p. 134).

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Lenora's ultimate vocation—to become a recorder of what BenitezRojo describes as the "dense polyphony of Caribbean society's characteristic codes"25—is suggested several times in her ballad. At one point, for instance, she recalls, "Teacher used to tell me, 'Lenora you interfere in people business too much and that is why you cant pay attention to your books. Why you have to know everything and ask question abut people business so? After you not Gleaner reporter' " (p. 129). But the reporting and chronicling of "people business" is the writer's task, no less so in the Caribbean than in any other part of the world. Senior's recuperations of West Indian cultural identity are not epic in scope, but they are nonetheless compelling and necessary. When a character like Lenora searches through her own past for an authentic reality, she speaks for many and she contributes to the formulation of a cultural discourse for the whole Caribbean that is not restrictive, demeaning, or exclusionary but expansive and alive with possibility. In many of Senior's stories that foreground a child's rebellion against repressive adult/colonial values, there is in the background a loving mother (or mother surrogate, like Miss Rilla) whose effect on the child is potentially more positive. The "true" mother in these situations is almost invariably blacker and less formally educated than the people who actually raise the children, and she often possesses a wisdom and generosity of spirit that the adoptive parents lack. Even the bewildered and spurned Miss Clemmie in "Ascot" has much to teach (if her son would only learn) about forgiveness and love. Senior has commented that "the topic of the Caribbean mother... and of our relationship to that mother" has become one of the "great literary preoccupations" of the region (Interview, 485). Senior consistently stresses the connection between the mother and a valuable, nurturing mother culture;26 the empowerment of the mother figure, subtly and hesitantly in Summer Lightning but explicitly and forcefully in Arrival of the Snake-Woman, can be seen as a virtual paradigm of decolonization.

Arrival of the Snake'Woman and

Discemer of Hearts: The Wider World The major themes of Summer Lightning—the search for personal and cultural identities, the nurturing role of the West Indian mother in Creole society, the problematic and complex relationships between traditional and modern ways—are continued and expanded in Arrival of the SnakeWoman and Discemer of Hearts, which can be seen, in large part, as extended meditations on the borders and divisions that have shaped Caribbean society and on the difficulties involved in breaching them.

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The ongoing dialectic between old and new, rural traditions and the wider world, provides both collections with their broad thematic outlines, but within that framework characters grapple with intensely personal crises, many of them ignited by the gradual erosion of historically imposed categories of class, race, education, and wealth. Not every such crisis is explicitly related to the evolution of a creolized society, but nearly all of them have to do with change, crossing boundaries, and moving into unfamiliar worlds. "The View from the Terrace" takes up the question of identity most directly, focusing as it does on the lifelong struggle of its protagonist, Mr. Barton, to associate himself with what Senior has called "the colonial superstructure" that "determined everything" (Interview, 481,482). In this story Senior also casts a considerably colder eye on the Jamaican middle class and its values than does her older contemporary John Hearne. Whereas Hearne tends to sympathize with his middle-class characters (a particularly vivid example is the courage and heroism invested in Mark Lattimer, the hero of Voices Under the Window), Senior is chillingly critical of hers when they, like Barton in this story or Nolene's husband, Philip, in "The Tenantry of Birds," fail to connect with the values of the peasantry. From early childhood Barton has longed for release "from everything that was loud, that was offensive"—qualities he attributes to his large Jamaican family. He seeks a kind of tranquillity that is essentially a nostalgic dream of an imagined England, a dream that effectively separates him from his own people: This peace which in time, unknowing, was achieved by nothing less than an alienation from the people around him—including his own family— first came to be crystallised in the poetry that Mrs King taught them in school Poems about daffodils and the downs and snow and damsels in distress, brave knights and languishing flowers and a world that somehow seemed rooted on its axis, steeped in values, in traditions that he failed to find or grasp in the real world that he inhabited.27

Barton's colonial education is consistent with that offered in the Caribbean for generations: "It was an education designed to make the students feel inferior. They learned that they were underlings, that greatness was elsewhere, in France and England and Spain. Important things were always achieved by white foreigners. Caribbeans were expected to admire men who had owned and traded their ancestors."28 The strategy works on Barton. Cultivated by teachers and "a succession of English bosses . . . who appreciated . . . his liking for things 'civilised', i.e., English" {Arrival of the Snake-Woman, hereafter SW, p. 96), he develops a distaste for black people (although he is himself darker than his first

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wife) and a deep-seated discomfort in his native country. Senior has made the point that "the exploration of race and class, that is, the subtleties of race and class, the encounter with race" is a major theme in Caribbean literature but that it is by no means limited to "battles with 'white racism' per se" (Interview, 485). This is clearly the case in "The View from the Terrace." But Barton's own racism certainly derives from his wish to be part of the white world. Nevertheless, when he does visit England, it does not, "as he imagined it would, feel like going home," and he is "acutely aware of his colour" (SW, p. 102). After the death of his first wife, he weds an "incredibly vulgar" (SW, p. 105) white Englishwoman, and that marriage ends in divorce. Barton is, moreover, estranged from all three of his children. One son has moved to Canada, married a white woman, and "lost all interest in the West Indies" (SW, pp. 98-99); the other has been cut off by his father for marrying "a coal black girl" (SW, p. 99); and Barton's daughter cannot be forgiven for having once been involved in radical politics. Even in his relations with his children, Barton is caught between identification with the islands and their African heritage on the one hand and defection to the world of Europe and North America on the other. He so prides himself on his self-sufficiency and self-control (he thinks of his life as "well-ordered") that he finds it expedient to blame his first wife for his own failings as a father, wondering "where their mother had gone wrong" (SW,p.l00). Toward the end of his life, Barton, alone except for Marcus, his longtime, trusted servant, builds a "huge house, snug and shipshape" (SW, p. 109), on a secluded hillside. He is distressed yet intrigued when a black woman with several children puts up a hut on the opposing slope, spoiling his solitary view. As the years pass, the number of children increases as if "by magic" (SW, p. 100), and thoughts of his own lost children set him wondering about this woman and her brood. His inability to accept the alien presence on "his hill" (SW, p. 90) or even to comprehend who the woman is and what she represents epitomizes the central dilemma of his own life, and shortly after being informed by Marcus that the woman's children have been fathered by several men, including Marcus himself, Mr. Barton dies, evidently of shock. However, after being washed away in a rainstorm, the woman's hut is rebuilt, and the woman returns to the hillside to continue to raise her family. That continuity, based firmly on a traditional, rural, Africanrooted culture, stands in stark contrast to Barton's isolation. The view from his terrace is a view of the future, and the image that lingers after the story ends is that of the two houses—the one filled with life (the woman's name is Miss Vie); the other, a grand but desiccated shell, awkward and out of place.

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The problem of identity looms just as large in "Zig-Zag," from Discerner of Hearts, but in this story Senior once again returns to the perspective of a child concerned about her place within both family and society. Sensitive and precocious, Sadie Chance is very much like several of the children in Summer Lightning—"a restless spirit" who finds herself forever "getting in people's way and asking questions and faasing in everything."29 She lives with her parents and her sister Muffet, with whom she is frequently and unfavorably compared. Their mother married a man of mixed race, and as the girls' Aunt Mim points out, Sadie " 'takes after the other side' " (Discerner of Hearts, hereafter D, p. 182). Muffet sports a light complexion and long, soft hair, whereas Sadie's skin is "darker than Papa's even, her h a i r . . . coarse and curly" (D, p. 182). Although the family is part of polite society, it can afford only one servant, a black woman named Desrine who has been in their employ for years. Desrine's seven children live with her parents in the country, but the oldest, Manuela, sometimes visits during summer holidays and plays with the Chance girls. Those visits stop shortly after an ugly incident in which Manuela playfully touches on Sadie's deepest insecurities by saying she has " 'bad hair' " (D, p. 211). Sadie slaps Manuela in response and is then reprimanded by Muffet, who tells her she has behaved " 'like a marketwoman' " (D, p. 213) and let Manuela drag her down. The core of the story is Sadie's ambiguous relationship both to Manuela and to her own very proper family, ambiguities that cannot be separated from the "colonial superstructure" of mid-century Jamaica. When the girls play together at a time before "a real princess ascended the throne," they establish a make-believe "Queendom of Hyacinths" (D, p. 155) in which they act out their fantasies about "high-class people" (D, p. 156). The connection between this childhood "queendom" and the real empire of England and her colonies underscores the difficulties Sadie faces in understanding where—or with whom—she really belongs. More often than not, she identifes more closely with the dark-skinned and untutored Manuela than with the prim, snobbish Muffet, who always assumes, as if by divine right, the role of Queen in their games. And although their mother likes to say that they come from " 'Somewhere . . . from Good Family' " (D, p. 156), Sadie's chronic concern is that she will, in her Aunt Mim's words, "turn down" (D, p. 181). One summer, after much pleading, Sadie persuades her mother to let her accompany Desrine home to Mount Hebron, "deep in the bush" (D, p. 163), where she meets Manuela for the first time and at once bonds with her. The two homes—the Chance family's modest but modern one and Desrine's, far away in the countryside—are variations on the houses in "The View from the Terrace," and the social distance between them is just as vast. Several times Senior describes the path up the hill to

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Desrine's home as "zig-zagging" (D, p. 168), but the phrase could just as easily characterize Sadie's uncertain stance toward the two worlds represented by Desrine's family and her own. Because they are so far apart, the trauma of feeling part of both of them is all the greater. "I am just like Manuela" (D, p. 156), she says to herself at one point, but she never succeeds in escaping the anxiety that she will somehow drop out of the "Big-People" society created and sanctioned by the colonial order and "become as invisible as the servants" (D, p. 203). Muffet's words after the scuffle with Manuela continue to ring in Sadie's ears: " 'Stay here, then, now you've found your place' "(D, p. 214). Much later, however, she has a recurring dream in which Desrine goes home, back into the bush, accompanied by her entire family, including Manuela. In the dream, Sadie longs desperately to follow them but cannot, and the question of her "place" remains unanswered. The idea of home—where it is, what it is—is never very far from the center of Olive Senior's attention. Barton's "European" house in "The View from the Terrace" is divided from Miss Vie's "Jamaican" hut by a deep ravine, and the two homes in "Zig-Zag" are separated by many miles of bush. In "The Tenantry of Birds," Senior attempts to bridge that gulf, bringing the two kinds of homes, with all their iconic associations, together. The "tenantry" of the title is a "rather bedraggled" (SW, p. 46) bird tree growing in an otherwise very formal English garden belonging to a wealthy Kingston couple. For Nolene the tree represents a small part of the lush countryside where she spent many pleasant summers as a child. It is like "something from a more primitive, less contrived location than their garden, that had wandered into the wrong place and flourished there" (SW, p. 47). For her husband, Philip, a university professor and political activist whose idea of a garden "is a showplace of straight lines, of symmetry, of everything exactly in its place" (SW, p. 47), the tree is an ugly excrescence that he would like to cut down. Nolene would prefer "a wilder, more informal kind of garden with huge spreading trees and a riot of flowers in bloom all year round looking as if they grew naturally there, like her aunt's garden in the country" (SW, pp. 47-48). She is particularly fond of watching the tenantry's "star boarde r s . . . the pecharies" drive out the "rough, uncouth, chattering and uncaring" (SW, pp. 46-47) kling-klings when they attempt to take over. This detail provides the story with its governing metaphor and Nolene with the example she later needs to take similar action of her own. As Philip becomes more involved in politics (and acquires a more politically correct, black mistress), the marriage disintegrates and Nolene is sent to Miami with their children, "for safety's sake" (SW, p. 56), as he puts it. One of the most delicate points Senior makes is that Philip, who like his wife is a light-skinned Jamaican of the privileged social class,

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does not immerse himself in island politics because of any innate sensitivity to island culture. He is part of what George Lamming calls "a new ruling group: a new breed of professional nationalist who may be heard in international councils arguing the case for a new economic order."30 His political activity is motivated more by ambition and ego than by sympathetic understanding; and his behavior toward his wife is closely akin to that of master to servant, or of colonial power to colony. The story explores several sets of oppositions—city and country, artifice and nature, the modern and the traditional—yet Senior does not reconcile them in the easiest or most obvious way, that is, by reconciling Nolene and Philip. Instead, she has Nolene return from Miami and reclaim the house. But the formal garden will have to go: "She would plant a new garden. First she would find the gardener and tell him never to touch the bird tree. It was her tree and her house and she was staying. He could move out" (SW, p. 61). To reassure herself, she recites a spell that she and her cousins used to call out deep within the Jamaican countryside (to chase away wasps), and she laughs "at the craziness of it. The power" (SW, p. 61). "Power" is the key word here, for the inner strength Nolene draws on to expel the domineering, exploitive, and faithless husband—her colonial master—and seize the house as a home for her children is explicitly linked to the folkways of rural Jamaica. The story's conclusion is strongly positive. The house, like Barton's, is a "European" structure in modern Kingston, but it will have a garden evocative of the countryside, and it will be presided over by a mother who has reached into her past and found a core of values to sustain her. Two of Senior's more recent stories, "Window" and "Discerner of Hearts," also suggest a synthesis of tradition and modernity, as well as Africa and Europe, as at least a possible future for Jamaica. In "Window," which takes place in the early part of this century, a family of impoverished whites—an invalid mother and her two daughers—share a run-down piece of property with an old retainer, Ma Lou, and her young grandson Devonshire. Since the father of the family deserted them years before, the house and the land have been allowed to fall into decay. It is Ma Lou who arranges for the sale of the few puny crops they are able to grow and who takes care of Mama and raises the sisters, Jesse and Bridget. At the beginning of the story, Jesse has been sent off to Kingston to go to school and live with her Aunt Irene, and Devonshire has just returned home after working on the Panama Canal for several years. Like "Ascot" and "Country of the One-Eye God," "Window" is a tale of return, but there is hardly any similarity between Dev and the young men in those stories. Dev returns neither to boast nor to steal, but to build. He has saved a bit of money and is ready to buy a piece of land, get married, and begin his life. Almost at once, Senior makes clear that

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Dev is drawn to Brid, who was just a child when he went away, and Brid, though too shy to show it, also likes him. Dev decides to marry Brid, buy the property, work the land, and renovate—even enlarge—the house so that they can all continue to live as "one family" (D, p. 67). When he approaches his grandmother with the idea, however, she is shocked that he would even consider marrying "white people daughter" (D, p. 67). Stunned and dejected by Ma Lou's opposition, Dev reflects that he has endured years of Jim Crow in the Canal Zone only to return to a Jamaica where "the white man reigned supreme" and black men were expected "to be born knowing their place" (D, p. 69). Dev resolves to fix up the house just enough to make it livable for Ma Lou, Bridget, and Miss Carmen, then to go away again. But as the repair work progresses, he finds it difficult to put Brid out of his mind. Every night he looks up at her window, and every night she peers at him through the protection of the shutters. The decline of Brid's family appears to portend a gradual withering away of the old colonial social order that is keeping the young people apart, but the story ends with Brid only imagining herself having the boldness to fling open the shutters. Whether the window to this house will continue to be a barrier or become a gateway to a different kind of future remains unresolved. "Discerner of Hearts," set decades later, strongly suggests that some of those shutters will inevitably be opened. Its main characters, a somewhat alienated little girl named Theresa and her older mentor, the family's servant girl, Cissy, at first appear to be no more than variations on earlier Senior protagonists, like Lenora and Miss Rilla in "Ballad" or Ish and Miss Coolie in "Arrival of the Snake-Woman." But Senior is moving into new territory in this story, not merely going over old ground. Theresa is the middle daughter of a prosperous, landowning family. Neither beautiful nor outgoing, she often feels outside the family circle and suffers from unflattering comparisons to her prettier and livelier sisters. Only Cissy ever compliments her or treats her with respect, reminding her," 'You have good-mind... better than all of them put together. You are a good girl, Theresa, for you know how to treat people like them is people' " (D, p. 12). Cissy is clearly another one of Senior's surrogate mother figures, and like some of the others, she is associated with the soil and the past of rural Jamaica. A virtual repository of folk wisdom, she knows all about charms and potions, the "Blackartman" who snatches children, and the healing ceremonies performed by Mister Burnham, the "Discerner of Hearts" who lives nearby. Cissy provides Theresa not only with the emotional support she needs to grow but also with an avenue of access to her country's traditional culture that has been denied to her by her upbringing. What distinguishes the story from similar ones in Senior's canon is that over the course of time Theresa also becomes a men-

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tor to Cissy, so that the learning and growing process moves in both directions at once. By the end, each character has taken a small but significant step into the other's world. As the story opens, Theresa literally crosses several boundaries: the threshold of her house, the main road, and, most important, the gate in the bamboo fence surrounding Mister Burnham's mysterious yard. The event that has drawn Theresa out of her shyness and precipitated her odyssey is Cissy's pregnancy. Cissy has earlier obtained a charm from Mister Burnham to attract the attention of a young man named Fonso, but because he already has three children by his girlfriend Ermine and is known to everyone in the area as a " 'ram goat' " (D, p. 14), she conceals his identity from Burnham. During the course of her pregnancy Cissy becomes convinced that Ermine has cast an obeah spell on her. She thinks her baby is doomed and that she will live out her life a barren "mule" (D, p. 11). The family doctor examines her and finds nothing wrong, but her state of mind continues to deteriorate. Not even Mister Burnham can help her, she tells Theresa; the magic of obeah is too strong. It is at this point that Theresa—more clearly emboldened than Brid in "Window"—decides to take matters into her own hands. Leaving the security and modernity of her family's house, she crosses the big road, makes her way to Burnham's yard, opens the gate, and enters a strange building filled with candles, crosses, odd pictures, and indecipherable symbols. Theresa is afraid that Burnham might be an obeahman or even the dreaded Blackartman, but when he appears, he treats her with great kindness, telling her," 'You are going to grow up to be a fine lady, for you have a big, big heart. But you must stop feeling bad bout yuself' " (D, p. 25). As for Cissy, he says that he can help her only if she comes to him in person. To accomplish that end, Theresa returns home and makes up a series of richly detailed accounts of her visit, attributing words to Mister Burnham that he never said. She has no idea how she has acquired the ability to tell such stories, but they eventually work a kind of magic on Cissy, prompting her to reexamine her own motives and values and take responsibility for her actions. By the time she goes to Mister Burnham for a "cure," Cissy is, without realizing it, well on the way to curing herself. In the end she resolves to give up Fonso and raise her child in a way that will prepare him for a changing world: "Theresa would be his godmother and would have to teach him his ABC as soon as he was old enough, before he went to school" (D, p. 36). Theresa suddenly loses her shyness and takes her place as an assertive and respected member of the family. Although it is true that both characters have drawn strength from Mister Burnham and the folk culture he epitomizes, it is also obvious that in this story histori-

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cally privileged and historically oppressed elements of society strengthen and invigorate each other. Even more forcefully than "The Tenantry of Birds," "Discerner of Hearts" is a parable of barriers broken through and gulfs bridged. Much less positive is Senior's treatment of a similar theme in "The Two Grandmothers." This story sets forth the town/country, modernity/tradition dichotomy more baldly, and no reconciliation between the opposing elements appears possible. The entire story is told in a series of speeches by a girl to her mother. In the first few sections she waxes enthusiastic about her Grandma Del (her dark-skinned father's mother), who lives in the country among simple people. Grandma Del, who has no television, tells the girl "lovely stories . . . straight from her head" (SW, p. 64) each night. These scenes recall some of the events from Nolene's summers in the country with her aunt's family, in "The Tenantry of Birds." As the narrator grows older, however, she refers more and more to her maternal grandmother. This woman, who asks to be called "Towser" instead of "Grandma," lives in the city, wears makeup, has had several husbands, and refers to Grandma Del as " 'a country bumpkin' " (SW, p. 65). She is also a racist. The narrator tells her mother, "Joyce says Grandma is sorry I came out dark because she is almost a white lady and I am really dark" (SW, p. 67). In this as in other respects, Towser is akin to Nolene's mother, who warns her daughter to avoid black people, threatens to end her annual visits to the countryside, and finally gets away from Jamaica altogether by moving to a condominium in Miami. These two women also share with Barton in "The View from the Terrace" a neurotic distaste for their own culture and an infatuation with that of the former colonial powers. Sadly, unlike Nolene, the girl in "The Two Grandmothers" chooses the path that leads her away from her own society. The story chronicles a gradual shift in her sympathies as she is increasingly seduced by the attitudes and lifestyle of the wealthy and sophisticated Towser. Trips to the country become "so boring," partly because "there's nobody but black people where Grandma lives and they don't know anything" (SW, p. 72). By the end of the story, the girl agrees to visit Grandma Del only briefly, and the last sentence confirms that her conversion is stunningly complete: "We can leave there right after lunch so we will be back home in time to watch Dallas" (SW, p. 75).31 Two brief companion pieces in Arrival of the Snake-Woman look back to Summer Lightning, but they also indirectly provide a bridge to the complex, guardedly affirmative conclusions offered by Senior in two or three of her longer and more ambitious stories. On the surface, both "Tears of the Sea" and "See the Tiki-Tiki Scatter" resemble Senior's earlier por-

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traits of lonely children. The little girl in "Tears of the Sea," who lives with her grandparents, is fixated on the idea of seeing the ocean. Although the family lives just a few miles inland, she has never been to the beach, an activity her grandmother regards as fit only for tourists. When the girl finds some shells in a pile of sand brought from the seashore, she imagines that she can talk to them: "She became a general and they her a r m y . . . a mother and they her numerous children" (SW, p. 77). One shell is her particular friend, but it sometimes speaks to her very bluntly: " 'My mother is the sea, my father is the sky. Where are your mother and father?' " (SW, p. 79). The girl is hurt but has to admit the truth of the shell's words: "She really was very lonely and had no one to play with" (SW, p. 79). Finally the shell, "wanting to make amends" (SW, p. 79), offers to take her to the shore. But the girl falls ill with rheumatic fever, and when she recovers, the sandpiles and the shells are gone. She is alone once more. As the story ends, she feels "a great wave . . . tumbling over the mountains from the sea" (SW, p. 82). "See the Tiki-Tiki Scatter" recapitulates many of these same elements. A little girl with no friends lives with her grandparents. Instead of a sandpile evocative of the sea, she is preoccupied with a small pond on the estate. At the pond she, too, finds imaginary playmates. She is the "ruler" of her "subjects": three turtles and thousands of tiny fish (tikitiki) that scatter when anything drops into the pond. Each afternoon the girl visits the pond, singing and dancing for her subjects and looking at her reflection in the water. She feels increasingly "pulled" by "the face that looked like hers" (SW, p. 88) in the water. At the end, she ponders how much fun it would be to plunge into the water and join the tiki-tiki, her friends, on "the other side" (SW, p. 89). In both stories a lonely child's vivid imagination serves as a vehicle for escape, and both little girls—sequestered and out of place—seek in their imaginary realms the love and companionship that they seem to lack in the real world. The ultimate price of that search for love, however, may well be death, as the conclusion of each of these tales clearly suggests. Two stories in Summer Lightning also foreground the potency as well as the limitations of a child's imagination. In "Love Orange," a girl's imaginative powers are sufficient to help her understand her great capacity for love but are insufficient to communicate those feelings to adults in a way that will change her life. And the boy in "Summer Lightning" staves off loneliness by exploring the "many secret places inside him" (p. 2). Whether the forces of his enchanted, secret world can protect him from the evils of reality is left an open question in the end; but the fact that he conceives of Brother Justice as an inhabitant of both worlds—the external, adult one and the interior one of his imagination—hints that a creative link between the two might be possible. What

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these four tales have in common is the idea that childhood imagination is infused with magic; but only in Senior's stories of children who grow into adulthood (most notably, "Lily, Lily," "Arrival of the SnakeWoman," and implicitly in "Discerner of Hearts") does she reveal how powerful that magic can be when coupled with knowledge and cast into articulate speech. "Lily, Lily" is an interlocking web of familiar Senior paradigms, with particular emphasis on the empowered mother as a source of both strength and liberation. One Lily of the story's title is a little girl born out of wedlock and brought up by prosperous relatives, the DaSilvas, who raise her as their own child after she is given up by her mother, Mrs. DaSilva's cousin Lily. In the course of time, young Lily, sexually abused by her "father," flees to the home of her "Aunt Lily." As in several other Senior stories, a child finds herself in a foster home, under an authority that misuses its power, and without the ability to free herself easily or claim her real heritage. Child abuse, only lightly touched on in "Summer Lightning," is Senior's harshest model of the corruption that can accompany power. In a section of the story told from young Lily's point of view, the political implications of this sad situation become apparent. The segment begins with Lily's graphic visualization of her adoptive father: And always now the nightmare of his hands ugly and thickly covered with matted hair like some wild beast his hands holding the reins his hands at table carving the roast his hands holding the prayer book in church his hands unbuttoning... trembling... touching. (SW, p. 121)

This passage cleverly juxtaposes "the prayer book" and the "unbuttoning," stressing not only Mr. DaSilva's hypocrisy but also his membership in a power structure that extends well beyond his own family. In the same part of the story, Lily reveals why her "aunt" is such a threat to this patriarchal arrangement. She supports herself by running the local post office and even operates the telegraph there. She is what Mr. DaSilva calls "scornfully . . . an 'Independent Woman' " (SW, p. 122). When Lily finally comes under the protection of her natural mother, she is liberated not just from the danger of physical abuse but also from the restrictions placed upon women by the society of that day. Lily agrees to send her daughter back to the DaSilvas only on condition that the girl be allowed to go to St. Catherine's, a school formerly restricted to whites, so that she may "get out of that house" and, just as significantly, reap the full benefits of "the very process of change that is sweeping the world" (SW, p. 141). The elder Lily has quietly grown in learning, sophistication, and ambition during the years since her daughter was

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born. As the story closes, she is preparing to leave Jamaica temporarily for Panama to "seize the opportunities opening up elsewhere" and learn "new ways of seeing, of doing" (SW, pp. 141,142). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jamaicans went abroad, particularly to work on the railroad in Costa Rica and, like Devonshire in "Window," on the Panama Canal. This is an aspect of the Jamaican diaspora that fascinates Senior, as is evident in her poem "Searching for Grandfather":

I In Colon I searched for my grandfather without connection. Not even the message of his name in the phone book. II Along the Line I found my grandfather disconnected at Culebra. Hacking the Cut he coughed his brains loose and shook

(but it was only malaria). You're lucky they said as they shipped him home on the deck of the steamer, his mind fractured but his fortune intact: Twenty-eight dollars and two cents. Silver. Ill What he had learnt to do really well in Colon was wash corpses. At home the village was too poor to patronise. He was the one that died.

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His sisters laid him out in a freshly-made coffin and cried: there was nothing left of the Silver Roll to weigh down his eyes for although his life has been lacking in baggage, they didn't want him to see that on this voyage out he still travelled steerage.32 Obviously, emigration and employment opportunities abroad did not lead to a bountiful future for everyone, or even for most of those who left with such high hopes. But in "Lily, Lily," such interaction with the wider world promises to be a strengthening, constructive experience rather than the morally, physically, and culturally debilitating one it is for some of Senior's other characters. Lily is, in a sense, an embodiment of an important phase in modern West Indian history. As Rhonda Cobham explains it, "Most of the Panama immigrants... returned to the West Indies after their jobs in the Canal Zone were completed. Their influence on West Indian society was far-reaching In Barbados and elsewhere 'Panama money' was used to educate a new generation of working-class children."33 Lily is intent on riding the crest of this new spirit of constructive change and widening opportunity and passing that spirit on to her daughter as her legacy. The multiple narrative perspective of "Lily, Lily" distinguishes it from Senior's earlier fiction. Emmeline Greenfield, a local gossip, begins the tale in a long monologue spoken to a visiting friend. This section provides background information from a member of the community whose knowledge is as partial as her prejudice is whole. Other segments of the story are relayed through an omniscient narrator, the consciousness of young Lily, the voice of Mrs. DaSilva, and, most important, a letter from the elder Lily to the DaSilvas.The general effect of this plurality of viewpoint is a decentering of authority. If the community does not speak with collective univocal harmony, neither is it dominated any longer by the discourse of a single powerful member or group. Emmeline and Mrs. DaSilva speak as competing representatives of the local power structure, but their credibility is undermined by the perspectives of the two Lilys. It is in the elder Lily's letter, moreover, that Senior scores her most potent political points. If Emmeline Greenfield's and Lucy DaSilva's accounts are "official" versions of the events that take place (the versions authorized by a community that places social status above all else), Lily's letter is the impassioned, personal version—and the true one.

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"My childhood," Senior has explained, "imbued me with a sense of the drama, magic and mystery inherent in all human transactions"; later in the same interview, she remarks that "writing, literature, is inextricably fused with magic" (Interview, 481,484). This cluster of associations is telling: childhood, magic, writing. Magic is the key link between childhood wonder and the transformational powers of the artist; the vagaries of childhood imagination can grow into disciplined imaginative strength only if the individual making the crossing into the strange country of adulthood holds tightly onto the magic. When that does occur—and it is the very genesis of artistic vision—a child's ability to fantasize can become an adult's ability to change the world. This is the point at which "Lily, Lily" interfaces with the tales of imaginative, haunted children. Lily is such a child grown up (another reason for the story's double title), her childhood imagination intact, enhanced by knowledge and channeled into language. Nowhere in Senior's fiction is the power of discourse to alter reality more vividly enacted than in Lily's letter to the DaSilvas. The letter, openly didactic, frequently strident, always polemical, is a rhetorical trumpet blast that brings the DaSilvas to their knees. Declaring that she will make the decisions concerning Lily's future (and expose Mr. DaSilva's crimes if he or his wife should oppose her), she criticizes the limitations imposed on women by society; she denounces "male betrayal" (SW, p. 139) as well as the "things called 'status', 'power', 'respectability' " (SW, p. 139); and she heaps scorn on "the people who rule" Jamaica, "the Governor and the clique surrounding him at Kings House" (SW, p. 141)—all male figures, of course, and all, in the early years of this century, English. Hie corrupt patriarchal family structure that Lily undermines when she forces the DaSilvas to obey her wishes is as much a product of the colonial sociopolitical system as a microcosmic model of it. The way to liberation from this kind of oppression is exhibited by Lily both through the example of her conduct and through her warning to Mrs. DaSilva to place her responsibilities as a mother above those "as a wife and social arbiter" (SW, p. 143). The intrinsic powers of motherhood in this story extend far beyond protection, however, or even nurturing. Lily's gift to her daughter—and to herself—has to do also with intellectual and moral growth, the freedom to be a whole person, and the means to define and shape one's own future. The ideas explicitly articulated by Lily in her letter—ideas about growth, freedom, and a new society—are woven so delicately into the fabric of "Arrival of the Snake-Woman" that their presence is hardly detectable, but this novella is nonetheless Senior's most eloquent rumination on the birth of modern Jamaica out of the island's exposure, for better or worse, to the wider world. It is also the point at which Olive Senior's vision most closely approximates that of Earl Lovelace, the

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Caribbean's great poet of things passing away. The story is actually told, or rather written down, shortly after the turn of the century, but most of it takes place in "the old days" (SW, p. 45), when the narrator, a physician, was a small boy growing up in an isolated rural community. The plot hinges on the coming of an Indian woman, Miss Coolie, to the village, her initial ostracism by most of its inhabitants, and her profoundly constructive effect on them over the years. When Miss Coolie first arrives, she is shunned by the people of Mount Rose largely because she refuses to be baptized in Parson Bedlow's church, causing the parson to brand her a "Whore of Babylon" (SW, p. 10). She is gradually accepted by most of the villagers, however, and in time she does join the church so that her young son Biya can attend Parson Bedlow's school. Later she opens a small shop in her house, expands it as business grows, and becomes "the most prosperous citizen in the district" (SW, pp. 42-43), eventually even living "at Top House where the old time white people, then Parson Bedlow, used to live" (SW, p. 43). More than a quietly satisfying Horatio Alger story, "Arrival of the Snake-Woman" is a moving exploration of cultural convergence in which a shift in power relations among people of African, European, and Indian ancestry signals the emergence of a modern creole society. The story opens in a time when slavery is still a living memory—at least to Papa Dias, the oldest man in the community, and Mother Miracle, whose father "was one of the old masters" (SW, p. 16). These elderly figures are the bearers of an African tradition that many years after emancipation34 still holds sway in rural areas like Mount Rose. Papa Dias, who is also of mixed African and European ancestry, is "a man of knowledge" who can do "workings" and "divine fate from throwing bisi the way his old Oyo 35 grandfather had taught him," and some say he can "summon Shango god of thunder" (SW, pp. 15, 16). Mother Miracle's magic is more mundane. She conducts services in her yard, "reading" people's illnesses and treating them with bush medicine and "holy water" (SW, p. 19). Until the parson and his wife, Miss Rita, arrive, Papa Dias and Mother Miracle are "the real rulers, in charge of everything that happened in Mount Rose" (SW, p. 16). For a while, the old people's "line of business" (SW, p. 19) suffers, but eventually many of the villagers find themselves following "two parallel ways of life" just as they had in slavery days. The villagers at Mount Rose cast their lot with Parson Bedlow, whom they correctly perceive as holding the keys to their future, but at the same time that they "attend service and fawn over Parson and his wife" (SW, p. 23), they discreetly visit Papa Dias and Mother Miracle. The fact that they do so in secret derives not from shame but merely from a sense of pragmatism. They know how to stay in the Parson's good graces while adhering to their traditional customs and beliefs.

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This sort of religious eclecticism is common in the Caribbean.36 But even though obeah and other forms of belief with African origins are found throughout the region (quite frequently among people who are also members of various Christian denominations), they are still regarded by many—especially the upwardly mobile—as socially unacceptable vestiges of a "backward" past. The survival of this prejudice can be attributed largely to the colonial system itself, which felt threatened by any manifestation of ties to Africa on the part of slaves and, later, free blacks. Consequently, it is not unusual to find in West Indian fiction characters who are suspicious or scornful of the kind of magic performed by Mother Miracle and Papa Dias. Beka Lamb's mother speaks disparagingly of obeah, for example, because she associates it with customs that have given the white power structure an excuse to keep her people in a subservient position. And in Roger Mais's Brother Man, Jesmina is horrified to learn that her disturbed sister Cordelia has been consulting the villainous obeah man, Bra' Ambo. Senior explores this issue with great sensitivity. Parson Bedlow and Miss Rita are the first people to come back into the district since "the old-time" whites "died off or moved away" (SW, p. 12) after slavery ended. The arrival of these new authority figures is announced, amusingly, through a bit of pre-Columbian technology—a man blowing on a conch shell. What Parson Bedlow represents, with his fireand-brimstone fundamentalism, is nothing less than the establishment of a neocolonial power structure. The villagers are surprised that the parson has not come to take their land, but the hegemony he intends to impose is more insidious and more thorough. The first words of "this strange white man" are," 'My children, Let Us Pray' " (SW, p. 14), and he immediately proceeds to gather the people into the protective custody of the ultimate patriarchal authority, with himself, installed at Top House, as chief deputy and warden. Gradually, the parson's "preaching about devils and idolaters and false prophets and miracle workers" (SW, p. 20) has its desired effect, and the influence of Papa Dias and Mother Miracle wanes. But what really binds the people to Parson Bedlow and Miss Rita is "the book-learning" that they pass on "to the children in the little schoolhouse which they built," because no one wants to give up "the magic . . . contained in black and white squiggles on paper" (SW, p. 23). As Senior makes clear in "Lily, Lily," this kind of magic, when joined with knowledge, can transform the world. It is important to note that Papa Dias, too, knows "how to write things down in a book" (SW, p. 15), and this, along with his Oyo learning, has been a major source of his influence. Senior herself, speaking of her childhood, has called "knowledge as embodied in the w o r d . . . a key to personal affirmation and power" (Interview, 480). Throughout the story, this emphasis on writing and the role of the writer in asserting such power is a subtle but insistent subtext.

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Ironically, the knowledge that provides Bedlow with his hold over the villagers in the short term may ultimately provide them with the means to define themselves and create their own society. The attitude of Ishmael, the narrator, toward Miss Coolie is crucial to the development of the story. From the beginning, when his cousin SonSon brings the "Snake-Woman" to the district as his wife, Ishmael stands in awe of her. Because he has already learned "all about India and the Ganges and the Heathen" (SW, p. 3) in Parson Bedlow's school, Ishmael sees her as a romantic figure, evocative of a world far beyond his own remote village. He strikes up a friendship with her (greatly displeasing his mother, who is afraid of alienating the parson), remains loyal to her all his life, and even marries one of her daughters. When Miss Coolie becomes "the chief demon in Parson Bedlow's pantheon" (SW, p. 10), Ishmael refuses to turn against her, and she, in turn, provides him with a motivation for remaining healthily skeptical of the parson. Matters come to a head for Ish when young Biya becomes seriously ill, and Parson Bedlow, who administers modern medicines to the community, will not treat him. Miss Coolie has to take the child by donkey to the nearest hospital, a "day and night journey for a man and so lonely no one ever went alone" (SW, p. 30). Biya survives, but the event leaves Ishmael unable "to reconcile Parson's preaching about charity and love and the ministry of Jesus . . . with his behavior to Miss Coolie and Biya" (SW, p. 32). He vows to reject the parson, "his life, his world, his book learning" (SW, p. 32). In the end, Ishmael does not reject everything that the parson represents, but it is Miss Coolie (like the beloved Miss Rilla in "Ballad") who insists that he go back to school and become a doctor. Miss Coolie's eventual baptism, far from signaling her defeat by Parson Bedlow, marks her emergence as a free person, the stage when she begins "to control her own destiny" (SW, p. 39). As Ishmael puts it, "It was as if she herself had decided to accept totally the life into which she had been thrust, to become fully a part of the district, to cast off the mantle of outsider and outcast" (SW, p. 39). But her conversion is ambivalent. Later in life, when she is prosperous and her children are grown, she reverts to wearing saris and bangles. By this time Parson Bedlow is long gone, and Miss Coolie is the matriarch of the community, free to be both Jamaican and Indian. A similar ambivalence colors Ishmael's thoughts as he brings his story to a close. He realizes that Miss Coolie brought to Mount Rose "an understanding of the world that the rest of us lacked, a pragmatic drive that allowed her to dispassionately weigh alternatives, make her decisions and act" (SW, pp. 43-44). Freed from her own past, she acquired a "flexibility" that enabled her to transform herself from a passive outsider to a shaping force within the community. But, as always in Senior's fiction, such flexibility has its negative side. Miss Coolie cer-

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tainly could not have acquired it had she not (for whatever reason) severed ties to her own people and come to Mount Rose. Her ability to weigh alternatives and act is a direct result of her own cultural displacement and would have been unthinkable had she remained in the Indian community. This appears to be the lesson of creolization in "Arrival of the Snake-Woman": that some things must be broken for other things to be made. "Miss Coolie," Ishmael reluctantly concludes, "is our embodiment of the spirit of the new age, an age in which sentiment has been replaced by pragmatism and superstition by materialism" (SW, p. 44). Ish, himself an outcast like his Biblical namesake, lives in the city so that his own children "will not have to go through the pains of adjustment" (SW, p. 42) that he did when he first left Mount Rose, but he returns home occasionally to visit Miss Coolie and her family, which, through his marriage, has become his own. When he does return, he admits to himself that he still feels "halfway between the old world . . . and the new, unable to shake off the old strictures . . . not feeling, like Miss Coolie, at ease enough to shift fully into the relentless present" (SW, pp. 44-45). The main character in a later Senior story, "The Chocho Vine," reflects, "Something strange was happening in the whole country these days.... changes were everywhere, all was topsy-turvy and confusion, it would stir up your brain to take it all in" (D, pp. 147-148). For Ishmael, who is coping with such confusion and living in a world increasingly removed from Oyo grandfathers and bush medicines, telling his story is a way to establish and comprehend who he is. "And this," he reflects, "is why I sometimes sit and write down the things that happened in the old days, so that my children will be able to see clearly where we are coming from, should they ever need signposts" (SW, p. 45). "Arrival of the Snake-Woman" takes place in the later years of the nineteenth century, when rural Jamaica's exposure to a wider world was just beginning. Today the age of colonialism is over, but the "new center-periphery system" is a reality. It would be naive to think that the process of cultural convergence will stop (after all, what culture is not in some sense "creole"?),37 but it would be needlessly cynical to assume that the process must end in the obliteration or absorption of one culture by another. That is why the problem of voice is so important and the role of the writer so essential. Like the Caribbean mother in Senior's stories, the writer must both nurture and liberate. If Ishmael's story is a "signpost," pointing the way not just forward to a complex future but also back to the wisdom of the ancestors and the sound of the conch, so is Olive Senior's fiction. As she herself has put it, "I want to reaffirm those parts of our heritage that have been misplaced, misappropriated, subsumed, submerged, never acknowledged fully as the source of our strength" (Interview, 484).

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Notes 1. Wlad Godzich, Foreword to Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), vii-xxi. 2. Olive Senior, interview with Charles H. Rowell, Callaloo 11.3 (1988): 487. Subsequently cited as Interview. 3. It should be pointed out that standard English as spoken in Jamaica differs somewhat from that spoken in Britain (even though the two are mutually intelligible), just as there are differences among standard American, British, and Australian speech. 4. Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Heinemann), 99-100. 5. Samuel Selvon, "Samuel Selvon Talking: A Conversation with Kenneth Ramchand," Canadian Literature 95 (1982): 56-64. 6. Kenneth Ramchand, "West Indian Literary History," Callaloo 11.1 (1988): 105. 7. Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 2. 8. Ramchand, The West Indian Novel, 9. 9. Wilson Harris, "The Unresolved Constitution," Caribbean Quarterly 14.1&2 (1968): 45. The publication of A Way in the World, however, convincingly demonstrates that Naipaul's work, both technically and ideologically, is still very much "in progress." 10. Gikandi, Writing in Limbo, 9-10. 11. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, "The Love Axe (1): Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic 1962-1974," in Houston A. Baker, Jr., Reading Black: Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean, and Black American Literature (Ithaca, NY: Africana Studies and Research Center of Cornell University, 1976), 32. 12. Olive Senior, "Hill Country," in Talking of Trees (Kingston: Calabash, 1985), 17. 13. A prototypical example of this plot is found in Earl Lovelace's The Schoolmaster, where "progress" associated with education or knowledge is presented in Miltonic terms as corruption. 14. Olive Senior, Summer Lightning and Other Stories (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1986), 16. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 15. The story, Lalla argues, "is a study in marronage because it is a tale of leaving and being left and consequently of the cold logic behind seemingly irrational violence" (p. 104). See Barbara Lalla, Defining Jamaican Fiction: Marronage and the Discourse of Survival (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 104-115. 16. Effeminate. 17. See especially Olive Senior, Working Miracles: Women's Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 18. Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 309. 19. Mark Kurlansky, A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992), 41. 20. Pamela Mordecai and Mervyn Morris, eds., Jamaica Woman: An Anthology of Poems (London: Heinemann, 1980), 78. Velma Pollard makes several perceptive observations on Senior's criticism of received authority in "An Introduction to the Poetry and Fiction of Olive Senior," Callaloo 11.3 (1988): 540-546.

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21. Senior's use of Brother Justice as a moral and emotional compass in the boy's life appears to owe much to Roger Mais's sympathetic portrait of a Rastafarian character in his second novel, Brother Man (1954). 22. A coconut tart. 23. Michael Dash, Introduction to Edouard Glissant, The Ripening, trans. Michael Dash (London: Heinemann, 1985), 3. 24. "The place of origin of many of the slaves brought to Jamaica in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.... in Jamaica, those who escaped and joined the Maroons came to dominate them and gained a reputation for fierceness." See F. G. Cassidy and R. B. LePage, eds., Dictionary of Jamaican English (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967). The Coromantee territory was located in present-day Ghana. 25. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James E. Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 189. 26. Another talented Jamaican writer who makes similar connections is Michelle Cliff. In both Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven (which chronicle different stages in the life of the same fictional family), the mother identifies with the African and rural side of her Jamaican heritage, whereas her husband, whose complexion is lighter, prefers the city and considers himself white. 27. Olive Senior, Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1989), 96. Subsequent page references are to this edition, designated "SW." 28. Kurlansky, A Continent of Islands, 15. 29. Olive Senior, Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 155. Subsequent page references are to this edition, designated "D." 30. George Lamming, Introduction to In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), xvi. 31. The juxtaposing and contrasting of two opposing sets of values in this story appear to owe at least a conceptual debt to Merle Hodge's novel Crick Crack Monkey, in which the protagonist, also a young girl, is alternately influenced by her two aunts, one down to earth and relatively poor, the other affluent, worldly, and upwardly mobile. 32. Mordecai and Morris, Jamaica Woman, 75-76. 33. Rhonda Cobham, "The Background," in Bruce King, ed., West Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1979), 14. 34. The abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire took full effect in 1838. 35. The Oyo state, located in present-day Nigeria, was a powerful kingdom during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 36. Kurlansky, A Continent of Islands, 73. 37. "No people," as Glissant puts it, "has been spared the cross-cultural process." See Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 140.

Zee Edgell

3 Zee Edgell

The Belize Chronicles

The long horn of a higgler's voice painting the shadows midday brown, cries about harvest, and the wind calls back blue air across the town; it tears the thin topographies of dream, it blows me as by old familiar maps, to this affectionate shore, Dennis Scott, "Homecoming," from Uncle Time

The mind, among sea-wrack, sees its mythopoeic coast, Seeks, like the polyp, to take root in itself. Derek Walcott, "Origins," from Collected Poems, 1948-1984

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Beka Lamb: A Lesson in History Belize is the second youngest sovereign nation in the Western Hemisphere, and with a population not much exceeding 200,000, it is also one of the smallest. Perhaps for these reasons, it has not yet seen the emergence of a significant body of literature, even though the country's ethnic and cultural diversity equals or surpasses Trinidad's. But as Nigel Bolland observes, the climate is right for just such a development. As in other parts of the Anglophone Caribbean, the local English creole has been the means of expression through which proverbs, sayings, and folktales conveyed African values and wisdom and often satirized the British elite. In "bruckdowns," a calypso-like composition, words are joined with music to tell a story, relate a local incident, or mock a prominent personality, and the singer-poets are praised for their wit and daring.

Bolland goes on to say that Belizean nationalism (a phenomenon of comparatively recent vintage but rapidly growing influence) "is prompting artists and educators to revalue their own folk arts, wherein the creative and resistant strains have long survived."1 Zee Edgell is the first fiction writer from Belize to attract widespread attention, and all three of her novels chronicle the history and everyday life of that country.2 Edgell's first novel, Beka Lamb (which shared the Fawcett Society Book Prize in 1982), is, appropriately, a narrative of self-discovery in which concepts of personal and national identity are tightly interwoven with the main character's increasing awareness of the folk culture to which Bolland refers. Like Olive Senior, Caryl Phillips, and a number of other third wave West Indian writers, Edgell has made fiction a vehicle for the retrieval of subsumed and submerged elements of Caribbean consciousness. In Beka Lamb, the growth of a child into adulthood closely parallels the movement of an ethnically divided, backwater colony toward independent nationhood. Underlying and vitalizing both stories—that of the child and that of the colony—is an extended meditation on the relationship between the past ("befo' time," in the words of Beka's grandmother) and a rapidly changing present. The novel is narrated largely within a long flashback and recounts several months in the life of fourteen-year-old Beka, who lives with her parents, grandmother, and two younger brothers in Belize City in the early 1950s, a period roughly coinciding with Edgell's own youth in what was then British Honduras. As the book opens, Beka, previously a poor student, has just won an essay contest at her school and is once more in the good graces of her family. The impetus for the leisurely reminiscence that forms the bulk of the novel is the

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death of her friend Toycie. Beka decides to "try to remember everything that had happened to her from April past, when she had failed first form, until today,"3 as a memorial to Toycie, whose aunt, Miss Eila, could not afford the expense of a wake. The plot counterpoints the essentially tragic movement of Toycie's final months with Beka's difficult but successful metamorphosis into a person respected by her teachers and her parents. One of the most distinctive features of Beka Lamb is its richness of historical and cultural detail. The book is filled with graphic descriptions of Belize City and its inhabitants, as well as many conversations about the manners, customs, cuisines, ethnic groups, political characteristics, and geography of British Honduras. There are obvious dangers inherent in the inclusion of so large an amount of factual material in a work of fiction. But in the case of Beka Lamb, the story of the emergence of Belize as a nation is thoroughly integrated with the story of Beka's emergence into adulthood.4 Because Beka's grandmother, Miss Ivy, her mother, Lilla, and their friend Miss Eila are actively involved in the political movement that would eventually lead to independence, the discussions of these matters occur naturally within Beka's circle; they are as much a part of her instruction as are her classes at St. Cecilia's Academy, the Catholic girls' school she attends. The novel's greatest aesthetic strength is, in fact, the way in which all these features cohere. Toycie's life and death are both the pretext for the telling of the story and its ostensible subject. It is literally pre-text, for it must occur before the recollection of it that is the novel's core. And it is only the ostensible subject because the novel's real subject is Beka's growth from a headstrong girl who failed first form (and lied about it) into the student who wins an essay contest. Moreover, the reminiscence is explicitly presented as a substitution for a wake, which itself is a ceremonial structure that recuperates and transmits elements of a culture. The topic of Beka's essay—the coming of the Sisters of Charity to British Honduras—is an embryonic form of the matter of the whole novel: the process of cultural convergence (or creolization), recorded through Beka's recollections, that gradually results in the emergence of a new society. Beka's own development within competing fields of influence generates the novel's dramatic movement, but that development depends upon her relationship to other characters and the crises they face. Chief among these is Toycie, whose unplanned pregnancy, expulsion from St. Cecilia's, and subsequent mental breakdown increase Beka's sense of anxiety at an already difficult time in her life and make her aware that she herself has had certain advantages that Toycie lacked. Toycie's problems also bridge the two main venues of the novel—school and home— where the major personal and cultural influences in Beka's world reside.

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Like many other works of Caribbean fiction, Beka Lamb is a parable of power relations, and it explores (like Olive Senior's works) personal and family relationships as paradigms for political structures. The connection to Senior is especially illuminating because Edgell, unlike Senior, presents a functional, whole family whose condition both epitomizes and contributes to the birth of the Belizean nation as a kind of larger family. The school is, for Beka, the most visible sign of the world beyond Belize—the world of colonial and neocolonial nations and their powerful, pervasive culture. Although a few of the teachers at St. Cecilia's are native Belizeans (like Miss Benguche, a black Carib who tells Beka and her classmates about the history of her people's presence in the country), most are foreign. More important, the curriculum is emphatically Anglocentric. What children learned in school during the colonial period bore little relation to the lives most of them led outside the classroom. "There was nothing of our landscape there / Nothing about us at all," as Olive Senior puts it in "Colonial Girls School."5 The impact of the British curriculum on West Indian writers—if only as something to escape from or move beyond—can hardly be overestimated. George Lamming, for instance, recalls that when he was a schoolboy in Barbados his English master was Frank Collymore, the editor of Bim, an early, distinguished journal of Caribbean writing; but even Collymore "did what he had to do," teaching Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and "whatever the Cambridge Syndicate demanded." And although, as Lamming says, students "were expected to master certain texts for the purpose of examinations,"6 the effect of such immersion in those texts and in the culture they inscribed extended beyond the classroom. In one of the many references to Dominica that appear in her letters, Jean Rhys remembers that among the most popular "verses" of her own school days was, "The grass is green / The rose is red / God bless King George's / Noble head."7 Claude McKay, born five years earlier than Rhys, was similarly affected. Looking back on his childhood in Jamaica, McKay writes, "In those days Queen Victoria with her veil and sceptre . . . upon the schoolroom wall appeared to us as an imposing white mother, more important... than the Virgin Mary."8 Not surprisingly, this situation is reflected again and again in Caribbean fiction. Mr. Barton, in Senior's "The View from the Terrace," recalls with some bitterness his youthful enthusiasm for "poems about daffodils and the downs and snow and damsels in distress" (Arrival of the Snake Woman, p. 96). As an old man caught between two worlds but belonging to neither, he realizes that his intellectual and aesthetic absorption of English culture may have distanced him from his own country, but it certainly did not make him English. Even more angry is the narrator of Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, who tries to erase from her mind the

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poem about daffodils that a teacher once made her memorize. 9 And Elias, the bright boy in Miguel Street who fails in his attempt to "pass the Cambridge Senior School Certificate," explains with resignation," 'Is the English and litritcher that does beat me.' " 1 0 T h e figure of the schoolmaster himself, as a wielder of influence through his assumption of colonial culture, has become almost an archetype in West Indian literature. From Mr. Slime in Lamming to Lovelace's Winston Warrick and Ivan Morton to Parson Bedlow in "Arrival of the Snake-Woman" (the list is long), his legacy may be either good or evil (and is often both), but the source of his power is always the same: his command of the language of Prospero. Beka Lamb's school is a friendlier place than the classrooms found in many works of Caribbean fiction, but it is still, particularly at the beginning of the novel, a colonial institution. In that context the political significance of Beka's frequent rebelliousness and disobedience is more striking. Beka is a compulsive liar, but her lying is only a part of a larger pattern of willful disobedience that she recognizes without fully understanding it. When, for instance, she finds herself unable to say forthrightly to Father Nunez that she believes in heaven and hell, the priest sends her home, and Beka is confused by her own obstinancy: "She felt like smashing her fist straight through the desk. She began to fear there was something within herself that was spoiled, something that caused her to continuously do and say things against her own best interests" (p. 91). Edgell maintains a fine ambiguity here. It is in Beka's "best interests" to obey the patriarchal authority of Father Nunez and the school he represents, but her interest as a character lies largely in her propensity to challenge or defy that authority. Beka's insubordination is not limited to the environment of St. Cecilia's, and it therefore should not be taken solely as a figurative attack on colonial institutions. A t home, too, surrounded by a loving and very Belizean family, she tends occasionally to be dishonest or disrespectful. In this regard she bears a superficial resemblance to some of the young people in the fiction of Olive Senior and Jamaica Kincaid. But in Senior's work the child often finds herself living with adults who are not her real parents; as we have seen, her rebellion is against authority that she does not perceive as legitimate. The parallel with the colonizer/ colony power dynamic is much sharper than in Edgell's work. As for Kincaid, her characters' disobedience and "two-facedness" have much to do with their desire to break away from strong mothers in order to achieve the very independence that those same mothers have taught them to desire. Kincaid's Lucy sees her mother's love "as a burden," and she fears that her mother simply wants her to be "an echo" 1 1 of herself. But later in the novel, she recalls her mother's warning her "many times" always to have her own roof over her head, to be independent.

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Similarly, Annie John feels that either her mother or her mother's shadow stands between her "and the rest of the world,"12 yet she has to acknowledge, as she leaves Antigua for nursing school in England, that her mother has long been preparing her for this separation. Both Annie and Lucy grow more like their mothers by growing away from them. Beka's reaction to parental domination is neither so extreme nor so bitter as Annie's and Lucy's; nor does she feel so suffocated by the society in which she lives. Kincaid's characters, like their creator, leave Antigua behind for good, whereas Beka's successor, the protagonist of Edgell's next novel, In Times Like These, returns to Belize, as Edgell herself did. This difference accounts at least partly for the contrast in tone between Edgell's work and Kincaid's. For Kincaid's young women, growing up and separating from family and country is a difficult and wrenching, though absolutely necessary, experience. For Beka, growing up is certainly painful, but out of the pain new and stronger bonds are forged. In the novel's most dramatic moment of conflict involving Beka and her mother, Lilla, Lilla slaps Beka for saying, " 'When I grow up I am going to marry a Carib' " (p. 68). The remark is offensive in part because of ethnic differences. Beka's family are English-speaking Creoles of Afro-European descent; the Caribs, or Garifuna, are descended from Africans and Carib Indians from the island of St. Vincent, in the southeastern Caribbean, and they have their own language and customs. In this scene Beka has interrupted an adult conversation, made an inflammatory statement, and flaunted authority. She has also, as we shall see presently, unwittingly touched on a subject to which her mother is especially sensitive. Nevertheless, when she retreats upstairs to her bed, she feels "guilt and shame," not anger: "Why couldn't she learn to say and do the right thing? 'Why am I so horrible?' Beka whispered. 'What is wrong with me?' " (p. 68). In the end, Lilla, feeling somewhat apologetic herself, comes to Beka's attic room and talks to her daughter about the incident, about the Caribs, and about her own past. The effect of the reconciliation is an augmentation of Beka's understanding of both her mother and her motherland. The episode casts into relief Beka's fundamental wish not to eliminate her rebelliousness altogether but to harness it, and this wish—much closer to realization by the end of the novel— militates against too sharply defined a political reading. Edgell seems to be suggesting that if some resistance to authority is inevitable and even desirable, it should be directed into constructive rather than destructive channels. Her second novel, In Times Like These, vividly displays the chaos that can overtake a delicately balanced society when such discipline is not maintained. Throughout Beka Lamb, these conversations with family members and friends serve to strengthen the ties that bind Beka as an individual

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to her society. Early in the book she interrupts her father, Bill Lamb, who is employed by Blanco's Import Commission Agency and has brought some of his work home: " 'Importing coffee from Guatemala now, Dad?' " (p. 7) she asks playfully. He replies that Belize has "always" traded with the Central American republics. This exchange introduces into the novel's fabric the single dominant fact about colonial British Honduras: Guatemala's claim to the territory and Britain's determination to resist it. Bill Lamb observes that" 'the British brand of colonialism isn't the worst' " (p. 7) they could have, and Beka reminds him that he has argued with his mother, Granny Ivy, over the possibility that her political party, the P.I.P., might be receiving money from Guatemala. The suspicion of a Guatemalan connection remained a lingering part of Belizean politics until just recently, when Guatemala finally recognized Belize's independence in 1991, and the fear of a Guatemalan invasion certainly delayed the granting of independence by Britain, which did not occur until 1981. Beka Lamb takes place thirty years earlier, at a time when political parties growing out of labor movements were beginning to organize and demand self-determination for the colony. Granny Ivy, Miss Eila, and, to an extent, Lilla all participate in this early political activity. Bill Lamb, the family breadwinner, has a position to maintain and so stays somewhat aloof from it. But he is also an innately cautious man who occasionally clashes, as Beka points out, with his activist mother. Those arguments, too, sharpen Beka's (as well as the reader's) understanding of her country at this juncture in its history. Granny Ivy is contemptuous of locals who " 'talk British, act British, and go on "home" leave' " (p. 95), while Daddy Bill warns," 'Hatred of British colonialism unites us now. There are so many races here I wonder what will keep us together once they leave'" (p. 96). The long-running family quarrel comes to a head just before National Day, when Granny Ivy decorates their house with the blue and white flags of the P.I.P. Referring to independence partisans who might be accepting financial assistance from Guatemala, Bill accuses his mother of associating " 'with people selling this country down the river for a bunch of quetzal' "(p. 141)13 and replaces the banners with Union Jacks. Bill certainly does not oppose independence, but he knows all too well the danger of a premature break with the colonial power. It is left to Beka's lighthearted Uncle Curo to try, unsuccessfully, to smooth things over by reminding Granny Ivy that " 'Guatemala hangs like a sword of Damocles over our heads' "(p. 142). One of the most important stages in the growth of Beka's awareness occurs over a period of days, while the family vacations on St. George's Caye, courtesy of Bill Lamb's wealthy employer, Mr. Blanco. The location is significant; St. George's Caye, just a few miles offshore Belize

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City, was the site of a battle in 1798 in which "British masters assisted by black slaves" (p. 46) defeated the Spanish and firmly established British sovereignty over the area. The event is still celebrated on September 10 as National Day, and it is paradigmatic. Descendants of the Englishmen and their African slaves who won the battle form the dominant creole culture of Belize, and Hispanics are today the country's largest minority. The inescapable association of St. George's Caye with that early interfacing of cultures is the thesis of a subtext that runs throughout this episode. Despite the fact that the process of cultural convergence has been in progress for quite some time, Beka's experiences during the holiday leave little doubt that the process has a long way to go—that, in fact, many aspects of the colonial situation still prevail. The imagery of these scenes reinforces that notion. The Blanco family are panias (Hispanics), not bakras (whites), but in the social and racial pecking order of colonial Belize, they occupy a higher rank than the Lambs; moreover, their wealth and concomitant social position give the English meaning of their surname ("white") a certain ring of truth. On the island, the Blancos allow their employees to stay in their holiday house, but only beneath the main structure, on the otherwise unoccupied ground floor. While Bill Lamb sees in Mr. Blanco "a model of what a man could do through hard work," Beka astutely perceives him as "a Maya deity—raining blessings upon his employees as long as the rituals were ceremoniously enacted" (p. 51). The Blancos have named their skiff the Nigger Gial, as if to set themselves apart from their employees, servants, and many of their customers. Their house, too, is white, and the holiday episode ends with the image of Beka's father standing, as always, "in the shadow" (p. 60) of it. On several occasions in the novel, Edgell returns to the idea that succeeding in a colonial society often means joining the establishment. While on St. George's Caye, Beka and her grandmother have a lengthy conversation about one such family, the Hartleys, whose house was stoned by an angry mob the previous year. Granny Ivy maintains that the incident occurred because Mr. Hartley had supported "West Indies Federation," a stance perceived by many as pro-British.14 But that political position may only have been the last straw: The Hartley family was Creole, but they lived lives that had much in common with civil servants from England who headed many of the departments of the colony's Civil Service. The Hartley sons attended boarding schools abroad, returning home only for vacations.... Mr and Mrs Hartley attended functions at Government House which meant they had reached the pinnacle of the small creole society. There were a few other families like the Hartleys, who, on trips to England, were invited to parties on the lawns of Buckingham Palace, and they displayed,

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on their centre tables, framed photographs of themselves with members of the royal family to prove it. (p. 53)

What Beka begins to realize during the talk with her grandmother is that both of these families—the Hartleys and the Blancos—have identified too closely with the values and culture of the colonial power and, in doing so, have made themselves largely irrelevant to the great task of building a new society. The central movement of Beka Lamb is an integration of disparate, isolated elements into a greater national whole, with Beka herself embodying this primarily comic (in Northrop Frye's sense of the word) development; her friend Toycie is a poignant representative of those who are marginalized or left behind. Unlike the Hartley family, Toycie does not deliberately set herself apart from the process; indeed, she enthusiastically participates in it up to a point. Toycie is three years older than Beka and a much better student. Deserted by her mother (who years before emigrated to the United States and no longer even writes), she is eager to graduate and get a good job so that her Aunt Eila will not have to work so hard. The series of events that shatters Toycie's dreams is initiated by the gift of a guitar. Miss Eila arranges for Toycie to be given weekly lessons by Mrs. Villanueva, who works at Blanco's, and through Mrs. Villanueva Toycie meets her son Emilio. Toycie conceals her pregnancy for a while, but she is, in spite of Bill Lamb's spirited defense of her, eventually expelled from St. Cecilia's. Her mental condition swiftly deteriorates, and when a major hurricane strikes in October, she wanders out into the storm and is killed. The abdication of Toycie's mother from her responsibilities assumes a dual significance, like so much else in the novel. Because she deserts the country and her family, her departure must be seen as more than a personal betrayal. Even more explicitly than in Olive Senior's stories, the family structure in Beka Lamb is linked with the viability of the culture. Beka's own family, with its politically active women and its caring, wage-earning father, stands in stark contrast to Toycie's. Miss Eila is a good woman who does the best she can to rear her sister's daughter, but she is poor, undereducated, and ill equipped to accomplish this difficult task all alone. The fact that Bill Lamb, not Miss Eila, goes to St. Cecilia's to plead Toycie's case points up vividly, if indirectly, Beka's advantages and the importance of a nurturing family as the most basic unit of a healthy society. An unplanned pregnancy ending in tragedy is an old story, but it is saved from bathos in Beka Lamb by its contextual resonance. The school, operated by nuns, promotes a kind of sexual morality that has never taken very firm hold in the Caribbean region. Toycie's separation

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from St. Cecilia's is a clear sign of how wide the gulf remains between the agencies of the colonial culture and the peoples they purport to serve. Gaps also remain among those peoples themselves. The most basic, intractable reason Toycie cannot simply marry Emilio (although even that would probably not prevent her expulsion from school) is that she is a creóle and the Villanuevas are panias, and the Villanuevas would never permit it. As for the guitar that first brought Toycie into contact with Emilio's family, it was given to her by an English woman, Mrs. Leigh, who had employed Miss Eila as a maid. Like the upstairs/downstairs arrangement of the Blanco house, the instrument stands as an objective sign of the master/servant power structure that still lingered in the British Honduras of the 1950s. But it also serves as a token of Toycie's—and perhaps the country's—creative potential. When Toycie and Beka first examine the instrument, they notice that the label inside says "Made in Spain"; but it is Beka—not Toycie—who seizes the initiative, scratches out the European place name "España," and defiantly scrawls in "BELIZE." The process that is such a major force in Beka Lamb—nation building in its political aspect or creolization in its broader and deeper cultural dimension—can of course be observed all over the Caribbean. The synthesis of new forms of culture and society out of encounters between older ones is a subject so multifaceted that its intricacy is nearly infinite, as Sidney Mintz and Sally Price convincingly demonstrate.15 Nowhere is this more true than on the eastern rim of Central America, including Belize, which constitutes the westernmost extension of Caribbean creóle culture—a place where the English-speaking West Indian world abuts on the immense reality of Latin America. In Belize there are the indigenous Mayas; "coolies" (Asians); creóles of African and European descent; bakras (whites); pamas (Hispanics, chiefly mestizos, originally from Mexico and Guatemala); and, perhaps most interesting of all, the Garifuna, or black Caribs (called simply "Caribs" in Beka Lamb)}6 The coexistence of all these groups, with their divers customs, languages, religions, and family structures, in a land no larger than Massachusetts or Wales strikes many observers as a near miracle. In terms of coexistence, Belize certainly puts countries like Ireland or Yugoslavia to shame. But creolization is more than just an agreement to live together peaceably. It is the long, painstaking growth of a new culture—Out of many, one people, as Jamaica's national slogan goes. Edgell does not minimize the difficulties of the process in Beka Lamb. Intermarriage, for example, whether between creóle and Carib or creóle and pania, tends to be frowned upon. Progress can be excruciatingly gradual precisely because the goal is not forced homogenization but a consen-

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sual growing together. Discussing the epistemology of French "philosopher of alterity" 17 Emmanuel Lévinas, Wlad Godzich points out that in Lévinas's construction of reality, "there is a form of truth that is totally alien to me, that I do not discover within myself, but that calls on me from beyond me, and it requires me to leave the realms of the known and of the same in order to settle in a land that is under its rule."18 Another Lévinas scholar, Alphonso Lingis, also stresses the necessity of an accepting, almost passive, stance in the face of alterity: "One sustains its impact without being able to assimilate it, one is open to it, exposed to its direction, to its sense, susceptible to being affected, being exalted and being pained." 19 This, I believe, is the essence of Edgell's representation of creolization; it is the opposite of imperialism in the sense that it necessarily entails the voluntary relinquishment, not the imposition, of power. But people never leave the realm of the known and the same very quickly or easily, and Beka Lamb dramatizes the pain as well as the exaltation that can accompany it. The character in the novel whose life most directly exemplifies the difficulties of creolization is Father Nunez, the priest at St. Cecilia's. Father Nunez is a Belize-born mestizo, "a man of humble origins" who "made the journey from beans and tortillas almost every day, to ordination as a Jesuit priest in Rome" (p. 88). His position is awkward because "in Belize . . . almost everything locally reared or made is suspect" (p. 88). This state of mind is, unfortunately, endemic wherever a colonial system has been put in place. However, the children at St. Cecilia's see Nunez as hypocritical in "adopting the mannerisms, language, and style of living of his foreign counterparts" (p. 89). He moves between two worlds, but rather than characterizing him as a prisoner, Edgell calls him a pioneer. His situation is an opportunity, not a trap, and yet such opportunities involve complicated decisions, as Father Nunez himself realizes.20 Should pioneers like himself forsake the old for the new? This seems simple, at first, but the emotional cost of attempting to reject one's nurture is dear. Should they hold tightly to the old and shut out the new? How can this be done when they are no longer entirely "the old"? It is only time, experience, and emotional maturity that teaches some pioneers to try and graft the best of the old onto the best of the new. What is the best of the old and the best of the ever-changing new? That selection takes generations to evolve, and the task is never done. (pp. 89-90)

Father Nunez understands, perhaps more than any other character in Beka Lamb, that this glacially slow process cannot be imposed but must evolve over the course of time, through trial and error, pain and exaltation.

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Some of the novel's other characters see their situations, their placement between two worlds, with considerably less clarity than does Father Nunez. Beka recalls that when she was thirteen, she came home one day to find "an old half-bakra m a n . . . seated at the table," whom Lilla introduced as " 'your grandfather' " (p. 40). Although she is told that this man lives " 'with a Maya lady out in the bush' " (p. 40), his great dream, he says, is " 'to go to England to see the place where my father was born' " (p. 41). And later in the book, Granny Ivy accuses Lilla of defending the British because of " 'the father you have' " (p. 57). This is one of the smaller threads in Beka Lamb, but it points up the impediments that lie in the way of fully comprehending the meaning of creolization even while participating in it. Beka's grandfather, by definition a Creole himself, lives with an Amerindian woman, and yet, not unlike the wealthy Hartley family, he feels strongly attracted to the colonial power as a source of his identity. His daughter Lilla is ambivalent, too, speaking less harshly of the British than does her mother-in-law and insisting on growing roses in her yard "like those she saw in magazines which arrived in the colony three months late from England" (p. 9). But in her capacity for introspection, she is more like Father Nunez, thinking carefully, when the occasion demands it, about herself and her homeland. Very late in the novel, for instance, Lilla decides "to master the cooking techniques of every ethnic group in the country from Maya to Carib," telling her husband, " 'We must unite to build a nation, learn about our country, study the names of trees,flowers,birds and animals' " (pp. 149-150). By far the most important of these reflective occasions is the conversation she has with Beka after slapping her for saying she will marry a Carib. The scene takes place at a point in Beka's reminiscences that is charged with meaning—the point at which Beka's Great-grandmother Straker has died and preparations are being made for her wake. News of Greatgran Straker's death comes while the family is on St. George's Caye, cutting short the holiday. The two chapters that follow focus on the funeral and the wake. Considering that most of the novel— Beka's recollections of the summer and fall of her fourteenth year— stands as a substitute for Toycie's wake, it may seem strange how few pages are devoted to Toycie herself or the circumstances leading to her death. These chapters suggest an explanation. Funerals and wakes are bonding ceremonies, ways of reintroducing people to one another and to their pasts, as the description of Greatgran Straker's funeral makes clear: It was more than a funeral they watched. In a way, it was a small lesson in community history, and everyone, for those minutes, was a diligent

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scholar. Belizeans did not often articulate what they did know of their history, even amongst themselves. By and large, most people preferred to forget the time that had gone before. But on certain occasions, and especially at funerals of the very aged, through the use of innuendos and euphemisms, a feeling was communicated, and this was understood. (p. 63)

At the funeral someone remarks," 'Old Mother Straker was one of the last. Not too many left now of the old people that remember things from the time before' " (p. 62). If these rituals of farewell are lessons in community history, it is easy to see how appropriate Beka's recollections— and the entire novel—are as a substitute for Toycie's wake. Unlike Toycie, Greatgran Straker does have her wake, but it is the occasion for a disagreement between Lilla and Miss Ivy that reveals much about the novel's deepest patterns of meaning. A wake in Belize, even more than a funeral, links the present with the past, including sometimes the precolonial past. For this very reason, Lilla is reluctant to let Beka attend. She argues with Miss Ivy that her Grandmother Straker " 'was Christian, and she had a Christian burial' " (p. 66) and that should be sufficient. Lilla condemns the wake as " 'superstition,' " while Miss Ivy defends " 'the old ways,' " adding that it is " 'only a get-together to remember and pay respect to the dead' " (p. 66). Here Miss Ivy strikes a nerve, and Lilla exclaims heatedly," 'I don't want to remember. The old ways will poison the new' " (p. 66). Lilla, declaring that she and Bill are " 'trying to progress' " (p. 67), charges that Miss Ivy and Beka's Aunt Tama associate too much with the Caribs. This is the moment at which Beka enters the conversation, uninvited, quoting her Carib teacher Miss Benguche and, when rebuffed, is slapped by her mother for angrily saying she will marry a Carib. It is not an accident that Edgell structures the argument in such a way that this issue precipitates its climax, for the Caribs, though they are mentioned only a few times in Beka Lamb, constitute the novel's symbolic heart. The Caribs, through their name and their ancestry, are an indivisible link between Belize and the Caribbean past, including its precolonial history. One of the most marginalized peoples on earth, the black Caribs trace their ancestry back to Amerindians who migrated centuries ago in large seagoing canoes from mainland South America to the islands of the southern Caribbean, displacing the Arawaks who had preceded them. Over the course of time the ravages of colonialism reduced them to small groups on Grenada, St. Vincent, and Dominica. The St. Vincent Caribs were gradually joined by escaped African slaves, and by the eighteenth century the two groups had merged into a racially mixed people speaking an Amerindian language yet retaining many religious beliefs and art forms (particularly dance) of African origin. After

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the St. Vincent Caribs—now black Caribs—rebelled in the 1790s, the British deported them en masse to the island of Roatan off the Honduran coast. From there they spread to the mainland, founding settlements in Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize.21 The story of the Caribs is the story of Belize in microcosm. They are in a sense the truest Creoles, because their Amerindian and African ancestors' mutual acceptance of each other was perhaps the Western Hemisphere's first voluntary and peaceable cultural synthesis involving peoples from the Old and New Worlds. Not incidentally, both of those peoples had been exploited, manipulated, and brutalized by the hegemonic European powers. Yet this is a model from which Beka's mother seems to recoil. The Caribs are native American, they are African, their presence in Belize provides a profound link with the Caribbean—but their syncretic culture has relatively little to do with Europe. When Lilla comes contritely to Beka's bedside after slapping her, she understands that she has struck her daughter in part out of her own fear of confronting the non-European within herself. The scene brings Lilla face to face with the truth that to progress must not mean simply to reject the past and identify with modern, British ways. She confesses to Beka," 'Why I am trying to keep you away from the things I experienced as a child I don't rightly know' " (p. 69). And when Beka asks her why blacks and Caribs do not mix more than they do, she confesses again, "I don't rightly know.... Maybe it's because Carib people remind us of what we lost trying to get up in the world. See, in the old days, according to Granny Straker, the more you left behind the old ways, the more acceptable you were to the powerful people in the government and the churches who had the power to change a black person's life." (p. 70)

The invocation of Granny Straker—one of the "old people that remembers things from the time before" (p. 62)—completes a circle and creates a real epiphany for Lilla. The conversation ends with the presentation of a gift. Lilla gives her daughter a new exercise book and warns, " 'Everytime you feel like telling a lie, I want you to write it down in there and pretend you are writing a story. That way, you can tell the truth and save the lie for this notebook. And when we tell you stories about before time, you can write them down in there, too, for your children to read' " (p. 71). This advice is identical to Ishmael's rationale, at the end of "Arrival of the Snake-Woman," for writing down his own story of "before time." The notebook, then, is much more than a gift. It is almost a charismatic bestowal: the transfer from mother to daughter of an instrument of power and the grave responsibility that goes with it. Greatgran Straker, Lilla, Beka—a clear line of descent manifests itself

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in this scene, with Lilla for the first time openly acknowledging her part in it. The metamorphosis of lie into story suggests nothing less than the fusion of what Bolland calls "the creative and resistant strains" of Belizean culture. Although the first word we see Beka write is "BELIZE," scribbled in Toycie's guitar, her real beginning as a writer dates from the gift of the notebook and, more important, from the conversation that precedes it. Variations on the Prospero/Caliban paradigm—particularly on the relationship between language and power—appear again and again in West Indian literature. Edgell's treatment of the subject is subtler than most, but it is crucial to the design of Beka Lamb. The novel's first sentence announces that Beka has won an essay contest at her school, but information about the nature and significance of the contest emerges only gradually. Sister Gabriela, an American nun at St. Cecilia's, first urges Beka to enter the competition, explaining that the Mother Provincial will soon be coming to Belize to help celebrate the order's seventy-fifth year of service. The essay contest, with the topic "The Sisters of Charity in Belize," is to be part of the anniversary celebration. An additional purpose of the contest is instructional. Sister Gabriela notes, '"I feel strongly that you should understand a little more about your country and about yourselves. Our present curriculum, because of the London examinations, does not leave much scope for that"'(94). The topic of the essay, then, is much like the topic of many of Beka's conversations with family and friends: the past. Although this particular aspect of Belizean history (the coming of the nuns) seems more than slightly Eurocentric, the Catholic church has served as a cohesive force in bringing the country's ethnic groups together. Initially Beka is reluctant to enter the competition. She is still in first form (having failed it the year before) and has no doubt that a junior or senior girl will win. Moreover, Granny Ivy discourages her repeatedly, telling her that the contest is " 'fool-fool' " (p. 151) and that a pania or bakra will win—because that is the way things have always been. Miss Ivy's attitude is somewhat curious. She frequently disparages a "befo' time" when the colonial power structure was more formidable, yet she seems hesitant to admit that the colonial system, with its peculiar disposition of racial biases, is on its way out. Lilla, on the other hand, actively supports Beka's effort, even taking her to interview an elderly masseur who remembers (barely) the arrival of the very first Sisters of Charity. Lilla's assistance has come in three stages: first the conversation on the day of Granny Straker's wake, then the gift of the exercise book on the same occasion, and finally the visit to Mr. Rabatu, the masseur. The interview gives Beka the approach she needs to win the contest as well as another personal connection with the past.

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Lilla's encouragement is vital to Beka's success, but it also has broader implications. In the works of both Senior and Edgell, the confusion, anxiety, and disorientation resulting from the fragmented nature of Caribbean history make essential the mother's role as guardian and transmitter of the past.22 That is why so much of the novel turns on the argument about the past when Lilla slaps Beka. It is only after this cathartic moment, at a time filled with grief and thoughts about the past, that Lilla is ready to assume her full responsibilities as a Caribbean mother and pass on her knowledge to her daughter. Near the end of the book, that process appears to be beginning, as Edgell pulls together the strands of her narrative. Hardly anything in this closely knit novel is arbitrary. Beka finishes her essay on the night of the hurricane that kills Toycie; it was begun on September 10, National Day. The legendary hurricane of 1931, mentioned in the novel, struck Belize on National Day and in its wake swept in the labor unrest that evolved into an independence movement. But even before Beka's essay wins the contest, her true mission is signaled by appropriate representatives from home and school. Sister Gabriela asks Beka to help put together a medley of Belizean folk songs for the Mother Provincial's visit, and Lilla, whose rosebushes have been damaged by the storm, asks her what she should plant in their place. In response Beka trumpets," 'just like a radio announcer' " (p. 163), a list of plants native to Belize. Both incidents bind together Beka's coming-of-age with that of her country and portend her ultimate vocation—as rememberer, as storyteller, and as dream weaver of her polychromatic culture.23

In Times Like These: Growing into Home I. During a conversation with her grandmother on National Day, Beka Lamb, stirred by the restless curiosity of youth, speaks wistfully about one day emigrating to a place not" 'too close' " or " 'too similar' " to Belize. Granny Ivy replies," 'One day you'll realize that everyone's own home is paradise' " (p. 147). In Zee Edgell's second novel, In Times Like These, the central character, Pavana Leslie, both fulfills Beka's ambition and, returning to Belize, comes to a realization similar to Granny Ivy's. Pavana has lived abroad for some fifteen years, and her homecoming is strange and disconcerting. In fact, it becomes for her a process of home construction in which she gradually acquires a new sense of her rapidly changing native country and at the same time learns to weave into her idea of home an understanding of herself and her various pasts: her childhood in Belize as

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well as those ghostly ancestral pasts brought back to life by her sojourns in England and East Africa. To accomplish all this, she must carefully wend her way through the thicket of power relations that have always surrounded her. At the end of the novel, like Nolene in "The Tenantry of Birds" and Theresa in "Discerner of Hearts," she has grown sufficiently strong and self-aware to feel, really for the first time, "at home." Beka Lamb's cognate narratives in Caribbean literature are other initiation stories: Crick Crack Monkey, Annie John, In the Castle of My Skin, The Year in San Fernando, and perhaps Miguel Street come quickly to mind. In Times Like These is more closely akin to such explorations of the postcolonial Caribbean's turbulent political life as The Suffrage of Elvira, No Telephone to Heaven, and Angel. In Times Like These also occupies a wider canvas than Beka Lamb, spanning two decades, through a network of flashbacks, and touching on three continents. The novel's primary action, moreover, takes place some thirty years after that of Beka Lamb—in the early spring of 1981, the year Belize achieved independence. Instead of a young girl moving toward adulthood, In Times Like These focuses on a woman in her thirties who is nonetheless attempting, like Beka, to find herself. As in the earlier book, the historical and political dimension of the narrative is closely intertwined with the personal struggles of a protagonist whose experiences reflect to some degree Edgell's own.24 If Beka Lamb is a coming-of-age novel that also dramatizes a colony's yearning for independence, In Times Like These is an overtly political novel that explores a moment in history—the very threshold of independence—and the nature of politics itself as it operates in and shapes the lives of individuals, families, and nations. In Times Like These opens in a London abortion clinic in December 1968 and closes in Belize on April 2,1981, but the plot follows anything but a straight chronological trajectory. For that reason, a brief sequential summary is in order. After arriving in London in 1967 to enroll at a polytechnic institute, Pavana Leslie meets several expatriate Belizeans and their European friends. One of these is Alex Abrams, a politically active young man whom Pavana had met ten years earlier in Belize. The two strike up a friendship and later become lovers, even though Alex is involved with a German woman named Helga. When Pavana finds that she is pregnant, Alex borrows money for an abortion from their mutual friend Stoner Bennett, but at the clinic (in the novel's first scene) Pavana changes her mind. Some months later, after Alex and Helga have married and left for Belize, Pavana gives birth to twins, Eric and Lisa. In the years that follow, Pavana raises her children first in London, where she works for a development agency called Project Child, and later in Somalia, where she serves as an assistant to another friend from London, Julian Carlisle.

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Julian urges Pavana to stay with him in East Africa, but in 1980 she returns to Belize and begins teaching at a Catholic school there. In early 1981 she accepts a position as head of a women's unit—a subdepartment of a subdepartment—in the Belize government. At this point Pavana's problems multiply. She is caught up in endless turf wars within and around her department; riots break out in the streets as a result of popular fear that recent talks with Guatemala will end in a loss of territory or even sovereignty on the eve of independence; and a personal crisis develops involving Alex Abrams, who has become an influential figure in the ruling party. Pavana has been waiting for the right moment to introduce Alex and his children to each other, but Stoner Bennett (also back in Belize), who opposes the incumbent government, forces her hand by threatening to go public with what he knows about her past relationship with Alex. Eventually Stoner grows desperate enough to kidnap the children in an effort to force Abrams to resign from the government and precipitate a referendum on the proposed agreement with Britain and Guatemala. The last movement of the novel concerns Pavana's frantic attempts to find and free her children as civil disorder escalates. This seemingly extended précis of the plot is actually only a skeleton, but the novel's formal complexity lies less in its wealth of character and incident than in its narrative technique. Unlike Beka Lamb, in which most of the story is related in one long flashback, In Times Like These deploys a bewildering array of time shifts. Both long scenes from the distant past and short scenes from earlier in a given day are recounted in this way, creating the impression of an almost obsessive circling back to the past, as if to retrieve every scrap of it. In this respect In Times Like These bears a closer resemblance to Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage than to Beka Lamb. A reason for the obsessiveness gradually emerges. Something big has been left out, withheld, or suppressed; there is a hole in the text that corresponds to a hole in Pavana Leslie's life. As the narrative unfolds, the gap begins to be filled in, and it is the most important kind of gap, bearing as it does on the question of parentage and origins. At the time of her return to Belize in 1980, Pavana has told neither Alex nor the children about their relationship. But there is also a mystery concerning Alex's own family, another gap that must be filled in before these people can even begin to know who they are or where their home is. And bracketing both of the family mysteries is the larger issue of parentage in the ancestral sense: Where do England and Africa fit into Pavana's developing sense of selfhood? The threading of the English and African scenes through the main pattern of the Belize plot focuses the reader's attention, and Pavana's own, on the composite nature of her identity. Like the layers of an onion when

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peeled back, the time shifts of In Times Like These reveal the contours and intricacies of an evolving life. II. In early 1981, when the present-day events of In Times Like These take place, Belize was at last about to be granted independence by Great Britain. The final transition from limited home rule to complete sovereignty took so long to occur not because Britain wanted to retain control of its last major Caribbean colony25 but because Guatemala had always claimed Belize as part of its own territory and threatened to annex it when the British pulled out.26 It is at this time of confusion, anxiety, intrigue, and guarded hope for the young nation's future that Pavana Leslie chooses to return and start a new life with her two children. As in Beka Lamb, Edgell spins a delicate web of connections between her protagonist's situation and that of the country, between the personal and the political. But even more than Beka Lamb, In Times Like These exposes the extent to which power dynamics underlie, direct, and sometimes poison personal relationships. These connections first begin to manifest themselves to Pavana during her years in London. Taken together, the London scenes present an oddly sunny portrait of the West Indian expatriate community in London during the 1960s and 1970s. This is where Edgell most nearly approaches the territory of Jean Rhys, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Caryl Phillips, and others who have written about the "final passage." But Pavana's experience includes neither the gut-wrenching alienation of Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark nor the prejudice endured by characters in later diaspora works like Lamming's The Emigrants or the plays of Caryl Phillips. For Pavana, coping with life in London is overshadowed by the problem of coping with Alex Abrams's steadily increasing personal domination over her. Most readers of this novel who are conversant with Caribbean fiction will be struck by the relative ease with which Pavana settles into her life in London during that first winter in 1967. Three days after her arrival, her greatest worry seems to be that an English milkman, commenting on her lack of winter boots, might see her as "a real back-of-the-bush immigrant."27 But the milkman has just picked up her bag after she slipped on the ice, and his remark that she " 'won't get far in them slippers' " (p. 102) is intended as friendly advice. There is no hint of racism, either here or elsewhere in the London scenes. Pavana's relationship to England is not that of someone from the colonial "periphery" trying to survive within the powerful "center." Her problems are largely practical: the weather, a shabby apartment, a water heater that explodes. Alex

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Abrams and his circle are politically active: Some of them, like Alex, are socialists, whereas others, such as Stoner Bennett, advocate black power. None, however, seems overly concerned with conditions in Britain itself or with discrimination against immigrants. These issues, so important in much diaspora literature (particularly in the early work of Caryl Phillips), seem curiously attenuated. The difference in tone between In Times Like These and other novels about West Indians in Britain can be attributed in part to history. The kinship between Belize and the United Kingdom has always differed somewhat from Britain's other colonial ties in the region. The ancestors of most of Belize's creole population settled there long after slavery had been abolished, Belize was the last important Caribbean colony to cut the umbilical cord, and it is the only one that has continued to require British military protection. In Edgell's work, at least, the Britain/Belize link is not so much Prospero/Caliban as Prospero/Miranda. Even George Lamming, in his own earlier novel of expatriation, The Emigrants (1954), writes of "a feeling, more conscious in some than others, that England was not only a place, but a heritage." He goes on to say that whatever hostility toward that heritage that some West Indians have expressed, "it remained... a hostility to something that was already a part of us."28 There is also a more immediate, and perhaps more aesthetically pertinent, reason for Edgell's mildly positive view of England. The novel's flashbacks are all rendered through Pavana's recollections after she has returned to Belize. Uppermost in her mind at this time is the problem of how she will tell Alex about his children and introduce Lisa and Eric to their father. When she thinks about her past, her thoughts are still dominated by the man who first commanded her attention fourteen years earlier. The very presence of Alex in London when Pavana first arrives goes a long way toward explaining why she feels relatively comfortable in a setting so different from Belize. Alex is not only a link with her past, a fellow Belizean, but he is a man who goes "to great lengths to protect her, to bring her along" (p. 34). For a while Pavana is grateful for what she perceives as his help "in guiding her, smoothing out what he saw as rough edges, correcting her pronunciation of certain words" (p. 35), but eventually, even as her emotional attachment to him grows, she comes to realize that the price one pays for such help is a loss of freedom and individuality. Slowly, almost unconsciously, she begins to resist. All along Alex's aim has been to "transform" (p. 107) Pavana, to remake her into a submissive member of his political group, but he is disappointed in her increasing tendency to disagree with him and his friends "on certain premises which they at the time held sacred" (p. 108). Her greatest offense lies in not placing her opinions "in the context of the ideologies on

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which they considered themselves . . . experts" (p. 108). "Ideologies" is dropped rather casually into the book at this point, but it is important. Much of the strength and security that Pavana later acquires comes as a result of her ability to free herself from the systems of received authority implicit in that word. Such an emancipation, however, does not occur easily or quickly. Instead, it comes upon Pavana incrementally, as a slow, lifelong epiphany that evolves and grows in clarity as circumstances change. By the end of the novel Pavana realizes that Alex has become one of those "mad persons" who grasp "political p o w e r . . . for its own sake, at any cost" (p. 35). As she brings him the news that their children have been abducted, she sees in his eyes a "hunger for power" of "overwhelming proportions" (p. 272). She ultimately understands that the genesis of Alex's corruption could be discerned in his behavior years before, when he brooked no dissent and attempted to mold her into an image of his own choosing. Then, at a time she later calls "her 'age of belief " (p. 34), her disagreements with Alex were just spontaneous outbursts. Although she dismissed his proposals for Belize as " 'importation'"—a new form of ideological colonialism—she embarrassed and angered him "unintentionally" (p. 108). When she did consciously distance herself from him, after he reacted coolly to her pregnancy, it was only "to protect herself from further humiliation" (p. 94). Out of that instinct for self-preservation grows a desire for something much more than survival. As she explains to Alex after they meet again in Belize, her decision to have the children and not tell him was not an act of revenge so much as the first stage of a long, slow process of growth and discovery. " 'All my life,' " she tells him, " 'I'd struggled to break free of certain cultural patterns. I didn't want to end up being supported by you but only while you approved of my actions and decisions. . . . I wanted to be able to stand on my own feet.' " She adds, more forcefully," 'I wanted some control over what happened in my life . . . ' " (p. 149). Pavana's journey home is still far from complete even at this point, but by reminiscing with Alex and reweaving important threads from her past, she can at least understand and articulate her direction: " 'I never wanted to lose possession of the self I was trying to become' " (p. 155). For about nine years after Alex and Helga leave London, Pavana is employed there by an organization that supports health-related programs for children in various poor countries. When her old friend Julian Carlisle offers her the opportunity to work with him on development projects in Somalia, she immediately accepts. The time she spends in Africa becomes a healing process as well as a bridge back to Belize. For Edgell, these brief scenes are a focal point for observations about the

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Third World in general and Africa in particular that are scattered throughout the novel. On a personal level, the years in Africa are especially useful to Pavana because, in Julian, they provide her with a model of a man who does not regard her as a colony. The contrast is pronounced. Whereas Alex considered her pregnancy as "a deliberate and cunning manoeuvre" (p. 107) and thought of it solely in relation to its possible effect on his own career, Julian was supportive of Pavana during that period of her life and now, in Somalia, showers both mother and children with affection. Although Pavana leaves Julian behind when she decides to return to Belize, they stay in touch, and the memory of an emotional attachment not corrupted by a desire to dominate remains with her and sustains her. If the whole novel is, in a sense, about the discovery of identity through the construction of an idea of home, Pavana's own conscious image of that idea has to do with family—and her own family, she realizes all too clearly, is conspicuously incomplete. While in Africa Pavana makes an effort to identify with the Third World as a category of mind. Speaking of United World, the agency for which she and Julian work, she says," 'Sometimes I think these so-called aided development programmes are diabolical schemes to keep us in our place' " (p. 22). On one other occasion, she refers to people in " 'developing' " countries as " 'us' " (p. 23), and she also objects when Harry Hawkins, Julian's regional director, likens the Somalis to children. But at the same time, she seems to recognize the intrinsic weakness of a concept that links together people of many cultures and historical experiences just because they all happen to live in less affluent countries, intuiting what Shiva Naipaul has made explicit: "The Third World is a form of bloodless universality that robs individuals and societies of their particularity." 29 Throughout the novel characters are mildly disparaged for succumbing to this mind-set by, for example, wearing African garb while displaying posters of white revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Pavana herself wore "ethnic dresses from all over the developing world" (p. 107) in deference to Alex's sense of ideological correctness. Years later, when she meets Stoner Bennett again in Belize City, she notices that he, too, has adopted the uniform of an idea. Because a jacket and tie would be " 'too European,' " he is wearing a "slightly too elegant" (p. 84) safari suit, an ensemble that evokes the Africa of Hemingway more vividly than that of Kenyatta. The whole enterprise—ethnic dresses, safari suits, and the like—suggests the kind of deracination that Shiva Naipaul witnessed in Australia when he beheld an Aboriginal poetess dressed as a Jamaican Rastafarian proclaiming," 'I and I want to be free Never will I lose my identity' " (p. 21). The ideologies that concoct such confections of the imagination are not intellectually compatible with sensibilities as fine as Pavana's, a point not lost on her dur-

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ing those early years in London when she disagreed so frequently with Alex and his friends. Pavana's attitude toward Africa itself is ambivalent. She does not go there to explore her origins. Nor does she explicitly feel what Edouard Glissant calls "the unceasing tug of Africa" as something she must struggle against "in order to take root in [her] rightful land." 30 Like her decision to study in England years earlier, the move to Somalia is pragmatic. But once there, she feels keenly her own distance from the place; her immediate milieu is largely whitewashed villas and dinner parties with other development workers. She finds herself using the words and phrases of "old Africa hands"—words that suggest to her, even as she utters them, "images of photograph albums, with faded pictures of helmeted 'great white hunters' " (p. 18). She feels like "a displaced person" (p. 18), a woman of color adopting the lexicon and perhaps even the attitudes of the former colonial masters. It is, perhaps, too easy to see her as someone who has, in George Lamming's words, internalized the white myths and has not yet summoned to her rescue the history of "the black rock." 31 But her Western orientation and British education set her so apart from the Africans around her that the fact of her African ancestry seems to dwindle in importance—to the extent that being in Africa has a jarring, disturbing effect on her. She fears that she is "beginning to lose a sense of balance, a sense of identity" (p. 19), and neither the "bloodless universality" of the Third World nor the experience of living in the lands of her ancestors, England and Africa, is sufficient to quell that fear. She must return to Belize. III.

March 1981 finds Pavana taking on a new job as director of the women's unit, still teaching part-time at Sacred Heart, and becoming increasingly embroiled—against her will—with the accelerating civil strife and Alex Abrams's part in it. She disdains party politics because she sees how the desire for political power has corrupted many old friends who were once idealists, but she is caught up in politics because she is caught between the conflicting ambitions of two of these friends, Alex and Stoner Bennett. Alex, who once was a committed socialist, has long since—for the sake of his career—joined the establishment. Stoner, ever the outsider, now supports the opposition, and much of the second half of the novel is taken up with his schemes to topple the ruling party and overturn the accord just reached with Guatemala. The crisis underlying these events may seem somewhat obscure today. In early 1981, when Belize's independence was finally imminent, Great Britain attempted to reach an agreement with Guatemala that

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would secure, once and for all, the new nation's sovereignty. A set of proposals for future discussion was drawn up by Britain, Guatemala, and Belize. Word of these "Heads of Agreement," as they were called, spread rapidly and provoked violent demonstrations in several towns as well as a strike by the Public Service Union. Both the strike and the demonstrations were backed by the opposition, which, hoping to bring down the government, accused the incumbent party of selling out the country.32 Compounding the problem of Guatemala was the widespread fear that the only viable alternative to an eventual Guatemalan takeover was a perpetuation of neocolonialism through a permanent British military presence. It is just before these tensions boil over that Pavana begins her new job at the women's unit. Despite the fact that the position has been scaled back, both in length of contract and in salary, she stays on, hoping to accomplish something constructive. And although the appointment is not supposed to be political, Pavana is swept up in political intrigue and frustrated by power plays within the bureaucracy. As far back as her London days, she has resisted externally imposed structures of authority, and here, too, she finds herself fighting to avoid being trapped in other people's patterns. The process of her own personal decolonization, she dimly realizes, will be long and arduous. At the outset, she meets Jackie Lee Baines, an American UN consultant who will shortly prove to be her adversary. Lessons learned among Julian's associates in Somalia, as well as Pavana's earlier experience at Project Child, have left her with the ability to evaluate such situations quickly and accurately, and she immediately sizes up Jackie Lee as a typical example of "the international development worker with an eye on the main chance" who has "no time for the cultivation of friendships with nationals unless they [are] potentially useful in furthering their goals and careers" (p. 60). Jackie Lee is allied with a Belizean woman in Pavana's department, Brenda Kirkwood, who has an "appetite for experience, power and travel" (p. 164). Pavana worries that together they will undermine whatever authority she has and make her "a figurehead" (p. 164) before her work really gets started. During her first weeks, Pavana constantly has to struggle against attempts to discredit her, efforts on the part of the government to use the unit for partisan political purposes, and the animosity of male government ministers who resent not only Pavana's independent attitude but the whole idea of women taking an active role in their own lives or the life of their country. An important subtext of In Times Like These—one found also in Caryl Phillips's A State of Independence, Shiva Naipaul's A Hot Country, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven—is the lesson that decolonization does not automatically bring about liberation: If the power structure retains an essentially

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colonial/patriarchal configuration, the mere substitution of black faces for white ones will not change things very much. One of Pavana's duties as director of the unit is to interview many of those women who are just "now beginning to work for the upgrading of their own status" (p. 195). She empathizes strongly with these people, sensing the link between all of their struggles and aspirations and her own. Her lifelong effort to assert some control over her own life, to retain "possession" of a self she is "trying to become" (p. 155), parallels the collective efforts of a young society in the process of finding itself. Both projects are rooted in a deep-seated human need for a sense of identity generated out of a conception of home. Gaston Bachelard argues persuasively that this instinct is basic and universal, deriving ultimately from a nostalgia for a state of well-being that precedes being " 'cast into the world' " at birth.33 Given the powerful presence in the subconscious of that prenatal condition, it is fitting that Edgell should emphasize as she does the importance of the mother—the individual's first home—in constructing and maintaining an environment that can become the basis for a stable identity. The metaphor of birth as an expulsion from home is deeply embedded in Edgell's design as well; Pavana, by spending so many years in the countries of her ancestors' origins, has separated herself not only from her own country but from her own parents. When she returns, she is well on her way to fashioning a sense of home and therefore identity for her children and for herself. The dark heart of In Times Like These, and the narrative element that counterpoints Pavana's own story (much as Toycie's does Beka's in Beka Lamb), are the revelation of Stoner Bennett's broken family. This occurs while Pavana and the children are spending the weekend on Pelican Island, one of the Belizean cayes, about ten days before Eric and Lisa are kidnapped by Bennett. Pavana has arranged for Alex to meet them there so that he and the twins can become acquainted. But Stoner also shows up, "dirty and disheveled" (p. 178), and tells Pavana that he and Alex are half-brothers. His mother, it seems, was once employed as a domestic servant in the Abrams household. All his life Stoner has adored Alex and has been virtually ignored by him in return, leaving Stoner hurt, bitter, and angry but still desperately craving Alex's attention. When Stoner stows away the next day on a boat Alex has hired to take the children diving, the tension between them erupts into violence. The quarrel is ostensibly over the Heads of Agreement, but that is clearly only one aspect of a conflict so deep as to be virtually mythic in character. The weekend, meant as a respite from problems, leaves Pavana "plagued by nightmares" (p. 205). The scenes on Pelican Island are significant because they crystallize in Pavana's mind at least one rather bleak alternative to the course on

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which she is, however haltingly, embarked. But they are important for another reason, too. Both Beka Lamb and In Times Like These contain pivotal episodes that take place on one of the offshore cayes. Belize, perched on the mainland of Central America, lies far from its nearest Anglophone Caribbean neighbor. Yet it is also an island nation, and its cayes are a link with that cultural area of which Belize is the remote western outpost. They extend like a hundred hands into the Caribbean, outstretched toward the Caymans and Jamaica. And they extend, too, into the Belizean past: St. George's Caye was the colony's first English settlement, its first capital. More recently, at the time Edgell's novel takes place, the hotly disputed Heads of Agreement proposed that Guatemala might have access to the sea through Belizean waters and the use of the uninhabited Ranguana and Sapodilla cayes. This one suggestion touched off more anger than any other. The cayes are the geographical manifestation of Belize's cultural identity; they are the country's birthplace and original home. Other fractures in the Abrams/Bennett family come to light shortly after the Pelican Island excursion. Stoner's mother, Pavana learns, was raped by Alex's father; Stoner was conceived by an act not of love but of violence. When Lynette Bennett says to Pavana, " 'We're the same kind, you and me. Messed up by the same bloody family' " (p. 218), she has a point. The rape is really only a less subtle variation on Alex's own urge to dominate, as Edgell makes plain later in the novel when a drunken Alex tries to force his attentions on Pavana as they are waiting for news of the missing children. Added to this is Alex's suspiciously intimate relationship to his sister Moria, the only woman he has ever truly loved, and Stoner's inexplicably intense, possibly erotic, attachment to Alex. This family, into which Pavana once wanted to marry, now seems counterfeit, a forgery, a model to be avoided at all cost. The primary impulse in In Times Like These, as in Beka Lamb, is centripetal, but in both novels Edgell devotes considerable attention to characters like Toycie and Stoner whose lives spin out in a different direction, away from the possibilities of integration into family or community. In Beka Lamb, Maskman and National Vellor enact, in a minor key, the anomie that finally engulfs Toycie. Maskman always wears gloves, long sleeves, and "a black oilskin hood" (p. 31) over his head, presumably to conceal some kind of disfigurement. Many stories circulate about him, but he remains a man of mystery, living alone and sharing his secrets with no one. National Vellor, whom Beka's mother calls " 'that half-crazy coolie woman' " (p. 5), also lives alone in a miserable shack. Early in the novel, Beka, seeing her walk down the street in her gold shoes and purple velvet dress, wonders if she is on her way to a date with

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one of the British soldiers stationed nearby." 'No mother, no father, no school,' " she later says to Beka." 'What can I do?' " (p. 126). In Times Like These also contains a pair of isolated characters whose stories run counter to the main movement in Edgell's fiction. There is Red Man, the eccentric, gun-toting caretaker of a dilapidated house who imagines himself persecuted by a red phantom that no one else can see. This terrifying apparition is his sole companion, his only family. And there is Miss Junie Silver, a young woman whose tragic story Pavana recalls after her own return to Belize. When Pavana was thirteen, she and her neighbor Miss Erline stood at the entrance to the Anglican cathedral to watch a wedding procession. Just as the ceremony began, Miss Junie Silver appeared, her "face twisted in rage," holding a baby. " 'Here is your baby, Edward Kelly,' " she cries out to the startled groom. " 'God will never give you another!' " (p. 11). The ceremony proceeded, but as the wedding party filed out, Miss Junie again stepped forward, this time stabbing her baby to death with a pair of scissors. Miss Junie herself later committed suicide by taking rat poison, Pavana learns. By 1981 Mr. Edward Kelly, in contrast, is a powerful and complacent government official. This anecdote, placed so close to the beginning of the novel, casts into bolder relief more than any other single incident the importance of the choices Pavana has made and the difficulties of the task she has undertaken. Junie's story is the chilling antithesis of Pavana's own, the killing of a child leading not to security, growth, and the continuation of life, but to ostracism, the destruction of the self, and death. One impediment to Pavana's full realization of a sense of home is her strained relations with her parents. A barrier has arisen between them over her long-standing refusal to divulge the name of Lisa and Eric's father. Pavana does not want to take the chance that her mother or father, however well intentioned, might contact Alex and jeopardize the stable family structure she has managed to maintain for the twins. When she originally decided to rear the children alone, she did so to spare them (and herself) the hurt and confusion of having a father who would, at best, perform his parental duties only intermittently. Moreover, since the time she moved to Somalia, "Uncle" Julian Carlisle has functioned as a surrogate father and continues to do so even after Pavana and the twins have relocated in Belize. One of the things that most sustains her during the several days when Lisa and Eric are missing is the knowledge that Julian knows what happened and is coming to Belize to help. When, on the last tense day of waiting, Pavana finally introduces Alex to her parents, the event is anticlimactic. They accept the situation with equanimity. As Alex himself observes," 'Parents seem able to forgive their offspring most things' " (p. 293). The meeting has little dramatic force, but it is thematically important because it strengthens Pa-

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vana's growing sense of the self she is " 'trying to become' " (p. 155) by restoring the most immediate and elemental link to her own past. Shortly after the visit to Pavana's parents, the children are located by the police, but not before Pavana and Alex encounter Stoner Bennett in the midst of an angry mob. Violence breaks out between pro- and antigovernment factions, and Alex is shot to death while trying to protect the brother he has always spurned. Stoner, who had always sought Alex's love and acceptance, kneels over the dead man, "maddened" (p. 301) with grief. Pavana, too, is stunned, but she rushes to the police station to be reunited with the twins. Within a few minutes the three of them are aboard a small airplane, flying from Corozal Town in the north, where Lisa and Eric were found, back to Belize City, where Julian waits for them at the municipal airport. Pavana is ready to start a new life with Julian and to resume her job at the women's unit, whatever the obstacles. Though somewhat melodramatic, the children's kidnapping parallels the novel's opening scene (in the abortion clinic) in a way that completes a circuit of meaning. If Pavana's parents are a vital link to her past, Eric and Lisa are her way into the future; this relationship, above all, must not be allowed to rupture. As in Beka Lamb, the strengthening of ties in both directions across generations is essential to the growth of self as well as society. The book's relatively upbeat conclusion should not, however, be mistaken for its total effect. Pavana's struggles take place against a backdrop of emotional turbulence and political instability. Her success is by no means ensured. The world in which she lives—our own postmodern, postcolonial world—is a kingdom of disorder. The riots that occur in Belize during that eventful spring of 1981 are only a specifically political version of the irrational, destructive forces that can burst forth at any time or place. Stoner's sudden appearance on the diving boat anchored off Pelican Island, Eric and Lisa's abduction, Alex's assassination, Miss Junie Silver's stabbing her baby—all remind Pavana of how delicate and fragile the shelters of order, reason, and civility are. Perhaps the most troubling example is her memory of an incident that took place in London on the day she walked out of the abortion clinic. Looking for Alex, who had failed to pick her up at the clinic as he had promised, she went to Helga's apartment and in an unprovoked fit of "madness" tore apart Helga's favorite book, then "grasped her cruelly by the hair and gave her a stinging slap across the face" (p. 153). (The book, The Little Prince, was one Alex had used to teach English vocabulary to the German Helga—a clever reversal of the Prospero/Caliban stereotype.) Years afterward Pavana still cannot fathom how her rational, conscious self could have been so invaded and possessed by jealousy and rage on that cold winter night.

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To steel herself against such irruptions and to survive and learn from the petty aggressions, territoriality, and power games that seem to underlie all too many human relationships, Pavana Leslie spends her adult life attempting to construct a psychic shelter—what I have called an idea of home—that will arm her with strength, stability, and a sense of belonging. Bachelard, examining our need for this kind of security, finds in the icon of the house, which we revisit endlessly in our dreams, "a veritable principle of psychological integration."34 Pavana's idea of home has its reification in what she calls "her dream house" (p. 229), a vacant wooden structure on Orchid Street, where an old school friend once lived. Pavana's hope is to buy the house, renovate it, and turn it into "a small hotel" (p. 53), but her financial circumstances make the idea impractical. Looking at the house one day, a train of associations leads her from it to a balloon she lost as a child, her parents' words of consolation, and Julian (still far away in East Africa), who reminds her of her father. The two of them have, she reflects, "the same sense of responsibility" (p. 229). This cluster of thoughts—the house, childhood, parents, Julian, responsibility—clarifies the direction Pavana's life is taking, and the name she would like to give to the hotel, the Belizean Heritage Inn, serves as a reminder that in this novel the construction of home has a cultural as well as a psychological dimension. In the concluding scene, Pavana looks out the window of the plane and sees "the villages, towns and the rivers, winding through the dense green jungle" (p. 307) of her homeland. It is at this moment that she summons up the determination to stick with her job at the government ministry, despite its frustrations. This resolution, even more than the anticipated reunion with Julian, reveals how much Pavana has grown. Her mind, to paraphrase Derek Walcott, has seen its mythopoeic coast, and like Belize itself, she is ready to begin taking root.

Notes 1. O. Nigel Bolland, Belize: A New Nation in Central America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 57. 2. Beka Lamb (1982), In Times Like These (1991), and The Festival of San Joaquin (1997). Edgell's third novel was scheduled to appear as this book was going to press. 3. Zee Edgell, Beka Lamb (London: Heinemann, 1982), 16. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 4. Michelle Cliff's powerful novel Abeng, which appeared three years after Beka Lamb, also interweaves the story of a young girl's coming-of-age with elements from the history of her country (Jamaica). In Cliffs book, however, the cultural/historical material is not so seamlessly integrated into the plot as it is in Edgell's. 5. Olive Senior, Talking of Trees (Kingston: Calabash, 1985), 26-27.

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6. Ian Munroe and Reinhard Sander, eds., Kas-Kas: Interview with Three Caribbean Writers in Texas (Austin, TX: African and Afro-American Research Institute, 1972), 5-6. 7. Jean Rhys, ALS to Evelyn Scott, 10 June 1936, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX. 8. Claude McKay, from "Up to Date," TMS with A corrections, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX. 9. Wordsworth's daffodils poem is treated in much the same way by Michelle Cliff in Abeng, where it is regarded as the symbol of all that is unJamaican in the colonial curriculum. 10. V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street (New York: Vintage, 1984), 33-34. 11. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (New York: Plume, 1991), 18,36. 12. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (New York: Plume, 1986), 107. 13. The Guatemalan unit of currency. 14. The British-sponsored Federation of the West Indies did come into existence in 1958 with Port of Spain, Trinidad, as its capital and Sir Grantley Adams of Barbados as its prime minister. The Federation lasted only until 1961, and Belize never joined. 15. See Sidney W. Mintz and Sally Price, eds., Caribbean Contours (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 6-11. 16. To this list should be added Mennonites from Germany and the United States whose productive farms dot northern and central Belize, and descendants of immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. In addition to these two bakra groups, the white population also includes a few descendants of early British settlers and a number of British and U.S. expatriates. 17. The phrase is Tzvetan Todorov's. See Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 258. 18. Wlad Godzich, Foreword to Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xvi. 19. Alphonso Lingis, Translator's Introduction to Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being; or, Beyond Essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), xvii-xviii. 20. The priest's understanding of this complexity is reflective of Zee Edgell's own. As Simon Gikandi perceptively observes, "What is unique about Beka L a m b . . . is Zee Edgell's ability to develop a tense dialectic between the subject on one hand, and her community and colonial society on the other hand, without falling back on the old and worn out polarities of tradition and modernity." Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 221. 21. See Douglas McRae Taylor, The Black Caribs of British Honduras (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1951); Nancie L. Gonzalez, Sojourners of the Caribbean: Ethnogenesis and Ethnohistory of the Garifuna (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Peter Hulme, Colonial Enounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 225-263; O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); and Bolland, Belize. According to Taylor, belief in the power of dead family members (gubida) is one of the strongest bonds holding Carib kinship groups together (p. 74). This helps explain why Lilla in Beka

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Lamb insists that " 'we don't need to protect ourselves from my Granny Straker' " and that" 'Granny Straker's spirit isn't roaming around trying to hurt a single soul' " (p. 66). 22. For a brief but illuminating discussion of Beka Lamb in terms of "the ambiguous role women play in the construction of national identity" (p. 197), see Gikandi, Writing in Limbo, 217-226. Lorna Down makes this idea the centerpiece of her argument in her feminist reading of the novel, "Singing Her Own Song: Women and Selfhood in Zee Edgell's 'Beka Lamb,' " Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 18.4 (October 1987): 39-50. 23. Gikandi reads the ending of the novel somewhat differently. In his view, Beka's essay is "an allegory of her own struggle to rewrite herself in a world dominated by often hostile signifiers," but winning the contest places her "closer to the colonial orb," and in so doing aggravates "her self-alienation in the process that was supposed to pull her out of the prisonhouse of colonialism." The thesis of Gikandi's book virtually dictates that he view written history (including Beka's essay) exclusively in terms of European, and therefore colonial, modernity—at variance with what he calls "the Caribbean cultural text." See Gikandi, Writing in Limbo, p. 230. The need for Beka to be seen as drawing "closer to the colonial orb" because she has written such a document causes Gikandi to neglect other elements within the text (the gift of the exercise book, the details of the songs and the plants, and Lilla's own struggle to understand the multicultural complexities of her country's history) that strike a different chord. 24. Like Pavana Leslie, for instance, Zee Edgell studied in London, worked in Africa, and was employed for several years in a government department after her return to Belize. 25. At this writing the only British colonies left in the Caribbean region are tiny: the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgins, the Türks and Caicos, and Anguilla. 26. Guatemala formally recognized Belize in 1991, but because tensions remained, a few British troops were still stationed there as recently as 1994, and Harrier jets have long been a major sight at the Belize International Airport. 27. Zee Edgell, In Times Like These (London: Heinemann, 1991), 102. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 28. George Lamming, The Emigrants (London: Allison & Busby, 1980), 229. 29. Shiva Naipaul, An Unfinished Journey (New York: Viking, 1987), 34. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 30. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 160-161. 31. George Lamming, Introduction to In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), xlv. 32. Bolland, Belize, 131-135. Also in the air at the time was a degree of anxiety, mentioned twice in the novel, about the Marxist coup that occurred in Grenada two years earlier, in March 1979. 33. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 7. 34. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xxxii.

Shiva Naipaul

4 Shiva Naipaul

Choreographer of Chaos

Flames of venus, the fireflies draw the honeymoon carriage To a seaside end Where a fisherman-friend, sooth-sayer, worshipper of the moon's rise, Will tell the story of the pundit's fall from paradise. Faustin Charles, "Fireflies" [for Shiva Naipaul], from Crab Track

between this mountain ridge and the vague sea where the lost exodus of corials sunk without trace— there is too much nothing here. Derek Walcott, "Air," from Collected Poems, 1948-1984

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Essays and Stories Any serious critical treatment of Shiva Naipaul must begin with the concession that his work bears some resemblance to that of his better known older brother. Both have written satirical stories and novels about the "denuded" (An Unfinished Journey, hereafter UJ, p. 29) Indian community in Trinidad, both have expressed skeptical, or even negative, views on developments in postcolonial societies, and both have exercised "the complementary arts of fiction and journalism" (UJ, 29). Like his brother, Shiva Naipaul emigrated to England, settled there, and attended Oxford University.1 But it is a mistake to dismiss Shiva Naipaul's work because of these likenesses (as some have done) and an even greater error to ignore equally important dissimilarities. Shiva was born thirteen years after his brother and reared in a different kind of household. By the time Shiva was seven years old, V. S. Naipaul had emigrated to England, and Seepersad Naipaul, the boys' father (himself a part of the Trinidad literary "awakening" of the 1930s and 1940s), had died. Although his mother's large extended family (the prototype for both the Tulsis in A House for Mr. Biswas and the Khojas in Fireflies) still loomed in the background, Shiva's immediate family consisted of only his mother and his older sisters. Moreover, growing up in the 1950s, Shiva witnessed many changes on the island long after V. S. Naipaul's departure. As he has cryptically put it, writing about himself and his brother, "The Hindu Trinidad of his youth was not the Hindu Trinidad of my youth. We did not have a shared past" (UJ, p. 27). These modulated differences between the two men's backgrounds appear as ghostly but very real differences in their writing. The ironic distance that so pervades V. S. Naipaul's work after Miguel Street is present in Shiva's fiction as well, but it is frequently mitigated—if not altogether cast aside—by a sympathetic communion with the perspectives and problems of characters. His tone, especially in depicting the peoples of Trinidad, is more often elegiac than acerbic. He shares in large measure his brother's grand pessimism, but he is much quicker to celebrate the many small victories of the human spirit. He is also far more comfortable dealing with female sensibilities. Indeed, the protagonists of his first and third novels, and the most compelling character in his second novel, are all women. And, finally, his fictional Trinidad is somewhat more densely populated with significant characters of other races and religions than the Trinidad of V. S. Naipaul's early books, with the notable exception of Miguel Street. "I am not," Shiva Naipaul insists, "attempting either to deny or to downplay my admiration for [V. S. Naipaul's] work. He has served as an example and as an exemplar. But we are each our own man" (UJ, p. 29). In fact, he argues, he turned to writing precisely to

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assert his own identity, to make his own mark: "The paradox is this: I was doing anything but following in my brother's footsteps when I started to write. Rather, I had taken the first step on the road to independence, to the autonomy that had always been denied me" (UJ, p. 28). In four collections of essays, Naipaul reflects not only on his own experiences and background but also on the situations of various émigrés, exiles, and displaced persons he has encountered. He writes movingly about both India and the West Indies, but he is perhaps most eloquent on the relatively infrequent occasions when he returns to the subject of India in the West Indies, particularly the long, difficult effort of the Indian community in Trinidad to maintain its cultural cohesiveness from generation to generation so far away from home. These and other matters treated in the nonfiction always seem to lead back to the same central, obsessive topic: Naipaul's seeking after himself, his identity, his place. And although he claims that he had "no desire either to fabricate new 'roots' or rediscover old ones,"2 he admits that he finds himself, like many West Indians of various races, so caught between two worlds, "like a fish out of water" at both "a Hindu rite" and "a drive-in cinema," that his sense of self-definition "has its roots in nothing other than personal exigency" (Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces, hereafter BDM, p. 42). Every day, he concludes, he has to redefine himself. Whether "in an English country church" or "in a mosque or a temple," he feels "out of place" and is overtaken by a "void" that "cannot be overcome" (UJ, p. 123). Shiva Naipaul's writing has been an attempt to fill the void, to replace the nothing of personal exigency with something more substantial. It is no accident that the titles or subtitles of three of his books contain the word "journey." This journey, tragically unfinished, is in fact the generative source for all his fiction, especially for the two novels on which his reputation must rest, Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers. The East Indians of Naipaul's Trinidad, even more than those in his brother's novels, are a people in cultural decline. The community into which both Naipauls were born had always stood somewhat apart from the predominantly Afro-European Creole culture of Trinidad and the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean. Brought to the region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work in the cane fields, the Indians—both the majority Hindus and the minority Muslims—clung to the soil long after the terms of their indenture had expired. Only very gradually, as memories of India receded into the mists of time, did they begin speaking English in the home, moving to the towns, taking up trades, and in some cases "turning Christian."3 V. S. Naipaul, in his novels and stories set in the 1930s and 1940s, chronicles the beginnings of these developments. Shiva Naipaul, too, reaches back into the 1930s (in Fireflies), but

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he trains his attention much more closely on the postwar years, when the absorption of Indians into the larger national community of Trinidad was accelerating. Shiva refers offhandedly in one essay to "the quasiHindu formlessness in which I was reared" (BDM, p. 5) and later in the same piece makes this observation: "The clannish, hierarchical Hindu past known to the older members of my family . . . had all but dissolved by my day.... By the time I was born, the living link with the countryside, with the sugar-cane estates of the Caroni plains, had been effectively broken" (BDM, pp. 24-25). The broken circuit between present and past, town and countryside, the New World and an increasingly remote Old World, is a problem for the whole Caribbean, not the East Indian community alone. Naipaul's work clearly reflects a sympathetic understanding of how intimately the experience of those ruptures binds up all the people who have found themselves cast ashore in the West Indies. When Shiva Naipaul turns to the Third World in general, his views, on the surface at least, appear to be less sympathetic, and these views have attracted a barrage of hostile fire. Michael Thelwell, for example, characterizes both Naipaul brothers as "restless, deracinated, malevolent spirits" roaming "through the Third World, their insatiable scavengers' eyes seeking signs of sickness, rot, or anything that they may mock, parody, and patronize," solely for the purpose of "feeding the cultural smugness and reassuring the historical insecurity of the Western literati, that historically irrelevant class which is their only constituency."4 This criticism comes from a man who has drawn pay from the U.S. academy and published books in the United States and whose constituency obviously coincides, to some extent, with that of the Naipauls. But the charge of racism is serious, and its seriousness is partly responsible for standing in the way of an objective critical evaluation of Shiva Naipaul's fiction. Naipaul is not a racist, no matter how vigorously his detractors may attempt to make him one. Although it is true that, like his brother, Shiva Naipaul makes disparaging observations about postcolonial Africa (as have many others who have spent time there), he is scarcely sentimental about Britain (and even V. S. Naipaul, it might be recalled, has referred to London as "the greater disorder, the final emptiness"5). Shiva Naipaul does in fact describe the Third World using terms like "regression," "infection," and "primitivist impulses seething through the lower reaches of society."6 But he uses these terms to characterize not so much the people in those "lower reaches" as the ideological abstractions that demean and in a sense recolonize them. Seen in this light, Naipaul's criticism of the Third World is profoundly humanistic. The Third World itself, he asserts, "is an artificial construction of the West—an ideological Empire on which the sun is always setting" (UJ, p. 39). It is a concept cleverly designed, like Edward Said's explanation of "orientalism," to fa-

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miliarize and distance simultaneously. Naipaul sees other such processes at work within developing societies like the West Indies—notably the ersatz culture of a generalized Africanization or negritude that he characterizes as a "masquerade" replacing a "reality" that "was lost" (Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, hereafter JN, p. 27). The sad instance Naipaul cites in An Unfinished Journey is the Australian Aboriginal poet turned Rastafarian who, even while vowing never to lose her identity, casually exchanges it for the pseudo-identity of "universalised blackness" (UJ, p. 21). Naipaul is critical of these kinds of mass psychopolitical transactions because he sees them as synthetic, the submerging of something real into something not so real, and as "an escape from the challenges of history" (UJ, p. 21). The rich cultural particular is replaced by the ideological general. But he certainly does not confine his criticism to Pan-Africanism. His most extended and horrific example is the Jonestown cult and massacre, and in An Unfinished Journey he finds a similarly depersonalizing abstractive force involved in the creation of the modern Indian republic. Naipaul maintains that the Nehru family's "inherited marginality" (with its origins in the "peripheral" region of Kashmir), along with its "adaptation and assimilation" in British India, allowed Jawaharlal Nehru "to distance himself from the constrictions of the subcontinent's cellular mosaic and to see a 'whole' where a whole may never have existed" (UJ, p. 58). In India the secular state of the Nehrus, Naipaul suggests, is unworkable and alien because it denies the very nature of the culture: "The divisions and distinctions and traditions bred by centuries . . . cannot be wished away" (UJ, p. 62). Here, as elsewhere in the essays, Naipaul sounds a warning against the lure of culturally denuding generalizations that obliterate human particularity. When he writes about the Indians of Trinidad in his stories and novels, the issue that concerns him most is the improbability of their survival as individuals and as a distinct culture, poised as they are between a fading past and an amorphous future. His fiction, suffused with anxiety and sadness, is vitalized by this single idea: "The longer I live, the more convinced I become that one of the greatest honours we can confer on other people is to see them as they are; to recognize not only that they exist but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities" (UJ, p. 38). All of Naipaul's seven short stories collected in Beyond the Dragon's Mouth, with the exception of "Lack of Sleep,"7 take place in Trinidad. These stories, like Olive Senior's, display both comic and tragic impulses, and their casts of characters are even more ethnically and economically diverse. But Naipaul, also like Senior, maintains a disciplined thematic focus. In fact, the several recurring motifs in the short fiction are so

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closely connected that they can be seen as components of a single, multifaceted theme having largely to do with change. Change occurs in the stories most often, for better or worse, as a result of contact with the "metropolitan" cultures of Britain and the United States, but the "progress" associated with the modern world does not always bring happiness in its wake. Instead (and here again there is a striking resemblance to Senior), social and economic changes resulting from fundamental alterations of traditional ways can wreak havoc on personal relationships and accelerate the disintegration of families. Two or three examples will make these patterns clear and serve as an introduction to the much grander verbal edifice of Fireflies. In "The Beauty Contest," one of Naipaul's more lighthearted stories, two merchants in a small town operate hardware shops. For years Mr. Prasad's Oriental Emporium and Mr. Aleong's General Store have coexisted amicably and somewhat sleepily. But when Aleong's son returns from a business management course in the United States, the merchants' friendship deteriorates, as Aleong begins to implement "new ideas": a neon sign, a plate-glass show window, uniformed shop assistants. All of these changes increase Aleong's business at the expense of Prasad, who is hard pressed to think of any "new ideas" of his own. At last his wife persuades him to sponsor a contestant in the Miss Doon Town pageant (another U.S. import). This publicity gimmick fails when Aleong also enters a girl in the contest and wins. Aleong continues to prosper, expanding his store into a chain, and he is eventually elected mayor, but Prasad, exhausted by the pace of all this progress, is content. He consoles himself with the thought that he no longer has to compete with Aleong because they now move in two wholly different spheres. And Prasad muses with satisfaction that his own business, although now reduced to a secondhand shop, is the only such establishment in town. More somber in tone are "A Man of Mystery" and "The Dolly House," in which the unraveling of family life reflects the slow but steady erosion of traditional ways of life. "A Man of Mystery" dramatizes the ravages of "progress" through the silent struggle between a simple man and his ambitious and more sophisticated wife. The children of the neighborhood see Mr. Green, a cobbler, as a figure of romance, largely because he is "spectacularly black" and very ugly, while his wife is a beautiful, refined woman of "half-Portuguese, half-Negro extraction" (BDM, p. 59). The realities behind the marriage are far from romantic, however. When they first met in South America, Mr. Green rescued his wife from a difficult domestic situation; now, years later, she is bored and dissatisfied. At this point in the story, events follow one another quickly: Mrs. Green goes to work as a receptionist in a doctor's office, then becomes the doctor's lover; the two of them pull down the

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Greens' old dwelling and put up a new California-style ranch house in its place; Mr. Green, relegated to his adjacent shoe shop, takes to drink and finally dies. But during this time many other changes take place in the neighborhood. Concrete pavements, running water, and a sewage system soon appear, along with other new houses, a supermarket, and automobile traffic. Throughout the story such changes, epitomized by Mrs. Green's actions, are contrasted with those centering on "the succession of carnivals, of births, of deaths" (BDM, p. 63). These ritual changes associated with the timelessness of old ways are eclipsed by the advance of modernity, and finally they become, like Mr. Green himself, the object of nostalgia. In "The Dolly House" another mysterious man, Roderick Dawson, arrives in a settled neighborhood and arouses the curiosity of its inhabitants. The unnamed neighbors in the story function as a sort of chorus; in them is invested the folk wisdom that "things never remained the same. All was flux" (BDM, p. 104). When Roderick brings a very young and naive wife to live in his small house, the neighbors realize that her happiness will not last because it cannot "accommodate itself to a change of circumstances" (BDM, p. 104). Roderick, with his interest in science and mechanics and a determination not to remain a sanitary inspector for the rest of his life, is the embodiment of progress and upward mobility in the increasingly materialistic society that is developing in Trinidad. He tries to "instruct" (BDM, p. 105) Clara, but to no avail. When at last he follows his friend Archie to the United States, Clara turns to an itinerant preacher for support, but the repressive brand of Christianity he attempts to impose on her is as foreign as Roderick's doctrine of scientific progress. Both men regard her as territory to be colonized, a blank slate on which they can inscribe their own codes. Upon returning to Trinidad, Roderick is puzzled to find that his wife's mind has wandered far from his sphere of influence or even comprehension. He can never know what happened to her "because they spoke in different tongues and there was no one to translate" (BDM, p. 126). Only in this sad denouement are the two explicitly revealed to be what they have really always been: inhabitants of different worlds, as alien to each other as Antoinette and her husband in Wide Sargasso Sea. But Clara's mental breakdown is foretold much earlier in the story when Roderick takes her to a fair and she is terrified by the "senseless, nightmarish chaos" (BDM, p. 114) of a ride on the ferris wheel. This same phrase, "senseless, nightmarish chaos," floats across her consciousness again when Roderick leaves her for his sojourn to the United States. The ferris wheel is an appropriate image for the two aspects of change that are essential to the design of Naipaul's fiction because its motion—depending upon the perspective from which it is viewed—suggests either the cyclical, patterned change that is a part of

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life and culture or "nightmarish chaos," the unpredictable, disruptive, and degenerative forces that his characters so fear. Fireflies: Illuminating the Void Fireflies may be only one of many fictional portrayals of the East Indian subculture in Trinidad, but its clarity of conception and richness of detail have hardly been surpassed. The novel's scope is also impressive; spanning nearly thirty years in the history of a large Hindu family, it touches on many aspects of life in Trinidad's multiracial society during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The powerful mainspring of the plot is the struggle of "Baby" Lutchman to hold together her immediate family—her husband and two sons—and to garner for herself a measure of dignity and respect. Inseparable from the Lutchmans' story is that of the Khojas—Baby's prosperous relatives—whose slow decline mirrors the decline of the whole Indian community as a culturally distinct entity. The family chronicle form of Fireflies, like that of The Chip-Chip Gatherers, is very close to what Wilson Harris (criticizing V. S. Naipaul) calls "a coherent design based on a social evolution" that is peculiar "to a particular social landscape."8 Specifically, Harris deplores the projection of "a 'coherency' based on the English social model" on "a native world."9 Although Harris evidently finds this type of novel suitable only to the landscape of Europe, it is in fact an appropriate mode of self-expression for any complex, highly stratified society—including that of the Indians in Trinidad. And when the society being depicted is itself in the process of gradual disintegration, the tension between this formal "coherency" and the increasing incoherence of the "native world" can yield remarkable effects. Much has been made of the need for Caribbean literature to develop forms that reflect the communal or collective experience of the region—forms inspired by what Edouard Glissant calls cross-cultural poetics. Harris explains in an interview with Kalu Ogbaa that by "community" he means a "kind of imaginative truth" making it possible to see all cultures as partial, insufficient unto themselves, "parts of a greater whole."10 The problem with Shiva Naipaul's portrayal of Trinidad's Hindu world is that he sees its transformation in two ways. He is saddened (not elated, as Harris might be) by its loss of cultural particularity, but he also understands, somewhat remotely, that the less individuated, less centered creole world is the "greater whole" that is coming into being. There is no denying that Naipaul's two long novels are chronicles of a society losing its center in the process of absorption into something else, something larger but more amorphous. But the very design of

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those novels looks to the decentered, cross-cultural Caribbean of the future. Unlike A House for Mr. Biswas, their titles do not refer to the centripetal point of a single dominating character. Indeed, their plots carry on long after their ostensible protagonists have died, suggesting that Shiva Naipaul—in a very delicate way, his own way—may have been deliberately subverting the coherent, centered novel that Harris finds so inappropriate a medium for rendering Caribbean reality. And in writing this kind of novel, which begins coherently but yawns open like the dragon's mouth before the end, Shiva Naipaul also exposes a centerlessness in human life that extends frighteningly beyond the merely cultural. Naipaul establishes from the beginning of the novel that Baby Lutchman's story will be played out against the backdrop of a culture in eclipse. Ram Lutchman's parents consider it a "coup" that the Khojas, "the acknowledged leaders of the Hindu community in Trinidad," are willing to let even a poor relation like Baby marry their son. For Ram, the union provides "an opportunity... to raise his head above the anonymities of Doon Town, an anonymity that had brought the Lutchmans to the verge of social extinction."11 This fear of obliteration or nothingness lurking just beyond the delicate, luminous structures of human society permeates the novel, giving even the comic scenes an edge of anxiety; it is the fear of the dark night into which the flashes of fireflies always finally disappear. As for Baby, at this early stage in her life, "the greatness of the Khojas" (p. 8) is the center of her being; she lives to obey. The Khojas are great, however, only "by default." They are "renowned not for their achievements, but for their deliberate backwardness and their eccentricities" (p. 10). Many of the other wealthy Hindu families have "been converted to Christianity" or have "gone into the professions... marrying English wives, living in lavish houses in the city and speaking only English" (p. 10). The Khojas, however, have held on to their land, kept their house in the country, and, above all, maintained the strict observance of all Hindu rituals and practices. The Khojas' "greatness" begins to falter when the matriarch of the family becomes feeble and later dies. For years it has been her task to preserve family unity as a bulwark against the enemies of orthodoxy. During her lifetime, the family provides, especially for Baby, "an emotional coherence and consistency" (p. 58). Baby is not crushed by Ram Lutchman's frequent beatings and infidelities early in their marriage because "her soul lay elsewhere" (p. 58). But even before Mrs. Khoja's death, signs of disunity begin to appear—"stresses and strains . . . flinging out from the centre the insignificant family cells that, taken together, had formed the might of the Khojas" (p. 58). After she dies factional divisions and bitter squabbles over money and property proliferate, and

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concomitantly, the position of the new head of the family, Mrs. Khoja's son Govind, deteriorates. Govind Khoja, who is at first virtually worshipped by his sisters, nieces, and nephews, manages to become a laughingstock over time because of his comically futile efforts to be recognized as an important figure throughout Trinidad and at the same time retain his self-appointed guardianship of Hindu purity. He never seems to understand (as Naipaul does all too well) that the two impulses are mutually exclusive. Extreme sectarianism simply is not compatible with the desire to achieve distinction within the framework of a pluralistic and increasingly creolized society. The Khojas' ambivalent attitude toward Christianity is emblematic of their difficulty in maintaining a consistent position with regard to that society. Early in the novel Naipaul reveals that in "the inner sanctum" (p. 62) of Govind's bedroom, his wife keeps an illustrated copy of the twenty-third psalm framed on the wall. Govind tolerates this impiety as long as he is assured that no one will see it. Appearances, at least, must be preserved. Somewhat later the Khoja sisters criticize their niece Renouka because her father (who later loses his mind and has to be placed in an asylum) sends her to a Catholic school and lets her call him "Daddy." But these improprieties are revealed to be the rule rather than the exception. Even the Khojas, it seems, are not exempt from the cultural and religious syncretism that, as any reader of The Suffrage of Elvira knows, is a fact of everyday life in Trinidad. Though "fervent Hindus," many of the Khojas observe "without discomfort... the events on the Christian calendar" (p. 154). Some, including Ram and Baby, go so far as to put up Christmas trees. And although Govind insists sanctimoniously that " 'Hindus should only celebrate the Hindu festivals' " (p. 155), he does not return the Christmas gifts he receives from his sisters. Eventually each branch of the fragmented family develops its own circle of Christian friends, and Christmas comes to stand for the Khojas' "essential separateness and distinctness from each other" (p. 157). Renouka's story, almost hidden within the larger folds of the plot, is a micronarrative model of the centrifugal movement of the novel as a whole. The episode in which the Khoja women express their disapproval of Renouka's modern ways is a préfiguration of the direction the girl's life will take. Her mother, Saraswatee, eager to please her sisters, blames Renouka's father, but Renouka herself has already been shaped by her brief experience in the creolized world of the Sacred Heart convent school. The morning after the aunts' complaints, she locks herself in the servant's room of her uncle Govind's house and cuts off her hair—a grievous offense against tradition that results in a severe beating by her mother. " 'I surprise,' " Govind remarks, " 'you haven't become a Christian yet, at the rate you seem to be going' " (p. 79). Much

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later, under the influence of a zealous mistress, Renouka's father, Rudvanath, himself renounces modernity and secularism, reverting "to that very Hindu orthodoxy which he had formerly abhorred" (p. 254). Renouka has been too thoroughly creolized, however, to turn back. She sees her father's increasingly violent antipathy toward her as "insanity"; losing his support seems "to make nonsense of her efforts to escape from the attendant disorder and chaos following hard upon the death of the elder Mrs Khoja" (p. 257). In truth, by this time Renouka wants "to abstract herself completely from the affairs of the Khojas" (p. 257). To do that now, she has little choice but to leave her father's house. She finds a job and moves into a room of her own in the city, eventually establishing "liaisons" with a black appliance salesman and, even more scandalously, with her own cousin Romesh, Baby Lutchman's wayward younger son. These affairs end, but the trajectory of Renouka's life continues to its logical conclusion: She emigrates to Canada, leaving behind forever both creolized Port of Spain and the Hindu Trinidad of the Khojas. Shiva Naipaul records these events with humor and a degree of sympathy. Although he certainly considers the creolization process akin to those ideologies and generalizations that erode cultural particularity, he hints in North of South that for East Indians in Trinidad, the alternative might not be much better. In the Trinidad of his youth, he recalls, "Life was rigidly divided into a public and a private sphere. These rarely met" (p. 103). In the public sphere, "school... cricket, soccer, the movies, Coca-Cola" were "all the anonymous assimilations of the colonial society" (p. 103). The private sphere was home, family, religion. Such a strict compartmentalization of human life could not continue forever, particularly in the postcolonial era, and its inevitable breakdown is in large part what Fireflies is about. Govind Khoja's two most ambitious attempts to establish his reputation throughout the island are miserable failures. First he runs for a seat in the legislative assembly and comes in dead last; later he founds a school—to be operated in accordance with his own bogus educational philosophy—and it quickly closes. But the most vivid objectification of his inability to live fully and simultaneously in both spheres—the public one of the whole society and the private one of Hindu orthodoxy—is an incident that occurs while he and his wife are at home alone on election night. The house is literally invaded by an emissary from the formless and unpredictable world outside the reassuring patterns of traditional Hindu life. The intruder is Romesh Lutchman, Baby's delinquent younger son, who, along with Renouka, forces his way in, terrorizes his aunt and uncle, and does considerable damage to the house and its furnishings before the police arrive and take him off to jail.

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Houses in Fireflies function symbolically as concrete manifestations of familial and social integration. Since the elder Mrs. Khoja's death, her home in the country has been inhabited by her eccentric widowed daughter Indrani, who has let it "crumble about her" (p. 278).This house, where Govind and his sisters were born, had long been the spiritual center and gathering place for the whole extended family. The transferal of ceremonial functions to Govind's house in the Woodlands neighborhood of Port of Spain results in a distinct diminution of authenticity. When Romesh, a true product of the urban melting pot and an avatar of the dark side of acculturation, breaks into and partly demolishes that house (even invading the Khojas' "inner sanctum"), that authenticity is further undermined. At this point it is quite clear that the public and private, secular and sectarian, can no longer be kept separate. The assault on Govind's house also strongly suggests that traditional structures associated with the past are defenseless against the unpredictable, disruptive forces of the modern. Shortly after this episode, Govind builds a new house in Tropic Vale, a fashionable suburb of "rambling houses with swimming pools" (p. 323). The Khojas, however, put up "a square, two-storeyed building, surrounded by a high concrete fence" that strikes onlookers as "a hideous blot on the landscape" (pp. 342-343). From his rural birthplace to the house in Port of Spain to this monstrosity in Tropic Vale— Govind is only dimly aware of how far he has strayed from the traditions he purports to defend. In the end, he is still trying to live in two worlds—in a modern subdivision among the economic powers and social arbiters of the new Trinidad yet also in an "aggressively" (p. 342) old-fashioned house that his neighbors, who do not even speak to him, regard as an ugly excrescence. The result is foreordained, as Govind finds himself adrift, a stranger in a strange suburb, a man without vocation or purpose. The heart of Fireflies is Baby Lutchman, and much of the novel is narrated from her perspective. Unlike V. S. Naipaul's family chronicle, A House for Mr. Biswas, this is essentially a woman's story, a fact that does not become completely evident until the second half of the book. In part 1, while Ram Lutchman is still alive, Baby is overshadowed by him, but this is a deliberate artistic strategy, a way of reflecting the usual relationship between husband and wife in that society. Ram dominates part 1 because Naipaul makes us see the marriage as the society sees it, with Baby in a subservient position. She is, moreover, alternately belittled and underestimated by male characters (her husband, her sons, Govind) throughout the novel. But after Ram's death at the end of part 1, she comes into her own, demonstrating to the reader, if not to her relatives,

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that she has been the family's source of strength and the novel's hidden protagonist all along. Ram Lutchman is Govind Khoja's opposite—a man who becomes part of the larger society out of economic necessity, one of countless Indians of his generation cast by circumstance from the rural world of pundits and cane fields into the polymorphous city. His linear, jagged journey out of the circular, enclosed world of the Khojas is as centrifugal as Renouka's and only slightly more purposeful. He sees his marriage to a member of the Khoja family in practical terms, as a means of achieving some kind of success or status in the wider, creolized society. At the government job he obtains with Govind's help, he meets people of other races and creeds. For a time he conducts an affair with Doreen James, a white woman who affects an anthropological interest in the Khojas and their culture. Ram's involvement with Doreen, as well as his somewhat stormy friendship with Wilkinson, a black co-worker at the Ministry of Education, is emblematic of his attempt to redefine himself as a Trinidadian, even though the effort is more a series of improvisations than a carefully calibrated design. The inconclusiveness of the project can be clearly seen not long before Ram's death, when he invites both Wilkinson and Doreen (no longer his mistress) to Christmas dinner at his house. Near the end of the evening, Doreen playfully remarks," 'You are incorrigible, Ram,' " and Lutchman's response is rich in ambiguity and irony: "Like many of the words she used to describe him, Mr Lutchman had no idea what it meant. Still, he was pleased that words existed that could describe him. It was a comforting thought. He laughed and replied, 'Call me what you will' " (p. 182). "Call me what you will": Ram's invitation to Doreen, the "European" at the table, to inscribe him as she sees fit reveals both how far he has moved from his Hindu roots and how far he has to go before he will be able to define himself in a society free from colonialist and neocolonialist dispensations of power. Baby Lutchman's life in the first half of the book revolves around her husband and two young children. When Ram buys a small house in Port of Spain with money left to him by his father, it is Baby who decorates it and makes it a home. The beatings that he inflicted on her earlier in their marriage end, but during his affair with Doreen, Ram spends a great deal of time apart from his family. His wife has no choice but to look the other way and to seek solace in the "emotional coherence" (p. 58) of the Khojas. In time Ram breaks off the affair with Doreen and acknowledges to himself "how successfully" he and Baby have "welded" (p. 160) their lives together. For Baby, this is the least anxious period she has known; for the first time she begins to feel something for her husband "resembling affection" (p. 125) as well as a measure of security.

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After Ram dies, however, one misfortune follows another. Various attempts to earn a living (taking in lodgers, running a chicken farm in the back yard, working at Govind's ill-fated school) all fail in turn. Her children, once her hope for stability and continuity in an uncertain future, are no help. An increasingly widening abyss separates Baby from her sons. Romesh, a deeply disturbed young man, moves out of his mother's house, falls in with a bad crowd, spends six months in jail, and finally moves to New York without even saying goodbye. His older brother, Bhaskar, goes to medical school in India but returns home after four years with no degree, having suffered "a nervous breakdown" (p. 337). Naipaul's fiction offers up many perspectives on the vacancies underlying human experience, but perhaps the most chilling is the nearly total absence of emotional connection between parents and children. This gulf erases a basic link between past, present, and future that can give life meaning. It is therefore more than just a sad sign of her own life's emptiness that Baby repeatedly tells her lodgers, all of them strangers," 'Call me Ma' " (p. 384). In the end, with no means of support and a lazy, neurasthenic son on her hands, Baby is forced to sell her house and move in with friends who live "in the heart of the sugar-cane country" (p. 391). Although Baby, more than any other member of the family, maintains good relations with all the Khoja factions, including Govind, she refuses their offers to take her in. Having established her individuality, she is reluctant to become once more an anonymous member of the clan. Selling the house is the most difficult decision she has to make because it has become, since her husband's death, "the most concrete symbol of her independence" as well as a reminder of the "tenderness and affection" (p. 226) for Ram that she has internalized and made part of her strength. No less than Govind, Baby is caught between two worlds. If she declines to rejoin the old, rigid world of sectarian tradition, she finds it equally impossible to hold on to the life she has tried to make for herself (represented in her mind by the house) in the new, fluid world of capricious change. Baby's attempts to accommodate herself to the new world are remarkable in view of her lifelong fear of the kind of change that is its dominant feature. Even before Ram's death, she is "worried" whenever she can "discern no pattern in his behaviour" (p. 139). The absence of pattern—whether conceived as chaos or the void—is the main source of individual and cultural anxiety in the novel. For that reason, the emotional instability of both Lutchman sons, as well as the insanity of Renouka's father, assumes great thematic significance. They are dramatic enactments of all the arbitrary terrors that seem to lie beyond the safe enclosures of the familiar. When Baby attends one of the an-

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nual Khoja catthas, or family gatherings, at Govind's Woodlands house, she understands that she is "going there . . . to try to keep hold of all the strings that kept her world in motion," but she also knows "that the past was indeed past and that the present and future were going to be very different" (p. 61). From this point on she begins to think about ways of readying herself for a future in which the bonds of tradition will no longer hold. That they are already loosening is evident to her: Why else would the house in the country be out of bounds? Woodlands was not and could never be an adequate substitute. Mr Khoja still wielded his spiritual authority unchallenged, but that could not last forever Almost anything would shatter the harmony when the time came. And then, what? That contingency would have to be prepared for. It would demand qualities of another order, and she could not be certain whether she possessed them. (p. 59)

One tactic she adopts is reliance on the fortune-telling skills of her eccentric next-door neighbor, Mrs. MacKintosh. Baby's dogged belief in the prognosticating powers of this charlatan is a revealing indicator of her need to cast some kind of a controlling pattern over a randomly unfolding future. But her major strategy is to develop a sense of self-reliance: "The gradual... inexorable disintegration of the clan had for a long time highlighted in Mrs Lutchman's mind the necessity for independence" (p. 223). Baby Lutchman's cherished independence is her way of coping with the "senseless, nightmarish chaos" (BDM, p. 114) that drives Clara mad in "The Dolly House." Although she remains genuinely loyal to the Khoja family, Baby realizes that their patterned, cyclical world is fading and that she must move, like her husband before her, into a disorderly future. Although filled with incident, the final chapter of Fireflies leaves an impression like that of the silence following the last note of a symphony. Much earlier in the book, just after Ram's death, it has occurred to Baby that if she lost her house, "she would have nothing left" (p. 226). Nothing is precisely what she does have left at the novel's end, which finds her occupying a single room in another family's house, deserted even by Bhaskar, who has decided to marry that family's daughter and emigrate to England. Like many nineteenth-century novels, Fireflies concludes with a marriage—a marriage, however, that betokens not social integration but its opposite. Before Bhaskar's departure, Baby, in a final gesture toward the fixity and assurance of a whole culture, holds a modest farewell puja12 in his honor. A short time afterward she accompanies Bhaskar and his bride to the docks, a journey "already so familiar to her" (p. 416) from other departures. The puja and the em-

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barkation are emblematic of the two worlds of the novel—the one ritual looking back to a traditional, ordered past; the other, looking forward to an uncertain, but certainly changing, future. After these ceremonies are concluded, a vacancy settles over Baby Lutchman; she sits at her window in the Ramnaths' house, gazes out over the cane fields, and longs for "nothing" (p. 416). The novel's title carries within it a full measure of Naipaul's ambivalence toward his subject. When the Lutchmans first move to Port of Spain, Ram buys "a bowl-shaped lightshade for the sitting room in which scores of small insects were trapped and died" (p. 40). Entrapment and extinction—these ideas, along with the association with light—carry over to an anecdote that Govind Khoja relates years later. A boy he once knew, he tells Bhaskar Lutchman," 'used to catch fireflies and put them in an old jam-bottle And he would study like that.' " When his wife asks, " 'But didn't the fireflies die being locked up in a bottle like that?' " he replies that fireflies are not so easy to kill: " 'They are some of the strongest insects on the island' " (p. 247). Again, there is the suggestion of entrapment and death, but also of beauty, luminescence, and strength. Perhaps most important, it is the glow of the fireflies that enables the boy in the story to read, illuminating the texts that will prepare him for life in a world from which fireflies have vanished. Against this image of "tiny flakes of coloured light" (p. 99) appearing, then disappearing, in the black void, stands the novel itself, a coherent design, as Wilson Harris says, but one based on social extinction rather than social evolution. Yet the design itself remains, an intricate, radiant ideogram of a way of life that is slowly flickering out.

The Chip'Chip Qatherers: Ropes Across the Abyss The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973), despite its many fine comic effects, is a darker novel than its predecessor. Its evocations of existential emptiness and universal decay are more insistent, and its scattered human triumphs seem, with perhaps one exception, even more transitory. The locales of the novel establish the parameters of the field on which Naipaul's characters variously confront the terrors of the void: the rural village (called simply the Settlement) where most of them were born and some still live, and the urban areas where many of them go "to break out of the vicious downward-spinning spiral in which they [are] trapped." 13 But neither direction promises much hope of escape from the perils of personal and cultural dissolution. The Settlement is aptly named. It is a place where people settle into the inertness of sediment,

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the residue of a sorry past of indentured servitude and a shabby, static present of destitution and waste. The towns in the novel, Victoria and Port of Spain, at least offer change, but in the creolized future they are rapidly creating, cultural identity must be sacrificed for the sake of a makeshift individual one that may amount, as Naipaul says elsewhere, to little more than "personal exigency" (BDM, p. 42). And deeply rooted within both the Settlement and the city, past and future, is a dispassionate and relentless "process of putrefaction" (p. 200). The narrative core of The Chip-Chip Gatherers is the rise and fall of Egbert Ramsaran seen through the eyes of a wickedly perceptive narrator, a harshly judgmental community, and Egbert's somewhat bewildered son Wilbert. Egbert Ramsaran, who taught himself to read and left his family's shabby home rather than remain in the Settlement, "a fate that filled him with terror" (p. 30), develops an obsession with power. After becoming the wealthy proprietor of a trucking company in nearby Victoria, he uses his economic strength to bully the people with whom he grew up—"the living representatives of the fate he had so narrowly avoided" (p. 30). Egbert concentrates virtually his entire will on the destructive goal of mentally divorcing himself from his origins by terrorizing and humiliating its inhabitants, who regularly come to his house as supplicants: "He grew to depend on t h e m . . . to convince himself that his escape was neither dream nor illusion" (p. 30). They endure his insults and tyranny because they, too, need reassurance that it is possible to break out of the Settlement "no matter how unpromising everything seemed" (p. 27). Clearly, the Settlement assumes a metaphorical hellishness, but there can be little doubt that the quotidian reality of these cane country villages, with their squalor and hopelessness, was grim indeed.14 Egbert's need for self-assertion and self-sufficiency is so total that he is incapable of affection. He is "animated by no idea larger than himself' and thus is "tied to nothing" (p. 29). Given the prominence of the concept of nothingness in Naipaul's writing, the significance of this latter phrase probably extends well beyond its immediate social frame of reference. Egbert's self-imposed separateness is in an odd way the one true link between his experience and that of the rest of humanity, because in Shiva Naipaul's world everyone is, in some awful, fundamental sense, "tied to nothing." The mere social implications of Egbert's monomania are bad enough, however, for all the people around him. He keeps his illegitimate son Singh on an "estate" in the country that is a "disordered, untended wasteland" (p. 42); he refuses to have anything to do with his wayward brothers; and he is particularly cruel to his wife, Rani, a homely Settlement woman whom he marries largely to demonstrate his scorn for and independence from Trinidad's wealthy Indian families. Only one

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person considers him a friend—Vishnu Bholai, a childhood companion who owns the Settlement's only grocery store. When the unhappy Rani dies, her conniving mother, Basdai, is distraught at the "catastrophe," but not for the reasons one might expect: "The prospect of losing her connection—however tenuous it had been— with Egbert Ramsaran was too terrible for her to contemplate" (p. 72). She looks around for a substitute and finds one in Sushila, a distant kinswoman with an appetite for power and an instinct for the main chance. She arranges for Sushila to move into Ramsaran's house to "take care" of him and young Wilbert, but the scheme backfires. Sushila soon colonizes the entire household, dominating Ramsaran as no one else has ever done, moving her sensitive, bookish daughter Sita in with her, and eventually banishing all the Settlement supplicants, including Basdai herself, from the premises. For more than four years Sushila reigns supreme. To please her, Egbert sends Sita to a private day school in Port of Spain and exchanges his "estate" for a run-down house on the beach, transferring Singh unceremoniously from that miserable property to the new one. Like every other victory in Naipaul's world, however, Sushila's proves to be ephemeral. Having always valued her independence as much as her power over others, she is disoriented when the discovery of a gray hair triggers the awareness that her success in manipulating people has always depended upon her remaining youthful, attractive, and energetic. The evidence of her own physical decay is devastating. From this point on her desire to escape the trap in which she finds herself competes with her fear of being turned out. The tension between the two impulses eats away at the self-confidence that has always protected her ego and seen her through all difficulties. She becomes insanely jealous of Sita and finally, in a spasm of irrationality, destroys most of her belongings and disappears, leaving her daughter with the Ramsarans. The novel's endgame is swift. When he understands that Sushila is not going to return, the once invincible Egbert suffers a stroke. Sita, who has developed an impossible attachment to Vishnu Bholai's polished and haughty son Julian, stays on with Wilbert to look after the old man. After Julian leaves for England to study medicine and Ramsaran dies, Sita finds an office job in Port of Spain and Wilbert attempts, with disastrous results, to run the trucking company as dictatorially as his father had. At last, unable to endure his life in the now empty family compound, Wilbert begins to spend evenings with the Bholais (whom he once despised) and inevitably blunders into proposing to one of their daughters. The closing pages find Wilbert at his father's ramshackle beach house with his new wife, trapped in a loveless marriage, tied to nothing.

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The images evoked in these final paragraphs—decay, entrapment, vacancy—are the iconic aspects of ideas that constitute much of the novel's meaning. The Chip-Chip Gatherers can be seen, through the widest lens, as a drama pitting individual acts of will against the chillingly powerful tendency toward disorganization and decay that constantly threatens the self and all its fragile structures. Although Naipaul's characters stubbornly resist entrapment in situations that render their lives meaningless, what they most fear, and what casts a pall of futility over all their actions, is the possibility that nothingness is the ineluctable ground of their being, a great dark maw that spit them out and will swallow them up again. This anxiety is such a pervasive and persistent force in The Chip-Chip Gatherers that the dialectic between tradition and creolization, so central to Fireflies, seems almost beside the point. Egbert Ramsaran's own entrance into the wider society of Trinidad has less to do with the politics of creolization than with his obsessive fear of the void. For Ramsaran, the Settlement is its most visible sign. "Decay," the novel's narrator observes, "was the very core of its existence" (p. 172). Physical deterioration, the decline from youth and beauty, is "swift, startling and irreversible" (p. 172), but more ominously, even individual identities seem to decompose. Ramsaran tries to re-create himself to escape this fate; he builds a new identity, a house, a business, all to stave off the destructive process epitomized by the Settlement. Even before leaving the Settlement, he contemptuously dismisses it as " 'a dungheap' " (p. 13), a place of decomposition, a place of waste. After moving from his parents' hut to Port of Spain, he changes his name from Ashok to Egbert and becomes a Presbyterian, but his motives are "severely practical" (p. 15). He is not interested in acceptance by the wealthy commercial families; indeed, he spurns them by choosing Rani as his wife. His conversion and name change are only means to an end: power, or, more precisely, a makeshift sense of security springing from an act of sheer will. For many years Egbert rules with unquestioned authority from "the seat of his empire" (p. 17), his company's fortresslike headquarters in the town of Victoria. But after his wife Rani dies, his psychological fortifications begin to show signs of erosion: More than a burden had been lifted from him by her death. A lifetime's iron restraint was weakening. Egbert Ramsaran was losing the desire to cling to the rope he had spun across the abyss. He was running out of energy. He was tired. Freed of one burden, there arose the gnawing temptation to be freed of all burdens, (p. 69) It is at this point that Basdai introduces her son-in-law to Sushila. Immediately Egbert sees the advantage of having a reasonably attractive

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woman—not too far past her prime—living under his roof. But what makes the liaison work, beyond mere sexual attraction, is the fact that the two share an intense loathing for the Settlement. For this reason alone, the success of Sushila's "assault" (p. 156) on the fortress is ensured. Like Ramsaran himself at an earlier age, Sushila is a rebel; also like him, she has re-created herself to fight off fears of decay, entrapment, and the loss of identity. Growing up in Basdai's household, she was a "wayward, reckless young woman who, by the time she was sixteen had twice fled from the constraints of the Settlement" (pp. 73-74). Not long afterward she gave birth out of wedlock to Sita." 'Marriage didn't agree with me' " (p. 90), she tells Ramsaran years later. When Sita was old enough to walk, Sushila left for good, returning only for brief unannounced visits to her daughter. No one has dared question her openly about her means of making a living during the long periods of her absence. When Basdai first approaches her with the idea of moving into the Ramsaran house to "replace" Rani, Sushila resists. Since childhood she has guarded her independence, and she is especially careful to maintain as much distance as possible between herself and the Settlement. This has been her rope across the abyss. But suddenly she sees an opportunity to acquire more power and security than she has thus far known. She agrees to give the plan a try, "determined not to yield an inch of her sovereignty" (p. 97) to Ramsaran. What begins as a relatively equal match ends as a rout, with an increasingly weakened and dependent Egbert thoroughly dominated by Sushila. Sushila's daughter, Sita, the novel's most sympathetic character, struggles to assert her independence while maintaining a degree of dignity that her relatives regard with suspicion and hostility. Brought up as a poor relation in Basdai's family, she is constantly ridiculed and harassed for reading books and wearing shoes. Her mother's brief, infrequent visits do little to strengthen her sense of self. Sushila, in fact, impresses her more as "a shifting, impermanent combination of scent and sound and colour" (p. 170) than as a real human being. She wants to love her mother, but that love has "nothing to which it [can] attach itself" (p. 170). Like Egbert Ramsaran—but in Sita's case, not of her own choice—she is tied to nothing. From an early age she uses her imagination to try to fill the void: " 'I too have a mother like everybody else,' she reassured herself over and over again. 'A mother . . . a mother... a mother.' She repeated the word in an endless hypnotic chant" (p. 170). The reassurance does not work. The more she repeats the word, the more alien and unreal it seems. But this exercise is the germ of a strategy that will see Sita through many difficult times—a strategy based not on sexual or monetary power but on the power of language and imagination.

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Sita is the novel's storyteller. She develops "the habit of talking to herself" and quickly discovers that through "her subtle and secret magic" she can "create, destroy and reconstruct the world around her" (p. 171). This is how she copes with Basdai's abuse, with being called worthless, the child of a " 'no-good mother' " (p. 171). She sets herself apart from the others, cultivates a belief in "her own singular destiny," and invests every act she performs "with a ritual significance" that is part of "a grand design" (p. 171). Naipaul makes it clear, by placing this passage immediately before one describing the horrors of the Settlement's decay, that Sita's magic—her ability to possess and transform through naming—is essentially protective. That function of words is adumbrated twice in Fireflies: when Ram Lutchman, pleased that there exist words to describe him, says to Doreen," 'Call me what you will' " (p. 182) and, again, toward the end of the novel, when his widow Baby is "gripped by a wordless grief" (p. 405). For Ram, being named—even in Prospero's words by the representative of the colonial order—is preferable to the nonexistence implied by anonymity, whereas for Baby, the loss of even words to structure and interpret her grief leaves her with "nothing" (p. 405). Just before that holiday dinner, Ram, having bought the "classics" Coral Island and Treasure Island as Christmas presents for his ungrateful sons, says to Baby," 'Literature is one of the most important things in this world' " (p. 170). Few characters in The Chip-Chip Gatherers, aside from Sita, share those sentiments; few, in fact, have any regard for words or understand their magic. The Settlement people consider Sita's reading simply a form of pretense. Mrs. Bholai sees to it that her own children are educated, but her purpose in doing so is purely utilitarian: It will enhance their social status, enabling Julian to go to medical school one day and the daughters to make suitable marriages. The same can be said of Egbert Ramsaran, who once taught himself to read as a means of making his way up in the world outside the Settlement but in later life reads only "popular accounts of the Second World War" (p. 20) and cheap detective stories. His son Wilbert is not interested in reading at all. Only Julian Bholai comes close to sharing Sita's sensitivity to literature, but even he does not share her comprehension of the power of words. Julian is a vain, pampered boy who enjoys his surreptitious meetings with Sita when the library van makes its periodic visits to the neighborhood, but he is in no way committed to her. Although she is more attached to him, she is "under no illusions as to the outcome of their friendship" (p. 234). Long before Julian's departure for England, Sita has learned "to teach and train herself to be dispassionate" by keeping a diary, which becomes her primary "technique of self-preservation" (p. 235):

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By writing down everything that happened between them, she was able to distance herself.... She wrote down their conversations word for word and read them over to herself. She might have been writing about two people who were strangers to her.... The Sita represented in the diary was not the Sita who wrote the diary, (p. 235)

Through this and similar strategies—all involving her power to refashion situations through the imaginative use of language—Sita endures first the Settlement, then four years of living in the Ramsaran house, and finally her mother's mental deterioration and growing hostility toward her. In contrast to Egbert Ramsaran, who tosses his detective stories contemptuously under his bed to gather dust and turn to junk, Sita invests in her diary and other books an almost talismanic significance. For this reason, Ramsaran's last and basest act of cruelty breaks Sita's spirit. Realizing that Sushila is not coming back, he takes out the full force of his fury on her daughter, commanding her to gather together "all them expensive books" (p. 248) and burn them. Sita complies. Fittingly, the blast of heat from this fire precipitates Egbert's stroke. And although Sita sees the world as "a dead and arid place" (p. 255) from this point on, she does survive, securing a clerical position in a government ministry and setting off for Port of Spain to begin a new phase of her life. It is perhaps a hopeful sign that Sita, before saying goodbye to Wilbert, sits down for a moment to collect her thoughts because, she tells him, that is what people do in Russian novels. Wilbert, armed with neither his father's iron will nor Sita's imagination, drifts into what Sita, with her mastery of language, has been able to conceptualize explicitly and face down: a life "riddled with futility" (p. 255). Trained to do nothing but run the trucking company in the manner of his father, and lacking the ability even to do that, Wilbert is trapped in a life of which "the pattern, the very stuff" (p. 292) is a random skein of accidents. Nothing he does matters, he reflects numbly. In such a frame of mind, and to escape the "ghosts" that haunt the Ramsaran house, he begins to spend more and more time with the Bholais, who constitute, loosely speaking, the novel's comic norm. When he visited their house as a boy, Wilbert had looked at their family photographs on the walls and beheld a world he "had never known: a vision, however perverse and distorted, of tender sentiment and pride" (p. 117). Long before, his mother, Rani, had tried to offer him a glimpse of such a world, but already too much his father's son, he had spurned it. Now he returns to the Bholai household, and despite the constant bickering he witnesses there, he is fascinated by the "routines of family life" (p. 297). But Wilbert is like a tourist in exotic climes. Although he marries Shanty Bholai (stumbling into the match, characteristically, almost by accident), he cannot

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expunge his bitterness or his sense of futility. At the end of the novel his chances of replicating even the Bholais' very dubious "happiness" appear remote. Wilbert is the one character whose story spans the entire novel, from the first page to the last, and it is through his eyes that Naipaul allows the reader to peer into his world's true heart of darkness. Disorganizational forces run rampant everywhere in that world, as various humanly fashioned structures, including families, fall apart. The Ramsaran house is in a state of dilapidation. The "rusting, decaying hulks" (p. 10) of discarded trucks litter the unkempt pasture. The so-called country estate, before it is sold to buy the tumbledown beach house, is overgrown with weeds. The Settlement functions, at least in the minds of Egbert, Sushila, and Sita, as the very fountainhead of decay. Although the human face of this entropic process is most vividly dramatized by Egbert Ramsaran's "capacity for destruction" (p. 30), it can be observed in other characters as well. Egbert's forcing Sita to burn her books is the novel's climactic irruption of that destructiveness, but it is far from the only one. Wilbert's callous disposal of his mother's painstakingly assembled stamp collection and, later, his angry dismantling of Julian's model airplanes follow the same pattern. The stamps and the planes are, like Sita's books, objectifications of the characters' attempts to cobble together identities that extend beyond those imposed on them by others, identities that afford them some scrap of personal security through private conceptions of the self, stories they tell about themselves. One of Wilbert's experiences in Port of Spain brings the reality and pervasiveness of decay and destruction into sharp focus. Before his father's death, Wilbert is given to wandering around the city's market, even though he is always sickened by what he sees, a Pynchonesque cityscape of human waste: "The odour of corruption was everywhere. Men and women decayed as the fruit and vegetables they were selling... sat crouched on the sacking where their wares were scattered" (p. 198). He observes the "mutilated, the diseased, the starving" (p. 198). One denizen of this hell haunts him more than others, a woman with "stumps for legs" (p. 199) who moves along the steaming pavement using her hands, shouting, " 'Make way! I don't want nobody to mash me!' " (p. 199). The phrase rings in Wilbert's ears long afterward; it is a plea, he seems to understand, that could be voiced with equal sincerity, and equal futility, by virtually anyone, including himself. On one of these visits to the market he is nearly overwhelmed by the power and the variety of the deterioration: Wilbert had the odd sensation of being cut loose from all that was normal, predictable and certain.... The stench intensified. He began to

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feel giddy and somewhat faint. The external and internal became confused He was embalmed in the process of putrefaction; drifting off into the vastnesses of an uncharted ocean whose deeps were composed of successive layers of degeneracy, exceeding everything he had yet experienced. World upon world of darkness without beginning or end. His identity was being shattered and pulverized, (p. 200)

All the nightmarish elements of The Chip-Chip Gatherers are distilled in this horrific vision. Wilbert feels "cut loose"—tied to nothing—because he perceives himself part of a process of general, universalized rot, involving not just his physical body but his mind as well, and even his sense of a discrete self. The imagery of the novel's concluding episode—Wilbert's "honeymoon" at the beach house—recapitulates the nightmare with only a slight diminution of intensity: a ruined house, broken windows, a dead coconut tree, a mangy bitch with a litter of flea-infested puppies. Early one morning Wilbert watches some of the women and children from a nearby village gather chip-chip on the beach. These shellfish are so small that an entire bucketful provides only a small mouthful of food. Wilbert is oppressed by the futility of their labors and once again, as he did in the market, he feels caught up, unable to separate himself from the scene. He trains his attention on a dead coconut tree, its wood worn so smooth that it gives a false impression of living flesh. The brief metaphor that flashes through the vacancies of Wilbert's mind is a lie, of course, but it is a lie that momentarily shields him from the truth: a dead tree "condemned to rot slowly on this wind-swept, shimmering beach of swooping vultures, starving dogs, chip-chip gatherers and himself' (p. 320). Singh, Wilbert's racially mixed half-brother who is now "dismissed as a madman" (p. 310) even by the chip-chip-gathering villagers, once had a dream of making a garden out of the wilderness of the Ramsaran "estate," but he concluded bitterly that" 'it would never work here' " (p. 62). Singh's "here" is all-encompassing—the entire world of the novel. Of all its inhabitants, only Sita retains enough of her capacity for dreaming or storytelling to suggest an intellectually viable strategy for engaging the void, and her powers are considerably eroded by the time she leaves Victoria. After she is forced to burn her books, she stops reading and explores with sadness "the empty spaces in her head" (p. 255). But her life does not end there. Just before she leaves the Ramsaran house for Port of Spain, she realizes that "there [is] no one even to lie to her. She [has] to invent her own lies" (p. 286). Almost immediately Wilbert enters the room, and Sita sits down for a moment as characters do in Russian novels. She is still marginally capable, it seems, of working her "subtle and secret magic" (p. 171) by inventing "her own lies." Sita's talent for narrating her life is distantly akin to Wilbert's perception of the

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smooth dead tree trunk as living flesh, but Sita's imaginative and intellectual power is much greater. Wilbert says of the mangy puppies, " 'Sometimes the right to live is no good at all' " (p. 317), vaguely intuiting the wisdom of Silenus. But Sita's understanding is more comprehensive; she may well know, like Nietzsche, that "action requires the veils of illusion,"15 and that only through inventing lies can the horrible be tamed. And although Sita's future does not look very bright, her solitary contemplations have led her to a secret that few of Shiva Naipaul's other characters possess: the author's own knowledge that the salvaging of the self is an ongoing process, a constant shoring up of human fragments against inevitable ruin. A Hot Country: Too Much Nothing The desolation of the beach scene at the end of The Chip-Chip Gatherers looks forward to Naipaul's third and last novel, in which he projects the image of an entire, enervated society stranded on that shore. The country in question is the newly independent Republic of Cuyama—"a million people trapped in the sun-stunned vacuum separating ocean from jungle."16 A Hot Country (1983) is Naipaul's most overtly political novel, a work that explores the relationship between existential emptiness (such as that felt by characters in Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers) and the political marginalization of a hastily assembled "nation" composed of various peoples " 'washed up and stranded by the tides of history' " (p. 144). Naipaul's fictional treatment of this land grows directly out of his earlier study of the circumstances that brought the People's Temple to Jonestown.17 In Journey to Nowhere he casts a coldly critical eye on Guyana itself, a barren field whose political and cultural denudation fosters corruption of all kinds and allows the grossest forms of tyranny to spring up lush and rampant. The Cuyama of A Hot Country is the Guyana of the 1970s, complete with its increasingly megalomaniacal and autocratic president,18 its "intellectual regression" {Journey to Nowhere, hereafter JN, p. 26) down "the Third World road" (JN, p. 33), and its "vocabulary of resentment" substituting angry slogans for rational thought and "masquerade" or "fantasy" (JN, pp. 26-27) for reality.19 Admittedly, Naipaul's ideas are not brought to life in A Hot Country nearly as powerfully as they are in the complex, dramatic orchestrations of his first two novels, but the lack of scope is at least partly counterbalanced by a greater intensity of focus. A Hot Country is a leaner, sparer book than its predecessors. There are only two central characters, Aubrey St. Pierre and his wife, Dina, and most of the plot consists of an account of their rather uneventful lives, related mainly through

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Dina's reflections and reminiscences. Her East Indian grandfather, years before, took "the Presbyterian bait" (p. 106) and changed the family's name to Mallingham. On her mother's side the ancestral picture is cloudier, but Mrs. Mallingham is said to be "enraptured by that modicum of Portuguese blood flowing through her veins" (p. 107) and speaks disparagingly of her husband's " 'coolie relations' " (p. 107). In the novel's only scene from her childhood, Dina denies the existence of God, prompting her father to beat her and cry out," 'Is my life a joke to you?' " (p. 8). Dina later realizes that she has inadvertently made her father glimpse the truth behind those words. Only as an adult does she understand the full implication of that childhood incident. Her father's father, in converting to a religion of the colonial masters, "had divested himself of everything that he could unreservedly lay claim to. Not his religion, not even his name, could he call his own"; and in making the change "from Mahalingam to Mallingham he had not moved from darkness to light but had merely exchanged one kind of defeat for another" (pp. 105-106). This sense that she is "formless, lacking a geometry" (p. 105) leaves a lasting mark on Dina's personality. She drifts through life, earning a degree at the national university, taking a job at Aubrey St. Pierre's bookshop, eventually marrying Aubrey because she sees "no alternative" (p. 120), and bearing a child for whom she feels little attachment. To her husband she says," 'I come out of darkness, out of blankness. I have no past' " (p. 44), and she confides to herself, five years into her marriage, even franker thoughts: "Life—her life—had finally been sucked dry of its charms. She had depleted her reserves of energy, of inspiration, of life. Only bitterness dripped and dribbled out of her" (p. 119). In her dreams she sees herself as a corpse; in her waking life, she surrenders herself to morose meditations on the emptiness and futility of her being. She feels "stranded in the middle of nowhere" (both literally and figuratively) and desires nothing more than a simple "vision of the road ahead" (p. 121). The wish to acquire some sense of control, structure, or, as she puts it, "geometry" leads Dina into superstition. She begins to believe in signs and omens and seeks the services (like Baby Lutchman in Fireflies) of a fortune-teller, not just to know the future but "to expose and acknowledge herself to herself' (p. 171) as a kind of therapy, a way of comprehending a soul she regards as incomplete. Like Sita in The Chip-Chip Gatherers, she has had to use her imagination to keep going: " 'There's nothing holding me together. Every day I have to re-invent myself' " (p. 160). Sadly, however, even that talent fails her, and she admits privately that she has "come to the end of her modest little road" (p. 119). Dina's "coolie relations" are a marginalized group in postcolonial Cuyama, and her husband's people are even more so. The St. Pierres are

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descended from the slave holding " 'aristocrats' " (p. 39) of the period before emancipation, when sugar cane made many white fortunes. In the last century and a half of colonial rule, families like the St. Pierres continued to cultivate cane using indentured labor from India—Dina's ancestors—and they continued also to monopolize economic and political power in the colony. After independence arrived in the 1960s, the few remaining white Creoles experienced a steadily rising level of anxiety, fear, and confusion. Aubrey's father " 'grasped the fact that he would have to make new alliances and new friendships in unlikely quarters' " (p. 144), but his mother, and many like her, never really accepted the altered state of affairs. Her last days are spent in a new house "in a distant, modishly modern suburb established on lands reclaimed from the coastal swamp" (p. 136) where she concludes angrily that "the certainties on which she had been reared had proved to be no certainties at all" (p. 138). The residential area in which she lives appears to bear witness to that conclusion. Within twenty years of its construction in "a burst of optimism" (p. 138), the suburb begins to decay; houses vacated one by one are allowed to fall into ruin, litter accumulates in the gutters, and packs of stray dogs roam the streets at night. When Aubrey visits the house after his mother's death, he finds a family of squatters living there among the things she had cherished. " 'I never imagined the final act would be so casual,' " he tells Dina." 'One expects more from a historic moment.' " Dina agrees, saying, " 'Life should reach its climaxes with more of a flourish' " (p. 146). But this is the way decay works, and as Eliot knew, this is indeed the way a world ends. The marriage of Dina and Aubrey is a strange construct. She agrees to marry him out of boredom and an inability to think of any other way to "push forward the winding road of her life" (p. 120); he marries her out of idealism. He feels "compassion" and "tender pity" for her and frankly admits to himself that "other ways of loving" are "beyond his reach" (p. 47). The marriage becomes a loveless trap for both of them. Naipaul throws Dina and Aubrey together almost as if to suggest that two tormented, incomplete personalities do not make a whole, and the emotional sterility of this interracial union, at the dramatic epicenter of the novel, is a virtual frontal assault on the very idea of creolization. Aubrey himself is as peculiar a character as his wife—at once idealistic, pedantic, and somewhat foolish. He speaks to Dina of his slave-holding ancestors "with a mixture of pride and disparagement" (p. 71) and declares that his own ambition is to devote himself to his country and "his" people, yet his accomplishments are minimal. He runs a bookstore perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy that is patronized largely by beggars, drunks, and a few of his intellectual friends, and he occasionally writes letters to the editors of foreign

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newspapers and brief articles "of local interest"(77) that have equally little impact. Only when his college friend Alex arrives from England for a short visit do these characteristics coalesce into some kind of focus. Alex instantly recognizes Aubrey's "deficiency of imagination" and "an intelligence which, looked at coldly, was not in any way remarkable" (p. 73). He sees in Aubrey a life wasted, "a man approaching ineffectual middleage, shorn of any bloom of promise, talking himself into oblivion with a calm, pedantic desperation" (p. 99). In the end, Aubrey comes to much the same conclusion himself. Although Dina once thinks that Aubrey will "never let go of his faith" (p. 64), his idealism, like the dreams of his wife, his mother, and Dina's father, begins to unravel. He finally understands that he is "like an insect trapped inside a bottle, vainly, frantically, whirring and beating its wings in a delirium of desperation" (p. 130); his anguished confession to Dina tells his whole threadbare story:" 'I don't know . . . what I really believe.... My life has been a series of futile gestures' " (p. 149). The most extended of those gestures—aside from the marriage— has been the Aurora Bookshop, "a project dedicated to the elevation of the Cuyamese intellect" (p. 24). Aubrey writes in a letter to Alex that in opening this enterprise he is " 'making a modest contribution to the spiritual uplift of the Cuyamese people' " (p. 77). As soon as Dina goes to work at the shop, however, she realizes that it does nothing of the sort. In fact, the bookstore is emblematic of the utter failure of the written word, of storytelling, to provide any lasting protection from the terrors of the void. A typical day at the bookshop finds Dina alone with no customers to serve, while Aubrey sits in the back room, also alone, pecking away at his typewriter, either writing yet another ineffectual letter or working on an endless novel based on his family history. Neither of these attempts to harness the power of language bears any fruit, and Aubrey's effort to persuade Dina to try " 'putting pen to paper' " is just as unsuccessful; she looks at him "as if he were mad" (p. 126). The only effective use of words in A Hot Country is political propaganda. At the time of Alex's visit, the president of Cuyama is about to hold a plebiscite on the rewriting of the country's democratic constitution. The aim is to place all power in the hands of himself and his party. Slogans like "One People. One Struggle. One Redeemer" (p. 84) are displayed on posters and banners throughout the country, as political discourse is twisted into nonreality, "mere froth churned by the chaos" (p. 184). For Dina, always the realist, neither the slogans nor the new constitution will make any difference: "They had, a long time ago, passed beyond the stage of mere corruption.... Banditry, cynicism and lies had

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been made a way of life; become, it could be said, an ideology" (p. 59). This trend toward ideology is also what concerns Pavana Leslie in In Times Like These as Belize prepares for its independence. But the sensibility behind that novel is far less pessimistic, and from Pavana's point of view, the chances of overcoming the "hungry quest for power" (p. 159) tarted up as ideology, replacing lies with truth, and taking root in a real place are far greater than in Naipaul's "sun-stunned vacuum." Yet Dina identifies with her own wretched country as closely as Pavana does with Belize—perhaps even more so: "She had spent all her life in this town. Looking out at its derelict perspectives, it seemed to her that she was looking out at no more than an extension of herself" (p. 176). While escorting Alex on a tour of the city, she averts her eyes from the "shells of burnt-out buildings," the "archways leading nowhere," the potholes, the litter, the gangs, the shanties, the smoldering fires, and surrenders herself to sullen reflection: "In this chaos she lived. Out of this chaos she had been formed. It was not easy to comprehend" (p. 151). Cuyama's "derelict perspectives," as Dina perceives them, obviously encompass a good deal more than visual blight. "Nothing worthwhile had ever been created on this sterile patch of earth," she says to herself, unconsciously echoing Froude, "and nothing worthwhile ever would be" (p. 64). The physical, cultural, and especially the political decomposition of Cuyama that she sees taking place before her eyes frightens Dina into numbness. Like all of Shiva Naipaul's more perceptive characters, what she fears most is disintegration, the void, "the formless night" (p. 120). Her identification with the "mongrelised ghost of a country" (p. 160) that is rapidly sinking into chaos only increases her terror. On her way back from the fortune-teller to the bookshop one evening, she listens to the "orgiastic rage" coming from a loudspeaker and thinks about the words and slogans of the increasingly violent mobs, with their "displays of frenzy" and their "desire to destroy" (p. 185). What makes it all so terrible—and what makes Naipaul's world so terrible—is the extent to which the external and the internal seem to converge. The mobs, she concludes, do "not have a self, a soul, to call their own" (p. 184), but this is exactly how she assesses her own condition. And Cuyama itself, the "vacuum imprisoned between ocean and jungle" (p. 64), has its analogue in her own mind, "ballooning with vacancy, stunned by i t s . . . emptiness" (p. 176). To say that these final images of a crumbling postcolonial order and a slowly dying Cuyama of the soul are depressing is to understate the case; but A Hot Country, easily the bleakest of all Shiva Naipaul's fiction, at least possesses the virtue of honesty, articulating as it does with startling clarity the vision of a writer who, like Wallace Stevens's snowman, sees nothing that is not there, and the Nothing that is.

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Notes 1. It is interesting to note, though it is probably not greatly significant, that V. S. Naipaul moved to England when Trinidad was still a British colony, and he retains his British passport; Shiva, however, didn't leave Trinidad until the early 1960s and goes out of his way to emphasize his Trinidad citizenship. See Shiva Naipaul, North of South: An African Journey (New York: Penguin, 1980), 29. 2. Shiva Naipaul, Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces (New York: Penguin, 1985), 210. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 3. I have borrowed the phrase from Samuel Selvon. For a more detailed account of the Indian presence in Trinidad, see Dolly Zulakha Hassan, V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 1-55; and for a discussion of the Indian community's ambivalence toward creolization, see Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 111-115. One of the best descriptions of the creolization of East Indians as seen from within is Selvon's "Three into one can't go—East Indian, Trinidadian, West Indian," in Foreday Morning: Selected Prose 1946-1986 (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1989), 211-225. 4. Michael Thelwell, Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts: Essays on Struggle (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 201. 5. V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (New York: MacMillan, 1967), 11. 6. Shiva Naipaul, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy (New York: Penguin, 1982), 26-28. This book has also been published under the title Black and White. 7. This story, about an elderly Englishman living in a shabby boardinghouse, appears to be Shiva Naipaul's fictional foray into Englishness—an attempt somwhat reminiscent of his brother's "English" novella, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. 8. Wilson Harris, "The Unresolved Constitution," Caribbean Quarterly 14.1&2 (1968): 41. 9. Harris, "Unresolved," 45. 10. Wilson Harris, "Exile, Philosophic Myth, Creative Truth, Thrust and Necessity: An Interview with Wilson Harris," by Kalu Ogbaa, Caribbean Quarterly 29.2 (June 1983): 55. 11. Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies (New York: Penguin, 1983), 7-8. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 12. Any of a number of forms of ceremonial worship in Hinduism. See Benjamin Walker, The Hindu World: An Encyclopedic Survey of Hinduism, II (New York: Praeger, 1968), 253. 13. Shiva Naipaul, The Chip-Chip Gatherers (New York: Penguin, 1983), 27. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 14. One of the most wrenchingly graphic pictures of this way of life can be found in Harold Sonny Ladoo's No Pain Like This Body (London: Heinemann, 1987). 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 60. 16. Shiva Naipaul, A Hot Country (New York: Penguin Abacus, 1989), 5. Subsequent page references are to this edition. This novel was originally published as Love and Death in a Hot Country (1983). 17. Naipaul traces the bizarre odyssey of the People's Temple from its roots in the "twisted" idealism of the 1960s, and further back, in "the New World

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dream of rebirth and self-realization" (JN, p. 206) to its shocking end in rural Guyana. Along the way he makes many fascinating observations, not only about Guyana but about the United States and its unique susceptibility to cults and self-fulfillment schemes. 18. Naipaul was writing about Guyana at a time when the previously proWestern president, Forbes Burnham, had declared the country a socialist cooperative republic, assumed dictatorial powers, and established close ties to Cuba. More recently, after a period of democratization, the East Indian politician Dr. Cheddi Jagan, for decades a leader of the barely tolerated opposition, was elected Guyana's president. 19. Numerous details in the novel conclusively demonstrate that Cuyama is not merely based on Guyana but is Guyana. Both are former British colonies on the mainland of South America; both have been occupied by the British, Dutch, and Spanish; both were settled mainly along a coastal strip, beyond which lies a trackless interior inhabited by Amerindians and a few maroons, or "bush folk"—escaped slaves who made their way into the jungle and retained many of their African customs. The capital of Guyana is Georgetown; that of Cuyama is Charlestown. And the topography of Charlestown, described in detail in the novel, is virtually identical to that of the Guyanese city, including an Independence Park and botanical gardens near the Anglican cathedral and a Park Hotel just down the street.

Caryl Phillips

5 Caryl Phillips

The End of All Exploring

If there was nothing, there was everything to be made. With this prodigious ambition one began. Derek Walcott, "What the Twilight Says: An Overture," from Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

"I think my publishers... assumed . . . that I would bring my sensibility further and further into England. In fact, the reverse has happened." Caryl Phillips, from an interview with Frank Birbalsingh, 1991

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The Final Passage: The Book of the Parents In Caryl Phillips's play Strange Fruit, a young black man of Caribbean origin says to his English girlfriend, "We are here because you were there."1 Variations on this slogan have appeared on many British walls and fences, especially in areas where people from former colonies have settled. They are, in effect, responses to more hostile messages, like the one Leila Preston sees from the window of a bus in The Final Passage: "IF YOU WANT A NIGGER NEIGHBOUR VOTE LABOUR." 2 These stark declarations suggest two of the main parameters of Caryl Phillips's work: the difficulties endured by the West Indian community in England and the historical background of its expatriation. Beginning in his early plays (Strange Fruit, Where There Is Darkness) with the subject he knew best—West Indians struggling against long odds to fit into British society—Phillips has moved into an exploration of family and cultural history in his five works of fiction.3 Born in St. Kitts, Phillips was taken to England as an infant by his parents and grew up there. In a sense, his career has been a mirror image of V. S. Naipaul's, who was born and reared in the Caribbean but has spent a large portion of his life remaking himself into something else.4 Phillips has devoted his intellectual efforts to the task of rediscovering (and reinventing) his own true past, creating a place for memory to inhabit. During the course of this imaginative passage across the seas of time and space, he has encountered many forms of disinheritance and translated them into the fractured consciousness of his characters. In The Final Passage the different fragments of Leila's personality—wife, daughter, mother, island girl, and refugee in England—are at war with one another. At the end of the novel she still has not succeeded in putting those pieces together. In A State of Independence Bertram Francis is dogged by the memory of his dead brother, his doppelganger and the novel's shadow protagonist. And in Cambridge the bifurcated nature of the Caribbean's post-Columbian history is reflected in the division of the narrative itself between the perspective of an African slave and that of a plantation owner's daughter. The careful plotting, constructional economy, and fluid dialogue of Phillips's novels can probably be attributed to the early experience he gained from writing for the stage.5 And although his plays are by no means mere apprentice works, they do adumbrate several ideas that are developed more fully in the fiction. In one way or another, all of the plays deal with a concept of exile that embraces both the spatial displacements of the diaspora—the great migration to England that Louise Bennett called "colonization in reverse"—and a temporal dislocation from a continuous past that would give the present meaning. They also

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touch on other issues that receive more extensive treatment in the fiction: the place of blacks in a white-dominated world, the possibility of return to an ancestral point of origin, and, above all, the recovery of history as a way of restoring continuity to a disrupted culture. The importance of history in Caryl Phillips's work is made clear by his choice of an epigraph for his first novel, The Final Passage:

A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England, (p. 3) The passage, from Eliot's "Little Gidding," is only partly ironic in the context of The Final Passage. The novel's sad revelation is that history cannot be "now and England" except for the English themselves. But the first few lines should be taken literally and without irony. Phillips's fiction can be seen, in fact, as a meditation on his own people's true history. In The Final Passage and A State of Independence, he begins with material drawn from his own experience and that of his parents—personal, family history—and in Higher Ground, Cambridge, and Crossing the River, he moves into a consideration of a broader sweep of history involving colonization, slavery, and the original African diaspora.6 It is significant that the lines in "Little Gidding" immediately following the lines Phillips chooses for his Final Passage epigraph are

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.7 The reason for Phillips's ambitious reconstruction of history—which in his case entails the assumption of voices that cross borders not only of time and space but also of gender, race, and culture—is similar to Ishmael's reason for writing down his story for his children in "Arrival of the Snake-Woman." As Phillips himself puts it in The European Tribe, when "history is distorted, the literature of a people often becomes its history, its writers the keepers of past, present, and future."8 For the Caribbean writer it is this very distortion, along with all the other forms

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of estrangement imposed by colonialism, that makes art both possible and necessary. Although The Final Passage is Phillips's first extended work of prose fiction, it is a mature and technically accomplished novel. The plot, with its numerous time shifts, seems to lurch nervously back and forth between past and present (the first section is entitled "The End") as it gradually moves forward, like a great slow boat. The result is that the reader is forced to experience the characters' own spatial and temporal dislocations, their sense of frequently being out of place or out of time, and their difficulty in seeing the way ahead. The narrative method also reflects Phillips's concern with the problem of conceiving and rendering any kind of present apart from a past that gave rise to it or of imagining a past apart from a present that is its consequence. Finally, the assemblage of blocks of narrative out of chronological sequence allows Phillips to examine his fictional model of the past from different perspectives, as if looking at the facets of a crystal that cannot be apprehended whole. The title of The Final Passage, an obvious allusion to the infamous middle passage of the slave trade, refers also to the great wave of West Indian emigration to England, the "mother country," that took place after World War II. But it also refers to the writing of the book itself, a psychic voyage into an imagined past in search of that pattern of timeless moments called history. In the brief opening movement of the novel, Leila Preston and her infant son, Calvin, wait to board the ship that will take them to England. The second and longest section, "Home," fills in the immediate background of the principal characters: Leila's rocky marriage to the egotistical Michael Preston; her best friend Millie's happier relationship with her own man, Bradeth; the sudden departure of Leila's mother for Engand to obtain medical treatment; the birth of Calvin; the rapid deterioration and temporary patching up of the Prestons' marriage; and Leila's decision to follow her mother to England. Within this part of the book a number of even deeper flashbacks provide vital information about Leila's earlier suitor, Arthur, who went to America for two years and expected her to wait for him; about Michael's "outside woman" Beverley, with whom he has another child; and particularly about the older generation—Michael's grandparents, Millie's Aunt Toosie, and Leila's mother—whose words linger in the minds of the younger characters like wisps of London fog. The final three sections, "England," "The Passage," and "Winter," which make up roughly half the novel, record the grim realities of life in London and Leila's slowly evolving decision, after her mother's death, to leave Michael for good and go back to the Caribbean.9 Whether or not she finds the means to follow through with her plans remains an open question at the novel's end.

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Leila is the central consciousness of The Final Passage, and she is also the catalyst for many of the incidents that form the novel's plot. The fragmented pattern of her life, filled with gaps and missed connections, is determined to a large extent by choices she makes herself. The first and perhaps most momentous of these decisions is her selection of a husband. Her first beau (and her mother's clear favorite) is a serious-minded young man named Arthur who tells her, on the eve of his departure for America, " 'There'll come a d a y . . . when we can run the country, our way! You, the brightest girl in the High School, you shouldn't be doing a clerical j o b ' " (p. 80). Arguing that their " 'land of nothing' " can be changed into " 'a land of plenty,' " he insists that" 'there's a future here' " (p. 80). His plans are, as he says, straightforward. He will go to America for two years to further his education while Leila saves money. Then they will marry and later have a baby—a sequence of events that distinguishes Arthur from most of the island's young wastrels. But Leila, although she nods in agreement, has already made up her mind not to wait for him, feeling sure that his "simple dreams" (p. 81) mark him as a failure. Even before Arthur leaves, Leila has taken up with Michael Preston, whose energy, hot temper, and edgy assertiveness contrast sharply with Arthur's dreamy idealism. Michael seems to promise a future less planned, but more dynamic and more fraught with possibility than that which the hopelessly bourgeois Arthur offers. It is not until her wedding day that Leila realizes the implication of her decision, when Michael, "clearly drunk" (p. 51), angrily confronts her:" 'As if fucking wedding cake is important issue on a day like this I tell you what is important issue, me!' " (p. 54).To emphasize this point, he throws his drink in her face, and Leila does not see him again for several months. Sadly for Leila, the potential for success that she sees in Michael is in fact there, but because any success he achieves will depend upon scrupulous attention to himself, it cannot include her. Just after the wedding day quarrel, the preacher says to Leila," 'You land a good man there, for he got something about him that most of the other boys on this island just don't got' " (p. 56). That "something" later surfaces in England, where it becomes apparent that Michael's ego-driven ambition will enable him to survive. As in Beka Lamb and many other Caribbean novels, relationships between children and parents, or parental figures, generate much of this novel's meaning. In fact, the bond between Leila and her mother is more important than her marriage to Michael, and its incompleteness—not her problems with Michael—is the main source of her discontent. Leila has disappointed her mother by marrying Michael, and in turn, when the older woman suddenly leaves the island, Leila feels rejected and betrayed. Hard fe,elings on both sides are compounded by the distance between the two. Although her mother reared Leila with care and atten-

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tion to all her needs, she has always been somewhat reticent (except with her criticism); and for her part, Leila has always postponed a serious attempt to break through. Her decision to join her mother in England is a belated effort to remedy the situation. She certainly wishes "to escape the life she [is] trapped in" (p. 95), but there is more to it than that. Just after her mother dies Leila stops by a church ("a secluded chapel"?) and reflects bitterly: "Didn't they understand that she barely knew her mother, that everything up until now had been a preparation for knowing, not the knowing itself' (p. 132). Too much time has been spent on "preparation"; the four months of hospital visits are not enough. The first visit, Leila admits to herself, is "more interview than conversation" (p. 124), and at the end she is forced to concede that the mother who just died is still "almost a stranger" (p. 132). Closely linked to this failure is Leila's confused conception of her "new start" (p. 15) in England. Preparing to leave the island, she plans to "take as little as possible with her to remind her of the island" (p. 15), and she wishes "to erase from her mind all memory of the last year" (p. 16). Phillips's purpose in The Final Passage is to do just the opposite—to remember, to reconstruct, to fill in the past: "A people without history/ Is not redeemed from time." Not only is Leila's effort a grievous error, in the terms framed by the novel, but it is self-contradictory: Even as she goes to England to erase her past and sever her ties to the island, she is (without fully realizing it) moving toward her island past by trying so desperately to know her mother. This point is reinforced by the novel's insistence on the island as "home."10 As Millie helps Leila pack, she tells her, "It's here I belong.... I love this island with every bone in my body.... It's my home and home is where you feel a welcome" (p. 115). And Leila's mother, in her hospital bed in England, says," 'Leila, child, London is not my home' " (p. 124). The mother/island nexus is important here (as it is in A State of Independence) because of the way Phillips plays it out. It is true that Leila's mother is representative of Leila's past and of her island home, and that in following her mother to England, Leila is subconciously trying to get back home. But in The Final Passage the mother, too, is partly to blame for the disorientation that results from Leila's desire to displace the island and her past from her consciousness. To Leila, the island was her mother, and the woman who was her mother left her behind there. Her mother's removal to England causes the island to lose all meaning, all sense of home. Moreover, her mother has abdicated her responsibility as a conduit between past and present by remaining silent about her own past.11 Even in the London hospital, she reveals nothing about her life before Leila was born. There is much to tell. Sexually abused by a great-uncle when she was young, Leila's mother never de-

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veloped any real interest in men. In later life, after every sexual experience, "she always felt used" (p. 125). When she became pregnant with a child she did not want, she extorted money from three different white men, any one of whom could have been the father. She saved the money for Leila, whom she came to love more and more for her "sharp intelligence" (p. 126). But Leila is to know none of this. The space that lingers between her and her mother is also a space separating Leila from her personal past and from her home. There is a similar succession of voids in Strange Fruit, in which a West Indian woman named Vivien has brought up her two sons "in one of England's inner city areas" (p. 7). She has always held up their absent father to them as a cricket hero who died of cancer before she left the Caribbean. The truth emerges only after Alvin, the older son, goes back to the island for his grandfather's funeral and returns with unsettling information. Vivien's family treated him as a pariah and referred to his mother as "Miss Chalkie" (p. 79) for (as they saw it) turning her back on the island and trying to become British. They also told him that his father, the "hero," was buried in an unmarked grave. When Alvin confronts his mother, the rest of the story comes out. Their father was a gifted cricket player who everyone thought should have been the captain of the West Indies team. He, too, thought it was time a black man captained the team, but when he organized a players' boycott to support his demand, he was fired and never played cricket again. Afterward he became a violent drunk, and Vivien left him, taking her children to England. This original rupture of the family structure is not nearly so damaging to Alvin and Errol as their mother's tapestry of lies and silences. She never tells them anything about the island of their birth (because she, like Leila, wishes to erase it from her consciousness), and what she tells them about their father is largely fabrication. In a long speech after an angry series of exchanges with his mother, Alvin lays the issue of responsibility squarely at her feet: "You should be telling me. You know, filling in the blanks 'cos the most important part of knowing where you're going to is knowing where you've come from, right?" (p. 77). Exactly right; and Vivien's disinclination or inability to span the gulf between past and present by "telling"—filling in the empty spaces with words—is repeated in The Final Passage by the stubborn silence of Leila's mother. Leila has convinced herself that going to England involves more than just being with and getting to know her mother. She means to begin a new life and she allows Michael to come with her (although it is primarily to please her mother that she wants the marriage to work). The oddity of the plan is that although Leila makes the decision to go to England, Michael is better equipped to prosper there. Two clusters of images

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in the long "Home" section of the novel suggest the scheme's final outcome. Michael's most frequent and typical appearance is astride his motorbike, buzzing around the island like an angry bug trapped in a jar. He is kinetic, always in motion, but never going anywhere except around and around on the road that encircles the island. Leila, in contrast, spends most of her time in her mother's house (both before and after the older woman's departure). The image of Leila as rooted, almost inert, achieves its fullest resonance as she lies in bed, pregnant with Calvin, and notices signs that the season is about to change: "The days were lengthening and again the island was preparing itself for a small rebirth" (p. 67). Throughout the lyrical passage that follows, Leila and her own impending motherhood are associated with the island's natural cycles. It quickly becomes clear to Leila that England is not the place for her. Like Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark, she finds it cold (in every sense of the word) and strange. Nearly all Caribbean writers who describe their experiences in Britain mention the weather. Pavana Leslie has difficulty walking in the ice and snow in In Times Like These, and Anna Morgan can never seem to get warm enough. Leila immediately notices that there are "no clouds, just one big cloud" (p. 142). If the weather and the urbanized landscape begin the process of estrangement for people accustomed to sunshine, vegetation, and a life lived largely outdoors, the attitudes of many of the English are even more discomforting, especially to the extent that they are determined by racism. The most urgent problem for West Indian immigrants arriving in Britain has always been finding a place to stay. Sometimes friends or relatives already there can help, but the run-down apartment building where Leila's mother was living before she went to the hospital cannot accommodate a couple and a baby. Everywhere Leila looks for a flat she finds the same signs:" 'No vacancies for coloureds'. 'No blacks' " (p. 156). Although The Final Passage takes place in the late 1950s, it is evident that things had not changed much since earlier in the century when Claude McKay had difficulty securing a place to stay or even, on occasion, being served in a pub. The "sepulchral-cold hostility of the English" ensured that McKay "would never want to live there again."12 Leila comes to much the same conclusion, but only after her mother has died and her marriage is irretrievably broken. Michael's perception of England is different, much closer to the stories he has heard of a place where white girls are plentiful and jobs are available " 'that can pay at least $100 a week' " (p. 104). As on the island, he spends little time with Leila, preferring to socialize with his friends from work at "the newly opened Caribbean club" (p. 169). England is "more than Michael had dared to hope for" (p. 169); its range of opportunities seems vast to a man with his restless energy and willingness to

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discard any excess baggage (such as his wife and son) that holds him back. Michael is one of an increasing number of young West Indians who put their pasts behind them in order to advance economically.13 Thinking of advice given to him by his grandfather long before, Michael is determined to succeed, however long it takes: "There was no chance of leaving this country with nothing, that was certain" (p. 170). Unlike the idealistic Arthur, however, Michael sees little real hope except in exile, and it is not likely that he will ever return to the Caribbean. Leila's whole experience in England is encapsulated and foretold in a memory from her childhood. One day when she wandered off by herself after school, she encountered "an old white lady down by the quayside." The lady smiled and held out her hand "as if offering... a sweet," but when Leila approached, she saw that the white lady's hand held "nothing" (p. 195). This is precisely what Leila receives from England. But in contrast to Michael, whose exile is bound to unfold as a relentless process of stripping away, a denudation of his very identity, Leila will leave England (if she does) with a sense of organic connection to the place where she started—a conception of home. Nothingness figures prominently in The Final Passage, as it does in Shiva Naipaul's work, but for Phillips, "nothing" is a series of personal emptinesses that are difficult, though not necessarily impossible, to fill. The word is bandied about with remarkable frequency in the novel. When Michael arrives at Beverley's house after leaving Leila at the church on their wedding day, he finds his mistress "too placid, just nothing" (p. 56). Leila, too, regards Beverley as "a nothing woman" (p. 60). Arthur refers to the island as " 'a land of nothing' " (p. 80). And in England, Leila realizes that her marriage is a sham because "no matter what she said or did," Michael gives her "nothing in return" (p. 164). There are many more examples, and the implied references are even more insistent: the nothingness that hangs between Leila and Michael, the silences that mark Leila's visits to the hospital, Leila's inability to explain her island's history to her English neighbor Mary, the gulf of ignorance in Mary's own mind, and, most of all, the void separating Leila from her past. For many of these vacancies there is no practical remedy, but for most of them the only possible remedy lies in some kind of speech. Near the end of the novel Leila waits in the shabby London house "for the postman to bring nothing" (p. 196), and in the novel's last scene she finds a Christmas card pushed under her door, but it is from "nobody" (p. 205). The letter that never arrives and the Christmas card from nobody are metaphors for all the failures of communication throughout The Final Passage. Too many times there is silence where there should be speech, blankness where there could be words. But during this bleak pe-

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riod Leila makes one of many visits to her mother's grave and is galvanized by the words on the stone. At that moment she suddenly feels grateful for whatever memories she has and her decision to leave Michael to flourish in England becomes irrevocable. She will discard the vain idea of a "new start" (p. 15) and go back, with her memories, to the place of her origin. There is much ambivalence in Leila's decision. Pregnant again, she wants her children to grow up on the island and to know her as she did not know her own mother. But they will be unable to know Michael, and she clearly does not plan to tell them very much, suggesting a link to Vivien's tragic mistake in Strange Fruit and, indeed, to her own mother's silences. A more positive signal is a cluster of associations floating through Leila's mind that connects her mother, her memories, and the "two friends" (p. 203) who will make her " 'feel a welcome' " (p. 115) when she returns. If her mother brought her to England in the first place, it is her mother's death and her terse words, " 'London is not my home' " (p. 124), that send her back. After years of yearning to know her mother, Leila must now be a mother, with all the responsibilities that the job carries with it. She will be rejoining Bradeth and Millie, whose unbroken pattern of life offers a model of continuity. But because Leila's own life has suffered so many ruptures and her sense of her own history is still so incomplete, at the end of the novel it remains questionable whether she will ever be able to serve effectively as a keeper of past, present, and future.

A State of Independence: The Book of the Sons Caryl Phillips has pointed out that A State of Independence is not a sequel, strictly speaking, to The Final Passage (Interview, 43). But in a sense, this spare, elegant narrative is a continuation of the voyage of exploration begun in the earlier novel. The story of a native's return to his island birthplace after twenty years in England could easily be the story of Michael Preston or one of his émigré friends. More important, A State of Independence, like its predecessor, lays bare the alienation that follows in the wake of the final passage. Bertram Francis experiences the double exile of a man who is not at home in his adopted country but, because he has suppressed his past for two decades, no longer feels welcome in his place of origin. The three days that Bertram spends on the island starkly dramatize the difficulty in going back (to the Caribbean or to a vaguely remembered past) that Phillips cites as the source of much of the "bleakness" in his work (Interview, 41).14 Mark Kurlansky comments extensively on the problems experienced by Caribbean émigrés

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who "still identify themselves with their island nationality" but "are frequently not seen that way when they return home."15 Most recent tales of return in Caribbean literature (among them Selvon's Moses Migrating, Edgell's In Times Like These, and Kelvin Christopher James's "Home Is the Heart") address this predicament; what distinguishes Phillips's treatment from the others is his projection of the idea of return as an attempted recuperation of history. Bertram Francis's flight to the Caribbean is not just a geographical relocation; he wants his past back. The convergence of spatial and historical estrangement has always been one of Caryl Phillips's central preoccupations, and like many other elements in his fiction, it has its roots in the plays. In Where There Is Darkness, the leading character, while desperately trying to convince his son, and himself, that his many years in England have brought him success, is nevertheless preparing, on his retirement, to go back to the Caribbean. And in Strange Fruit, Alvin, who like Phillips was born in the Caribbean, returns there to attend his grandfather's funeral but also to discover his past, to find out, as he puts it, where he came from. What he finds is an island beset by "all the diseases of decolonisation.... Inflation, unemployment, political violence" (p. 69). Worse than that, he is made to feel "a stranger in a very strange land" (p. 69) by the very people who might have been expected to welcome him home. The day after the funeral, Alvin's uncle tells him to get out and "not to bother ever coming back"(80). In his last bitter conversation with his mother, Alvin asks, "What we supposed to do? Live on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic at a point equidistant between Africa, the Caribbean and Britain?" (p. 99).16 Alvin's sense of dislocation, however, has just as much to do with his need for a past that undergirds his present and gives it meaning. What upsets him most is his rejection by the older members of his family—people he sees as part of his past. His raft floats on a trackless sea of time as well as space. The title of A State of Independence refers as much to Bertram Francis's state of mind as it does to political conditions on his native island. When he arrives, the islanders are preparing for the celebrations that will mark their formal separation from Great Britain. Bertram, too, intends to break with Britain by finally coming home and setting himself up in some kind of business that is not " dependent upon the white man' " (p. 50). But the word "independence" in this novel has a double edge. The island itself, not completely free of Britain economically, culturally, or psychologically, has already begun to drift toward dependency on another great power—the United States. And Bertram gradually realizes that his own psyche is still considerably shaped by categories of thought acquired during his long exile. As his plane circles above the island's capital, Baytown, Bertram's interpretation of the view is decid-

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edly Eurocentric: "He knew full well that from this height what appeared to be a neat and tropical Versailles would seem little more than a sprawling mess when on the ground."17 The hierarchy that instantly arranges itself in Bertram's mind reveals both how far from home he has traveled and how far from a state of independence he remains. The elaborate symmetries of Versailles, evoking the orderly, centripetal force field of empire, clearly take precedence over the centrifugal "mess" of the postcolonial Caribbean. Bertram's three days on the island are a study in frustration. He is met at the airport by surly officials and a hostile taxi driver. His mother is less than overjoyed to see him, and his younger brother Dominic has been dead for several years, the victim of a hit-and-run driver. Bertram's various conversations with people on the island—a few of whom, like his mother's neighbor Mrs. Sutton, remember him—generate little sympathy for his plans. When he seeks the assistance of his boyhood friend Jackson Clayton, who is now a powerful government minister, he is angrily rebuffed. Only his former girlfriend Patsy offers him any affection or encouragement. She offers him, in fact, a chance to start over with her, but at the end of the novel, as Bertram walks the six miles from Baytown back to Sandy Bay after the Independence Day celebrations, his future remains in doubt. As Bertram makes his way around the island, braving his mother's bitterness, Mrs. Sutton's scolding, and Clayton's threatening taunts, he is beset by a rapidly growing sense of disorientation and detachment. But his predicament has its origins in his own egotism, which, while less brutal than Michael Preston's, has caused no less pain to family and friends. The duration of his stay in England, along with the infrequency of his correspondence, left his mother, Dominic, Patsy, and even Jackson Clayton feeling abandoned and betrayed. In a flashback to the period just before his departure, Bertram plays a game with himself "that he often did when disturbed" (p. 98). He picks out a spot on the horizon, then another spot beyond it, then visualizes yet another, "so that he might one day see another island that nobody else had ever seen, and then proceed to people it with persons from his mind so that he had his own world that nobody could touch" (p. 98). This strange vision, informed by the terrible solipsism of the imperialist, foretells Bertram's later isolation. Having cut himself loose from his primordial moorings, from all those who have cared about him, he finds himself directionless and alone, a man adrift between islands. As in The Final Passage, much of this novel's meaning inheres in the central character's conception of home. Sonja remarks in Where There Is Darkness that immigrants are not happy "in their adopted countries because it's not home" (p. 47), but they cannot be happy back in their place

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of origin, either. While Bertram certainly considers his return a homecoming—an idea reinforced in his mind when the immigration officer stamps his passport and says," 'Welcome home, Mr Francis' " (p. 13)— he has separated himself too long from his island (and his island past) to reclaim that heritage without a struggle. The essence of his estrangement (indeed, the primary source of it) lies in his relationship with his mother. Revival of that particular tie is critical to the whole enterprise, but his mother refuses to cooperate. When he tells her about his plans to relocate on the island, she speaks "to him with open contempt" (p. 50) and later charges that England has captured his soul.18 The reason for her anger has less to do with his going abroad (on an island scholarship) than with his staying there. He lamely explains," 'I just couldn't study the course so I took work and one thing led to another England just take me over' " (p. 85). His mother is not impressed, and she is especially incensed that Bertram stopped writing to her and Dominic, whose life effectively fell apart after his brother left. Things could not have been as hard for Bertram, she tells him, as he made life for her and Dominic when he went away to pursue his " 'own selfish matters in England' " (p. 84). The invocation of Dominic's name is like a physical blow to Bertram. The younger son—who stayed behind on the island, languished, and died a drunkard's death under the wheels of a car—is the novel's ghost-protagonist, the other half of Bertram, the half embodying the island and the past. His presence, or more accurately his absence, is palpable on every page. Blaming Bertram for all her troubles and implicitly for Dominic's death, his mother orders Bertram out of her house. That small structure, in which he and his brother grew up together, should be Bertram's place of Bachelardian repose—a source of well-being and the wellspring of identity. His expulsion from it constitutes an uncoupling from his past and, consequently, from a continuous self rooted in the past. If Bertram's mother banishes him from this primal, psychic home, Jackson Clayton—once a friend, now a member of the new nation's ruling class—makes him feel most unwelcome in the social and cultural matrix of the island as a whole. When Bertram asks for advice, Clayton says bluntly," "The advice is, I think you should go back to where you came from England is where you belong now.' " He adds (referring to all those who emigrated)," 'You let the Englishman fuck up your heads' " (p. 136). Clayton himself has no such excuse; he is one of the postcolonial Caribbean's new men—opportunistic, ambitious, willing to make alliances of expedience to facilitate their rise to power.19 Pavana Leslie meets such men in In Times Like These, and Shiva Naipaul describes them in Journey to Nowhere as leaders who are "only outwardly black" (p. 34). Traces of their type can also be found in Lamming's Mr. Slime (In

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the Castle of My Skin) and Lovelace's Ivan Morton (The Wine of Astonishment). Clayton is true to form, distinguished from these others only by his greater potential for brutality. When he tells Bertram, " 'I can make i t . . . damn uncomfortable for you' " (p. 113), it is no idle threat. The changes in Jackson Clayton reflect profound changes in the island. One reason that Bertram cannot repair his link to the past by returning is that the place is no longer the same. As Clayton puts it," 'We living State-side now. We living under the eagle and maybe you don't think that is good but your England never do us a damn thing except take, take, take.' " This characterization of the direction in which the island is moving reverberates with the ring of truth. Clayton goes on to say, rather perceptively," ' Y o u . . . wanting to invest in the place you remember, not the place that is'" (p. 112). Signs of the island's rapid Americanization are everywhere. Bertram meets a boy named Livingstone (possibly his own son by Patsy) who, although proud to have a job cleaning out the artificial pond at a new luxury hotel, hopes to emigrate to America:" 'New York Yankees, Washington Redskins, Michael Jackson, you can't want for more than that'" (p. 103). Less enamored is Bertram's new friend Lonnie, a bartender in Baytown, who sneers," 'If you really want to make some money in this country you best butter up your backside . . . and point your arse towards New York' " (p. 131). It would appear that if Bertram wants to establish a business independent of the white man, he has come to the wrong place.20 After his last unpleasant encounter with Jackson Clayton, Bertram's prospects for relocating on the island certainly look bleak. The only remaining tie to his past is Patsy, who attempts to console him. Bertram is "desperate that he should not appear either lost or rootless on his own island" (p. 145), but Patsy is not fooled." 'Seems like a wind must have blown through your head,' " she tells him, " 'and filled it full of confusion' " (p. 150). Although acknowledging that he may have come back " 'too late' " (p. 151), Bertram still cannot make up his mind whether he should stay or go back to England. A significant exchange follows this admission. Patsy says, " 'I'm not rushing you out of my home,' " then adds, " 'You don't feel at home there?' " Bertram replies, " ' B u t . . . I don't yet feel at home back here either.' " As he leaves to attend the independence festivities, she looks at him and asks, " 'You coming back here again tonight?' " (p. 152). For Patsy, the "here" of the island and the "here" of her home are synonymous, but for Bertram, the situation is more complicated. If he does not feel "at home . . . here," then "here" has, in effect, become "there." The corrosive process of alienation has eaten away the very ground of his being. In the novel's last few pages, Bertram takes a bus into Baytown, watches the independence celebration without participating in it, and,

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when the sun comes up, walks the six miles back to Sandy Bay "looking, remembering, and planning" (p. 156). By this point it has become clear that Bertram's impressions of his native island (and, implicitly, Phillips's impressions as well) are essentially those of an outsider. (.A State of Independence serves as a rather good travel guide to St. Kitts.) Like Alvin in Strange Fruit, Bertram takes in all the visual aspects of the place and some of the attitudes of the people, including especially those things that have changed, but his understanding cannot penetrate beyond; he is unable to see and experience the island as its inhabitants do, from within. The native has become that ultimate alien, the tourist. His awareness of this transfiguration makes it particularly difficult for Bertram to contemplate his brother Dominic—the Francis son who stayed on the island and stayed an islander—but he cannot keep Dominic out of his thoughts. Before he leaves town he tosses his last beer bottle into the sea and realizes that "Dominic had crept from all corners of his mind and occupied the centre" (p. 156). The son who emigrated, lost his sense of self, but lived continues to be haunted by the son who was left behind, lost his sense of purpose, and died. Although Bertram's mind is also preoccupied with how he might help a mother who wants nothing to do with him, it is certain that without Dominic his life on the island will be hollow indeed. During his long walk to Sandy Bay, Bertram notices abandoned and crumbling sugar mills, modest, almost discreet reminders of a troubled and bloody history. Unsure of what they represented, nobody had ever bothered to demolish them. Instead, they had been content to see them either collapse into disrepair, or be converted into centerpieces for hotel complexes, (p. 157)

Phillips's choice of words in describing this scene points to a disturbing correlation between Bertram's dilemma and that of the island. The islanders (and, implicitly, West Indians in general) are "unsure" of what the mills represent because they, as a people, have been detached from their historical past, just as Bertram has detached himself from his personal past. The ruins themselves, artifacts of history and clues to its meaning, will either "collapse" or be annexed by the fortresses of an alien, neocolonial future—in either case losing their power to link present to past. Farther down the road Bertram spots an avatar of that future, a " m a n . . . threading wires from telegraph pole to telegraph pole" and recalls that this is the day "the people would receive their first cable television pictures, live and direct from the United States" (p. 158). If the island's "state of independence" is largely an illusion, Bertram's is now all too real. Belonging neither to England nor to the Caribbean, he is as

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independent as he wanted to be when he first left the island; his return has been an exercise in cultural and psychic denudation, a true journey to nowhere.21 But in tracing it, Caryl Phillips, as he does in The Final Passage, reconnects himself to a misplaced, submerged part of his own world—in both novels arriving where he started and knowing the place for the first time. Cambridge: The Book of the Ancestors Although Bertram Francis's sense of identity is precarious, A State of Independence is nevertheless Phillips's most "centered" novel, cleaving with nearly Jamesian discipline to Bertram's bruised consciousness. The decentered structure of The Final Passage points much more directly to the formal experiments of Phillips's last three books, and it is also a narrative strategy more suited to the literature of a region that Antonio Benitez-Rojo has characterized as having "no center or circumference."22 In The Final Passage voices rise and feelings are expressed in isolation, as characters repeatedly fail in significant ways to connect with one another. Higher Ground and Phillips's recent book, Crossing the River, are really collections of thematically related stories, and within each of them gaps and silences yawn between people, generations, and cultures. It is in Cambridge, however, the third of Phillips's novels to deal primarily with West Indian material, that the narrative of separations, muted and subtle in The Final Passage, achieves its fullest articulation, with structure and meaning all but indistinguishable. Two-thirds of Cambridge is the journal of Emily Cartwright, a thirtyyear-old spinster sent by her father to inspect his sugarcane plantation on a Caribbean island (plainly St. Kitts). The second longest section of the novel is the hastily written memoir of one of the slaves on the plantation, an African educated (and freed) in England who has been recaptured, sent to the West Indies, and renamed Cambridge by Mr. Cartwright's estate manager. The third and shortest section is in the form of a report describing Cambridge's murder of the plantation's overseer, Arnold Brown, and his subsequent hanging. This brief but chilling document is the voice of colonial officialdom. Along with a prologue and epilogue related by an omniscient narrator, the report of Cambridge's execution fills in some details of the plot for the reader, but the book's real fascination lies in the ways in which Emily's and Cambridge's stories resist coming together. The fundamental psychosis of the slavery system is stitched into the novel's narrative design. The lives of Emily and Cambridge are closely intertwined, yet he barely sees her and she hardly notices him.

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But Phillips does more in Cambridge than objectify in fictional form the moral and psychological disjunctions brought about by slavery. He also continues his exploration of his own past, expanding the search from his generation and that of his parents to remoter times and more distant sources of the Caribbean identity. Using the French Caribbean as an exemplum, Edouard Glissant explains that the whole region's history has been determined by the "brutal dislocation" of slavery: Our historical consciousness could not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment, as it were, as happened with those peoples who have frequently produced a totalitarian philosophy of history, for instance European peoples, but came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces. This dislocation of the continuum, and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, characterize what I call a nonhistory.23

Glissant goes on to say that in the Caribbean "the writer must contribute to reconstituting its tormented chronology" because "history as lived experience" is "not the business of historians exclusively."24 The transformation of nonhistory into history, the excavation of a cultural as well as a personal past, is one of Phillips's principal objectives; indeed, it could be called the end of all his exploring. A number of West Indian writers have confronted this issue by rewriting in their own terms pages from colonial "nonhistory." Among the most ambitious efforts have been George Lamming's Natives of My Person and John Hearne's The Sure Salvation. Another well-known example, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, is particularly relevant to Phillips's project in Cambridge because it is concerned "not just with the historical past, but also with the literary past."25 As Louis James puts it, Rhys's novel is "a radical revaluation of Jane Eyre and its European attitudes from the perspective of a West Indian Creole."26 Cambridge does not revalue a single, identifiable work, such as Jane Eyre,21 but it does revisit the fictional universe of the nineteenth century. Discussing Mansfield Park, Edward Said points out that while the Bertram family depends utterly on income from its sugar plantation on Antigua, Sir Thomas Bertram "is never seen as present in Antigua,"28 even when he is absent from England. Jane Austen (her own consciousness of course firmly rooted in England) notes only the absence, never the presence. When the subject of slavery comes up, the silence that descends on the conversation indicates, Said argues, "that one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both." Mansfield Park and other cognate works must be seen "in the main as resisting or avoiding that other setting, which their formal inclusiveness, historical honesty, and prophetic suggestiveness cannot com-

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pletely hide."29 In Cambridge the silences and the lack of a common language are assuredly not hidden; they are still more glaringly exposed than in Mansfield Park. But the postcolonial point of view that Phillips brings to bear at least enables him to record "that other setting" as a palpable presence. Emily Cartwright's journal resounds with echoes of the writings of actual British visitors to the West Indies throughout the nineteenth century, notably Lady Nugent and James Anthony Froude. Like Lady Nugent's journal, Emily's contains a wealth of descriptive detail about island life; unlike Lady Nugent's impressions, however, Emily's discourse is carefully shaped by a West Indian consciousness. She is repeatedly made to face the moral dilemmas posed by the system from which her father has so richly profited, and in doing so, she exhibits an increasing ambivalence about the values upon which that system was erected. Yet despite the ambivalence, her point of view, even more than that of Bertram Francis in A State of Independence, remains (at best) that of a tourist. Her references to the quaintness of the slaves' demeanor, apparel, language, and customs, as well as her sharply condescending remarks about the habits of whites on the island, mark her journal as a commentary on the tourist mentality. Displaced from the present day by nearly two centuries and enlivened by much humor that is unintended by Emily, the journal is much more politically effective than Jamaica Kincaid's frontal assault in A Small Place. Many of Emily's opinions undergo incremental alteration during the several months she spends on the island, but none is closer to the novel's core than her attitude toward the slaves. Her first observations cause her embarrassment; she is shocked at the slaves' attire, which leaves "scarce anything to the imagination."30 Before long her reflections become somewhat more philosophical. She expounds upon the "self-evident inferiority" (p. 35) of blacks and considers their lot a lucky one because of "the comforts that are to be enjoyed under massa's rule" (p. 37), even going so far as to assert that "the average English labourer" would consider the slaves' life "luxurious" (p. 67). She acknowledges that "this tired system is lurching towards an end" (a fact readily apparent after the abolition of the slave trade in 1798), yet in her next paragraph insists that abolitionists "do not comprehend the base condition of the negro" (p. 86). In his own narrative Cambridge later reports that Miss Cartwright's attitudes toward slavery are, in her own words, "somewhat different" (p. 165) from her slave-owning father's, but her conviction that blacks are "generally good-humoured... though untempered to the civilized ways of man" (p. 40) never really wavers. Emily's nearest approach to anything resembling a "liberal" point of view occurs whenever she briefly contemplates the initial, traumatic

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event in every slave's life. She privately admits that "the A f r i c a n . . . having been torn from his native country, and made to toil under a burning sun in mortal fear of the lash, is hardly likely to form a favourable opinion of his masters" (p. 63). Although this is a truism from the moral vantage point of our own time, it was not at all so in the early nineteenth century when Cambridge takes place. That Emily sees the slaves' hostility as having a logical cause sets her apart from other whites on the island. Not long after writing these lines, she reflects on the psychological consequences of the slaves' having "been torn from their native soil and thrust into the busy commerce of our civilized world." Many centuries may pass, she concludes, before they ever "reclaim a true sense of self' (p. 71). Much later she inches toward a position more familiar to readers today, opining that "the greatest impediment" to the blacks' making progress is not so much their inferiority as their belief in it—their "desperate tendency to despise their own race and colour" (p. 105). Unfortunately, this is the point at which Emily's understanding grows dim. She never pauses to ask herself why the slaves and freed blacks should appear to value themselves so little. It is left to Cambridge's narrative to suggest, through his own deeds and especially his words, how overwhelming is the power of hegemonic colonial authority to frame discourse and shape thought. For the most part, Emily regards her ruminations on slavery as peripheral to her principal mission. Her relationship to Arnold Brown, the overseer and de facto manager of the plantation, looms much larger in her mind. She is appalled by Brown's crudeness and surly behavior, and she is puzzled as to his position on the estate. She expected Mr. Wilson, supposedly the manager, to meet her, but he is nowhere to be seen, and neither Brown nor anyone else—white or black—seems willing to explain his absence. She ultimately learns, from Wilson himself upon his return to the island, that he was driven off by Brown after a long-standing dispute over how best to handle the slaves (Wilson's methods being marginally milder than Brown's). The power struggle between the two men, which is revealed only gradually in the novel as Emily herself learns about it, dramatizes two ineradicable facts of colonial West Indian life: the corrosive effects of absentee ownership and the pervasive fear of a slave revolt. In most of what Franklin Knight calls "exploitation colonies," white planters "never considered the place as a proper substitute for home Whenever they could, they escaped. And the problem of absenteeism was a chronic one in the British Caribbean."31 Emily eventually perceives that much of what to her seems amiss can be attributed to her father's absence, but he clearly has no interest whatever in even visiting the place—much less living there. And although the dispute between Brown and Wilson can occur only in Mr. Cartwright's absence,

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its real source lies in fear of the slaves, who vastly outnumber the whites.32 It finally becomes apparent that the origin of Brown's other major conflict in the novel—with the elderly slave Cambridge—has much to do with his fear and resentment of Cambridge's influence over the rest of the slaves. As the months pass, Emily, for reasons her proper, ladylike language is incapable of expressing, finds herself increasingly drawn to Brown. For some time after her arrival (and after a bout of illness), she refuses to share the dining room table with so rude a man, preferring to be served in her bedroom. But gradually, and perhaps inevitably, given the scarcity of what she considers "civilized" (i.e., white) companionship, she warms to him. "Mr Brown," she records in her journal, "has taken to dressing for dinner. That he has a wardrobe that admits of fashion startled the breath from my body" (p. 80). A few kind words and a suit of clothes are all it takes to effect a sea change in the attitude of this lonely woman marooned on an island that offers little society, let alone emotional support. Much more than breath is startled from Emily's body in the fullness of time. She grows increasingly fond of Mr. Brown, who with almost comical swiftness becomes "Arnold" in her journal. She surrenders herself to a guiltless "intimacy" (p. 118) with him, becomes pregnant, and subsequently finds "a g u l f . . . forming" (p. 127) between them. All of this takes place against the backdrop of another melodrama—not completely explained until Cambridge's narrative—involving Brown, Cambridge, and a menacing, mentally disturbed obeah woman named Christiania. Everyone on the plantation fears Christiania, except Cambridge, who has taken her in and regards her as his wife. Cambridge's anger at Brown's apparent liaison with this woman finally leads to a confrontation resulting in the murder of one man and the execution of the other. Caryl Phillips's understanding of the ways in which gender can qualify experience is particularly evident in Cambridge. Both Christiania and Emily are caught in an exploitive power structure, and both use the limited means available to them to struggle against it. Christiania is triply oppressed, as a slave, a female, and a "wife" to Cambridge, who (though a slave himself) characterizes her in terms of possession, obedience, and "jurisdiction" (pp. 163-165). Christiania's expertise in obeah gives her a certain freedom of movement among the other slaves, however, and her feminine wiles sufficiently captivate Brown to gain her a seat at his dining table. This strange parody of plantation domesticity (with Christiania as faux mistress to Brown's decidedly faux "massa") has been a small victory for the slave woman, but it proves to be a temporary one; the decline of her influence over Brown appears to coincide directly with the rise of Emily's, whose own course of action is much less calculated (and somewhat more ambivalent) than that of the "mad" Christiania. Sub-

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jected to her father's plans to marry her to a "fifty-year-old widower" (p. 3) when she returns to England, and unable to exercise any real authority on the plantation, Emily finds herself an apologist for a system of which she herself is a victim. While her carefully chosen words remain those of a dutiful daughter and respectable member of her father's social class, her deeds—the affair with Brown—are a stinging, if subliminal, rebuke to patriarchal authority. A number of anthropologists have commented on the extent to which, under various versions of colonialism, the presence of white women has reinforced the ideology of the ascendant colonial class. Defense of the white woman's virtue often served as a pretext for the unleashing of more virulent strains of racial oppression. But as Ann Laura Stoler explains, racism, "fear of the Other, preoccupation with white prestige, and obsession with protecting European women from sexual assault by Asian and black men" all became, in many colonial situations, "part of a critical class-based logic, statements not only about indigenous subversives, but directives aimed at dissenting European underlings in the colonies—and part of the apparatus that kept potentially subversive white colonials in line." Both women and "poor or impoverished whites," Stoler goes on to say, were "categories that defined and threatened the boundaries of European (white male) prestige and control."33 At times, Cambridge reads almost like a gloss on Stoler's words. When Emily arrives on the scene, the delicate order of plantation life has already been seriously weakened, as much by the actions of whites as by the slaves' smoldering discontent. The owner is absent; the rightful manager has been driven from the island; and the uncouth Brown (precisely the type of white colonial who must be kept "in line" to preserve the interests of the ruling class) sits arrogantly at the head of the master's table. If the affair between Emily and Brown is for Emily a subconscious act of rebellion, it is for Brown only the final step in a gradual, deliberate usurpation of authority, and it contributes ultimately to the undermining and dismantling of the colonial power structure. One of the novel's central themes, the close kinship between language and power, does not become fully apparent until Cambridge tells his own story, and this is also where Phillips brings the presence of the Caribbean—and the African part of its history—most dramatically to the foreground of the novel. Taken from his family at the age of fourteen, Cambridge (born Olumide) is marched to the sea, put in the cargo hold of a ship, and forced to endure the middle passage—an ordeal that many of his fellow prisoners do not survive. Soon after his arrival in the New World, he is sold to an Englishman and taken to London, where his new master encourages him to accelerate his study of English ways.

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When Emily writes in her journal, "It is to be hoped that this process of creolization will soon replace all memories of Africa, and uproot such savage growths from West Indian soil" (p. 64), she is unwittingly describing what happened to Cambridge years before. In his own account he reports that after learning English and bending his mind to the Christian faith, "Africa spoke only to me of a barbarity I had fortunately fled" (p. 143). "Fled"! In one word is distilled the enormity of what has been done to this man. Although Cambridge duly records such atrocities as African children being sold in London pet shops along with dogs and cats, his indoctrination into Englishness is so complete that he eagerly agrees to return to Africa to teach the people there "the laws of civilization" (p. 149)—a decision that leads to his recapture and a lifetime of hard labor on the Cartwright plantation. The remaking of Cambridge into "an Englishman, albeit a little smudgy of complexion" (p. 147), is accomplished through two interdependent processes—the suppression of the past and the linguistic cleansing that necessarily precedes it. Because Cambridge and his fellow captives are "forbidden upon pain of death to forge verbal links" (p. 136) with one another and are linguistically segregated to keep that from happening, they have no choice but to learn English. And although he first considers this new language to be "nothing more civilized than the manic chatter of baboons" (p. 135), by the time he learns it, his values and perspective have altered considerably: "Armed with an enhanced mastery of this blessed English language, I went forth into London society and soon discovered myself haunted by black men occupying all ranks of life" (p. 142). In his compassionate account of the indignities suffered by blacks in the England of two centuries ago, the diction clearly reveals that Cambridge is speaking as a compassionate Englishman. The chattering of baboons is now "blessed"; he is "haunted" by the sight of other blacks who are now, truly, other. Cambridge's situation from this point on is extremely ambiguous and complex. He is so transformed by his mastery of Prospero's language that even after his recapture, he regards himself not as "base African cargo" but as "a virtual Englishman" (p. 156). Yet he finds that the word "virtual" (so resonant today as a synonym for the illusory) is meaningless in a world of racial polarities and cultural absolutes. On the one occasion when Emily hears him speak at length, she calls his English "highly fanciful" (p. 92) and his precision of speech "lunatic" (p. 120). Emily's indignation is only the outward face of fear. The standard, "correct" English of her day, with its rigidly prescribed lexicon and stylized syntax (so beautifully embodied by Phillips in Emily's journal), is the mark of the ascendant class within the empire, a language of control. Cambridge's acquisition of it is a mark of his own cultural deracination, of course, but it is also, for the white

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power structure, a hint of things to come—a long, arduous struggle that begins with language and ends with liberation. As early as Strange Fruit, and in nearly all of his work since, Phillips's imagination has been engaged with the consequences of the suppression, theft, or destruction of a sense of the past. In Cambridge he turns his attention to the most ghastly manifestation in modern history of the forcible dislocation of past from present, the African slave trade. Cambridge himself, despite his energetic embrace of the English language and the Christian religion, repeatedly condemns the evil of that system and fully understands the price he has paid for his metamorphosis into a "smudgy" Englishman. From the beginning of his narrative, which he composes shortly before his execution, he emphasizes that which he has lost in the process: "Of my early life in the bosom of my family I confess to having little knowledge. On this subject my memory is no more" (p. 133). Describing the Africans' anguish when they comprehend that they are to be transported across the ocean, he is more succinct: "Our history was truly broken" (p. 137). This statement is strikingly similar to the last lines of "Heartland" in Higher Ground, whose narrator—also an African who is being shipped to America as a slave— laments, "My present has finally fractured; the past has fled over the horizon and out of sight" (p. 60). What makes the experience of both characters so prototypical in terms of the African diaspora is not just the loss of a past but the keen, lingering awareness of the past that was lost. Although Emily Cartwright does reflect sympathetically on the problems resulting from the African's "having been torn from his native country" (p. 63), she continues to believe that the process must be pushed forward until "all memories of Africa" (p. 64) have been eradicated. Her mind is not elastic enough to grasp the extent to which she, too, is enmeshed in a web of suppressions and denials woven largely by the same white male power structure that profits from the slave trade. Her father, a dissipated and irresponsible man, has arranged a marriage for her as a matter of his own convenience. Emily's distress is evident, but she is unable to articulate it: Her thoughts are revealed in the prologue by the omniscient narrator: "She spoke no words. She locked eyes with him, as though to drop her gaze would be to end the years of painful communication they had sought to construct. Still she spoke no words. Papa, I have buried feelings. She listened as her voice unspooled in silence" (pp. 3-4). For a long time after her arrival in the Caribbean, Emily is able to keep her feelings hidden even from herself. But when she gives herself to Brown—a terrible breach of the social codes of her class—and experiences "pure, undistilled happiness" (p. 118) perhaps for the first time, she begins to understand something of the life she has suppressed and

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the freedoms she has been denied. Like Olive Senior in "Lily, Lily," Phillips forges a delicate link here between the political and psychosexual dimensions of oppression. But unlike Lily's story, Emily's ends tragically, and her suffering, no less than Cambridge's, is rendered with the exquisite sensitivity of a writer who fully comprehends the catholicity of estrangement. The abyss between these two main characters lies at the structural center of Cambridge and gives the novel its distinctive quality of off-centeredness, a seeming failure of the principal strands of plot and point of view to mesh with each other. This can be disconcerting. The title character does not even appear until one-third of the way through Emily's long journal, and he is not mentioned by name until twenty pages after that. Toward the end of her narrative, Emily refers to him more frequently, but only because his dispute with Brown has become a distraction to her. They have just one conversation, which she cuts short because of its impropriety. As for Cambridge, he alludes offhandedly to Emily as "an English female" (p. 163) and a bit later as "the woman Emily" (p. 165). She registers on his consciousness, but only on the margins. Of course, all the failures of Emily and Cambridge to take each other into account are just the point. In giving voice both to the educated slave and to the plantation owner's daughter (while not allowing those voices to speak to each other), Phillips captures the very genesis of the "nonhistory" that, in Glissant's words, results in "the erasing of the collective memory."34 The model offered by Cambridge is less the past recaptured than the dislocation of history displayed as narrative disjuncture. Exhibiting the past's broken pieces, however convincingly, is not the same as putting them back together, but it does constitute a positive act, a replacing of nothing with something. J. Michael Dash points out, in his introduction to Glissant's Caribbean Discourse, that when any group "is ignorant of its past, resentful of its present impotence, yet fearful of future change, the creative imagination has a special role to play."35 A concise, eloquent expression of that role can be found in one of Phillips's plays. In act 1 of The Shelter, clearly a préfiguration of Cambridge, two people are shipwrecked on an island. The woman is an English spinster in her thirties; the man is a middle-aged black, also born in England. The woman is astonished that the man can speak English. She says, "I feel sure you have not within you the capacity for reason" (p. 18), and "Your family attachments are those of a dog" (p. 22). For his part, the man, who calls himself a slave only "to the state of your world" (p. 23), attempts to convince her that he means her no harm, but his real task lies in simply convincing her that he is a human being, equal to herself. One question he asks her resonates throughout Phillips's work: "Can you learn to perceive again?" (p. 28). This is the task of the writer as voyager and explorer—not to remind

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us of what we have already seen, but to make us learn to perceive again, to see the unseen, and to remember the forgotten.

Notes 1. Caryl Phillips, Strange Fruit (Ambergate, Derbyshire: Amber Lane Press, 1981), 38. Subsequent page references are to this edition. The phrase also appears as an example of graffiti in Michelle Cliffs No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Vintage, 1989), 137. 2. Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage (London: Faber, 1985), 122. 3. Including Higher Ground (London: Penguin, 1989) and Crossing the River (London: Picador, 1994), in addition to the three novels discussed in this chapter. 4. Any generalizations about Naipaul's career as a whole at this point have to be qualified in light of the publication of A Way in the World—a book in which Naipaul, for the first time in many years, deeply probes and openly acknowledges the Caribbean roots of his consciousness as an artist. 5. In addition to Strange Fruit, Phillips's major dramatic works include Where There Is Darkness (Ambergate, Derbyshire: Amber Lane Press, 1982); The Shelter (Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1984); and the screenplay Playing Away (London: Faber, 1987). 6. Hie historical breadth of Phillips's reach is particularly evident in Higher Ground and Crossing the River. Although labeled novels by Phillips himself and marketed as such, both books are really assemblages of several long stories loosely linked by thematic threads. Each explores the ramifications of African slavery through the centuries, and each contains sections taking place in Africa, the United States, and England, respectively. 7. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 145. 8. Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987), 99. Modern historiographers have increasingly posited a conception of history itself that bears some relationship to the project of the imaginative writer, speaking of history as model, description, or hypothesis rather than a photographic record of events. 9. The Caribbean island in both The Final Passage and A State of Independence is unnamed, but it is transparently St. Kitts.The village of St. Paul's becomes St. Patrick's; Sandy Point, Sandy Bay; and the capital, Basseierre, is Baytown in the fiction. In both novels there is also a smaller, mountainous sister island visible from the main one—as Nevis is visible from St. Kitts. The island in Cambridge appears to be St. Kitts as well. Its capital is also Baytown; the Anglican church there, as in Basseterre, is St. George's; and there is again a "smaller sister-island" (p. 99). 10. The second section of the novel, "Home," comprises nearly half the text and contains most of the scenes that take place on the island. 11. The importance of this duty is underscored by a remark made by Sonja, in Where There Is Darkness, who tells her boyfriend, "I want this child, our baby, to inherit a stable and well-ordered past" (p. 55). 12. Claude McKay, from "Up to Date," TMS with A corrections, Harry R. Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX. McKay also predicted, incor-

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rectly, that there "never will be enough" blacks in Europe "to bring about a race problem." ALS to Nancy Cunard, 30 April 1932, Harry R. Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX. Phillips himself observes that although hostility toward black people in the earlier days was mitigated by curiosity, by the 1960s and 1970s the hostility was "distilled." See Caryl Phillips, interview with F. Birbalsingh, Caribbean Quarterly 37.4 (1991): 41; hereafter cited as Interview. 13. Charles P. Sarvan and Hasan Marhama point out that the island is no Utopia. It is a place of very limited economic opportunity for bright young people like Michael and Leila, a "stagnant" society "where the sound of a motorcycle starting up is a sufficient event to attract adult spectators." See Sarvan and Marhama, "The Fictional Works of Caryl Phillips: An Introduction," World Literature Today 65.1 (winter 1991): 3 5 ^ 0 . 14. Rhonda Cobham calls the "failure on the part of the exile to reconnect with the 'real' world of 'back home' " in many Caribbean novels "almost Kafkaesque." See Rhonda Cobham, "The Background," in Bruce King, West Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1979), 9-29. 15. Mark Kurlansky, A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), 223. 16. Phillips's entire body of work can be seen as an extended meditation on this question, including his perceptive remarks on Othello in The European Tribe, 45-51. 17. Caryl Phillips, A State of Independence (London: Faber, 1986), 10. 18. The charge is a familiar one in West Indian fiction. A character in Ismith Khan's The Jumbie Bird, for instance, exclaims, " 'Look at all we local boys, them who gone to England an' come back, an' right away they start talkin' like Englishman.' " See Khan, The Jumbie Bird (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1986), 90. 19. A barman tells Bertram," 'He's a big man, you know. Some say when the Doctor resign the Premiership, if he ever resign that is, Minister Clayton bound to take over as the new leader' " (pp. 63-64). The bartender's "if he ever resign" is prescient. The "Doctor" in question is a fictional version of Dr. Kennedy Simmonds, a physician who has been premier, then prime minister, of St. Kitts and Nevis since before independence, and who formed a minority government (inaugurating his fourth consecutive term in office) after an inconclusive election on November 29,1993. 20. Sarvan and Marhama, "Fictional Works," correctly observe that Bertram has returned primarily to take advantage of new business opportunities—to make money—not to help develop a country he has ignored, as he has ignored his family, for twenty years. 21. Sarvan and Marhama, "Fictional Works," see Bertram moving "away from his selfish, sterile 'freedom' " (p. 37) at the end of the novel. Yet even though he is heading back toward Patsy's house and thinking of asking Mrs. Sutton how he might assist his mother, it seems unlikely that he will stay on the island for any length of time. 22. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James E. Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 24. 23. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 61-62. 24. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 65. 25. Mark McWatt, "The Preoccupation with the Past in West Indian Literature," Caribbean Quarterly 28.1&2 (1982): 15.

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26. Louis James, "Sun Fire-Painted Fire: Jean Rhys as a Caribbean Novelist," Ariel: A Review of International Literature in English 8.3 (1977): 111. 27. One might be tempted to see the influence of Rhys in the name of Emily Cartwright's middle-aged fiancé, a Mr. Lockwood, but if the reference to Wuthering Heights is intended, Phillips does nothing more with it. 28. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 90. 29. Said, 96. 30. Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (New York: Knopf, 1992), 21. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 31. Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 179. Knight distinguishes between labor-intensive agricultural colonies sparsely settled by Europeans and those like Cuba, where large numbers of Europeans settled and put down roots. 32. Knight discusses this problem as well. "In every colony," he points out, "the minority white population lived in fear of the legitimate aspirations of the free mixed and enslaved group." See Knight, The Caribbean, 174. 33. Ann Laura Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule," Comparative Studies in Society and History 31.1 (1989): 138-139. 34. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 62. 35. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, xix.

Robert Antoni

6 Robert Antoni The Voyage In

All mimesis presupposes that what is represented is the "only true reality." When it involves two realities of which one is destined to reproduce the other, inevitably those who are part of the process see themselves living in a permanent state of the unreal. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse

Her legend, which would sprout a thousand hallucinations, had been born in our midst—born of stories and rumours which, in time, would become some of the most extravagant realities of our lives. Ben Okri, The Famished Road

The darkness was full of ubiquitous tongues, croaking and alien, stiff like the ancient crapaud, subtle and whispering as the vague breath of a leaf in the forest. Wilson Harris, The Secret Ladder, from The Guyana Quartet

143

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Short Fiction If the imaginative writer's task is to remember the forgotten when history has been distorted or broken, as Caryl Phillips has claimed, contemporary West Indian writers have certainly conceived an impressive variety of responses to that challenge. Olive Senior's meditations on the intricate interplay between traditional ways and the modernizing encroachments of the wider world, Zee Edgell's efforts to record and personalize the initial chapters of her nation's story, Shiva Naipaul's elegiac dissections of a displaced and disintegrating subculture, and Phillips's own small, vivid recuperations of personal and cultural history—all are manifestations of this larger project, a positive zeal to reattach to the Caribbean present an idea of a past that will give the present a new meaning.1 All of them move toward this end through what Edward Said calls "the voyage in"—a "conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories."2 For the Caribbean writer, such a transformation of discourse is particularly complicated: in the West Indies, the past has been shattered into so many discrete pieces that the reconceptualization of history must be, at the very least, collective and composite, an evolving, creolized history for a Creole culture. It is this kind of history, and the West Indian obsession with it, that Robert Antoni evokes in his prodigious, multifaceted novel Divina Trace: a circular, interconnected series of narratives about the past that is both internally coherent and as centrifugal in its expanding waves of signification as Antonio Benitez-Rojo's "repeating island," "unfolding and bifurcating until it reaches all the seas and lands of the earth."3 Antoni's own "voyage in" is characterized above all by exactly the countercolonizing movement that Said describes: the incorporation of nonlinear thought structures associated with South Asia and West Africa into the narrative design of a very Western form of discourse— the fictional family chronicle—transforming it truly into something rich and strange. Although the repeated interpretation and reinterpretation of family and island past generates the narrative structure of Divina Trace, the novel also explores other issues related to the ambiguous interplay between past and present. Like Edgell, Antoni addresses the question of how personal and cultural identities evolve and grow together after the historical ruptures brought about by colonialism. The novel is, among many other things, an astonishingly complex and ambitious anatomy of the collective composition of human personality. The most emotionally compelling element of the novel, in fact, is the difficult struggle of the central character, Johnny Domingo, at the age of ninety, to understand

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who he is by examining fragments of island history and legend made available to him through memory, imagination, and dream. And critical to the island's sense of identity and independence is the figure of Magdalena Divina, whose story is inextricably entwined with that of Johnny's family, and whose role as Caribbean mother assumes—quite literally—mythic proportions. The myth that Divina Trace gradually produces for the reader is, fittingly, a highly syncretic one; the statue of Magdalena Divina and the stories surrounding it have sublime meaning for Amerindians, Catholics, Hindus, and followers of West African religious traditions like Shango. Magdalena is the novel's principal embodiment of the creolization process that has become history's answer to its own dismemberment. It is relatively easy to sketch out the areas in which Antoni's work can be seen as part of the same experiential territory as that of many of his West Indian contemporaries: the search for identity, the role of the mother, the creolization of Caribbean societies, the imagination's engagement with history, the importance of storytelling in the retrieval and transmission of culture. In Antoni's short fiction, such similarities can seem relatively routine; in Divina Trace, one of the most ambitious, complex, and successfully rendered novels of the past several years, these themes are raised to an altogether higher power. The method of storytelling becomes a meditation on the intrinsic attributes of story itself, with all of its attendant retelling, variation, and elaboration. This aspect of the novel in turn raises questions about the shifting, variable quality of truth (as humans perceive it) and the nature of human consciousness. Beyond and beneath Johnny Domingo's reminiscences and dreams lie further questions: What is history? Does an objective history even exist? What is the relationship between history, storytelling, and myth? What, indeed, is the relationship between imagination and reality? Robert Antoni's grasp of the complexities of a Caribbean culture engendered by multiple histories derives at least in part from aspects of his own background. He was brought up in the Bahamas, the son of a Trinidadian physician who settled in Freeport after attending medical school in Canada. In addition to his parents and siblings, the Bahamas household included Antoni's paternal grandparents. His grandmother— the model for Granny Myna in Divina Trace—in particular fired his imagination with tales of the old days in the southern Caribbean. Just as important to his artistic development was the fact that the family appears to have retained and even cherished its sense of West Indian identity, whereas the affections and loyalties of many other predominantly white creóles have inclined toward Europe. Edward Kamau Brathwaite has argued that novels that dramatize the problems of white creóles, like Wide Sargasso Sea, do not really rep-

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resent the West Indies because they do not directly address the experience of the predominantly poor and black masses. The implication that no work in this category can be construed as authentically West Indian has been vigorously challenged by Kenneth Ramchand, the Caribbean's preeminent literary critic, who deplores drawing such exclusionary lines based solely upon nonartistic considerations.4 Not only does Brathwaite's formulation seem to rule out figures like Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Michael Drayton, and H. G. deLisser,5 but it clearly marginalizes the many brilliant Caribbean writers of East Indian origin. In Brathwaite's defense, it must be admitted that West Indians of mainly European heritage6 have produced very few writers of quality who have associated themselves primarily with the West Indies. Antoni's work, however, is nothing if not authentically West Indian. Everything about it—the command of vernacular speech, the evocation of place, and, above all, the mastery of the cultural nuances of Glissant's "métissage without limits"—marks Antoni's fiction as a major imaginative effort at "understanding this Caribbean."7 Antoni's short stories are unmistakably the work of an apprentice writer surveying and staking out a stretch of newly discovered terrain, but they are no less a part of that terrain than is Divina Trace, and they provide a useful introduction to the more baroque features of the novel. Two of the best stories are "Two-Head Fred and Tree-Foot Frieda," which takes place in the Bahamas, and "My Grandmother's Story of the Buried Treasure and How She Defeated the King of Chacachacari and the Entire American Army with Her Venus-Flytraps," which, like Divina Trace, is set on the island of Corpus Christi, Antoni's fictional version of Trinidad. "Two-Head Fred" is an initiation story that dramatizes a boy's traumatic passage from the realm of childhood magic to the republic of hard adult fact. Billed as an excerpt from the novel in progress that would become Divina Trace, "Two-Head Fred" was actually never part of the longer work and in fact was written three years before Divina Trace was even begun. The main character is Addy, an eleven-year-old boy spending part of his vacation with his family at their summer house on Deep Water Cay, Bahamas. With them is Zoe, their longtime housekeeper, who, as Addy explains to his curious friend Jook Jook, has " 'lived with us since Christopher and I were babies.' " 8 Zoe helped raise the two brothers, but so, in a way, has Jook Jook, who every summer does "odd jobs" for their father and takes the boys "fishing, conching, and misbehaving." Jook Jook, Addy explains, is "the greatest conch and woman jooker in all the world" (pp. 87-88). This summer he takes an interest in Zoe, who has accompanied the family on their holiday for the first time. The story really has two plots that advance simultaneously and converge near the end. During the month a romance develops between Jook

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Jook and Zoe, but while this is happening, Addy is busy fending off the monotony of daily life on a small island, which he describes as "anything . . . but exciting" (p. 87) and "pretty boring" (p. 97). Always eager to transform quotidian reality into something more interesting, he reflects, "I had lots of time on my hands; ideas were already taking shape in my head" (p. 87). The most important of those ideas is a plan to follow Jook Jook and Zoe around until he sees them " 'in action' " (p. 91). His imagination is further stimulated by Jook Jook's tall tales of a twoheaded dog (Fred) and a woman with three feet (Frieda) who rides a bike and sells toe jam. Addy includes these figures in the cast of characters he already knows, making no distinction between fact and fiction. Ten-year-old Christopher is Addy's opposite, a pragmatist and wet blanket who is always tugging him toward phenomenal reality and conventional morality. Christopher says flatly, " "There isn't any Three-foot Frieda,' " and when Addy asks him if he wants to help catch Jook Jook and Zoe in the act of jooking, Christopher primly declares," 'I'm not interested in spying on anyone. It's not right' " (p. 91). The month passes slowly for Addy, who in spite of all his efforts and hopes fails to see anything resembling jooking. On the last day, however, he has his chance. Hiding in Jook Jook's boat, he manages to follow the couple to McClean's Town, where he slips into his friend's house and hides in a hanging closet made out of a tall box. The closet is jumbled and cramped. Just as Zoe and Jook Jook enter the house, Addy knocks over and partly spills a bottle of rum stashed on the floor. He swallows "several mouthfuls" (p. 99) of it to calm his nerves, then begins to sweat and feel dizzy. When he takes another swig of the rum, his equilibrium is shattered by a comical collision of the imaginary and the factual: The closet began to spin. I closed my eyes. Two-head Fred snapped at me, Why you do dis, boy? Why you do dis to me? I screamed. Zoe screamed. "Hef in de house! Hef!" I tried to shove out of my closet. It flopped over, trapping me inside, rum spilling, Zoe screaming. Tree-foot Frieda kicked me. How you could do me dis mischief, chil'? How you could neglec' me so? Commotion filled the house: the sounds of people rushing, crying, yelling, (p. 99)

The ideas that have been "taking shape" in Addy's head concern a very adult, and in a sense very practical, activity—sexual intercourse. Addy has tried to domesticate the adult world by bringing what is for him the most mysterious part of it within the borders of his youthful imagination. But his attempt to witness jooking—to see it as it actually exists—leads him abruptly out of the familiar neighborhood of childlike "ideas" and into the unpleasant foreign territory of responsibility and guilt.

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The pas de deux between imagination and phenomenal reality is also central to "My Grandmother's Story," and it is this element as well that links the short fiction most fundamentally to Divina Trace. Unlike "Two-Head Fred and Tree-Foot Frieda," "My Grandmother's Story" also shares with Divina Trace a locale (the island of Corpus Christi) and several characters, although the time frames of the novel and the story are not an exact fit. In the story Granny Myna9 mentions that she was married in January 1913,10 whereas in the novel she is already a wife and mother by 1899. At some point during the composition of the novel, Antoni seems to have decided to push the Domingo family history further back into the past. But even within Divina Trace he manipulates the temporal dimension to such a degree that his elaborately recorded chronology undoes itself at virtually every turn. Read by itself, without reference to events in Divina Trace, "My Grandmother's Story" is a fairly straightforward account of a comic (almost a mock epic) confrontation between Granny Myna and a charlatan who tries to steal her money by exploiting her interrelated faith in science and belief in the supernatural. This rascal, the "King" of Chacachacari, appears at Granny Myna's door one day "dress up like he playing mas in Carnival" with "a big ruby upon the forehead flashing, and earrings dangling, and rings rings rings" (p. 285), although Granny Myna immediately notices that "even with all the jewels and paraphernalia he have so, the only clothes he wearing is dirty old dungarees" (p. 285). The contrast between the two styles is important; it establishes a pattern of interplay between what is and what might be that runs through the whole story and gives it resonance. The King tells Granny there is a hoard of gold bricks hidden on land she was forced to give up "to make the American Base during the war" (p. 281) and assures her that what lies beneath the ground is still legally hers. The King, with his retinue of small Indian boys, appears as a figure out of a magic world of remote times, legendary places, and buried treasures— which is exactly the impression he wishes to convey. But Granny Myna remains skeptical. She has seen too much of Caribbean reality, distorted by rum and Coca-Cola and the Yankee dollar,11 to be readily taken in by this parody of Caribbean romance. The King's scheme is too complicated to summarize in detail, but the core of it involves an angel who guards the treasure and who must be propitiated by burning ten thousand dollars in his presence. Granny Myna skillfully interrogates the King about the nature of the heavenly being, and on this subject she is on familiar ground. Was it male or female? she asks. The King replies that it was a "man angel" because "he see the parts" (p. 289). Although it is obvious that this angel is concocted by the King to trick the old lady out of her money, the reality of angels is

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not questioned by Granny Myna. In fact, she suspects the King of lying precisely because she does believe in them: "So right then I know no to believe nothing the King say, because the truth, if you ever see an angel—and I seen plenty in my time—is that they are all smooth" (p. 289). To corroborate this point, she consults the family scientist, Uncle Oily, "a professor of bones and rocks" (p. 290), who assures her that "yes, angels is smooth" (p. 292). After several twists in the plot Granny Myna and Uncle Oily become sufficiently mesmerized by the "magic" (p. 288) of the King's metal detecting device to give him all the money they can scrape together, but when she at last realizes the full extent of his deceit, Granny Myna brings all her wit to bear, including a knowledge of bush medicine, on the task of defeating and humiliating her foe. In addition to introducing several characters from Divina Trace, "My Grandmother's Story" contains a wealth of detail about the customs and history of Trinidad, very thinly disguised as Corpus Christi. But its real achievement lies in the sophistication underlying its humorous treatment of the clash between Granny and the King. The King is a pragmatist with a vivid imagination and no moral compass, while Granny is an imaginative and religious woman with a keen, pragmatic mind. Everything in the story (like Uncle Olly's scientific observations on a supernatural being's anatomy) suggests that unequivocal distinctions between the phenomenal and the extraphenomenal worlds are naive at best. Granny Myna believes in angels, but what initially persuades her to give money to the King is his demonstration of the metal detector. This "magic" machine and the bogus angel are two small manifestations of an idea that is much more fully developed in Divina Trace: the frequent ambiguity of the conjunctions between science and religion, reason and faith, "fact" and imagination, history and myth.

Divina Trace: The Tale of Telling Combruetions and Confufflations

Even a preliminary exploration of Divina Trace requires a good bit of circling around, doubling back, overlapping, and returning to terrain already trod, if only because that is the way the book itself is constructed. The form of Divina Trace resembles Benitez-Rojo's description of the Caribbean itself: If someone needed a visual explanation, a graphic picture of what the Caribbean is, I would refer him to the spiral chaos of the Milky Way, the unpredictable flux of transformative plasma that spins calmly in our

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globe's firmament, that sketches in an "other" shape that keeps changing, with some objects born to light while others disappear into the womb of darkness; change, transit, return, fluxes of sidereal matter.12

Divina Trace is, like Henry James's characterization of Conrad's technique, "a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed."13 The subjectivity of the seven voices that speak to Johnny Domingo as he pieces together his family history makes the "case exposed," an intricate medley of shifting events, relationships, and dates. The text is further complicated by the duality of the voice that links together and in a sense contains all the others, that of Johnny himself, recalling the sensibility of youth from the perspective of old age. Johnny's own words are powerfully infused with childhood fear, and ninety years of wisdom acquired through experience in both the United States and the Caribbean have not extinguished that terror. The arrangement of voices in Divina Trace is concentric, like the winds surrounding the eye of a hurricane. The first five "narrators"— Granny Myna (Johnny Domingo's paternal grandmother), Papee Vince (his maternal grandfather), Evelina (the family's black servant), Dr. Domingo (Johnny's father), and Mother Superior Maurina (Granny Myna's older sister)—all "speak" to Johnny, through the medium of his memory, in prose. Near the middle of the book, Magdalena—the focal point of Johnny's ruminations—recites in her southern Caribbean dialect a two-part verse variation on the Indian epic the Ramayana, which is simultaneously a variation on the plot of Divina Trace. Between the two halves of Magdalena's poem, and at the dead center of the novel, lies an even more oracular utterance, the narrative of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god. Hanuman, in his "calypso-simian tongue," a nonsyntactical, highly associational flow of words and syllables, spins out his own version of the "subplot of the monkey tribes" found in the Ramayana, a part of the epic that is probably older in origin than the primary story of Rama and Sita. This section, as Antoni describes it, "provides a transition between the two halves of the book, which are constructed as mirror-images, and it stands apart as an encapsulation of the novel as a whole."14 Following the second half of Magdalena's poem, the novel's five prose narrators finish their accounts in reverse order: Mother Superior Maurina, Dr. Domingo, Evelina, Papee Vince, and Granny Myna. The middle of the novel—Magdalena's poem and Hanuman's monkey talk—is its most forbidding stretch of territory: a verbal version of the tangled Maraval Swamp at the end of the path called Divina Trace. In the poem Hanuman himself asks playfully, "Where are dere monkeys enough to read it? Where, in truth, are dere monkeys patient to trudge, /

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Dis mudthick-mudswamp of monkeylanguage?" (215-216). Hanuman's section suggests a level or source of consciousness beneath or prior to rational thought and therefore a prelinguistic, even perhaps prehuman, origin of storytelling and myth. Later in Divina Trace, Johnny Domingo himself recalls thinking, "This story does not belong to this voice. To these voices. This story belongs to that moon. To that black sky and that black sea. This story belongs to the same foul smell of the swamp when the wind blows" (p. 310). Johnny's odyssey through the novel's voices takes him at last into this inner swamp—deep into himself—and what he encounters there is crucial to his understanding of his own identity.15 When he emerges from it and into the comparative light of the rest of Magdalena's poem, he is ready to retrace his steps back through the other voices that have spoken to him. The poem itself is much more than a witty, Caribbeanized retelling of the events in Divina Trace. As one of the oldest stories in human history (as well as one of the most widely known), the Ramayana serves as a prototype—a particularly pertinent one in that it arose out of an oral tradition and exists in many different written versions. Philip Lutgendorf characterizes the epic as "a meta-story never exhaustively encompassed by any one text but always inspiring new and variant readings."16 Finally, the Ramayana, like Divina Trace, records the birth of a myth out of storytelling and its inscription on the consciousness of a people. As Aamer Hussein put it in one of the most perceptive reviews of the novel, "The voice of a myth, recounting a myth, lies at the heart of this chronicle of the creation of a myth."17 Although the plot of Divina Trace is constantly evolving as the different voices speak to Johnny Domingo in his memories and dreams, the plot does possess a determinate core: Johnny's search for the plot.18 All of the voices recorded in Divina Trace, along with Johnny Domingo's frequent commentaries on them, are recalled in one long night of rumination—the night before Johnny's ninetieth birthday—but they have traced themselves on the slate of his mind over a period of decades. At first he thinks of the process only in general terms as "a collection of voices merging and separating, and occasionally falling into rhythm with my own quick breathing" (p. 82). Later, reflecting on Mother Superior Maurina's version of the story and how it came to him, he realizes how much more is involved: First it was only the isolated words: short phrases, fragments of a language which I knew belonged only to her. And as the years progressed and I continued to listen I began to hear whole passages, coming to me from somewhere out of my childhood—from somewhere out of that vast storehouse of words and images constantly disassembled and re-

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assembled and surfacing again mysterious, new—so that now at the end of ninety years of blind hearing I can sit here and listen to the whole story, (pp. 157-158)

And what is that story? As Papee Vince is fond of saying, the facts are these: Long before Johnny Domingo was born, when his father was a young man just back from medical school in London, an adolescent girl named Magdalena emerged from the bush, joined Mother Maurina's convent, and seven months later gave birth to a child said to be half-frog and half-human, although it may only have been anencephalic.19 Magdalena died immediately afterward, under circumstances that are hotly disputed, and the child, christened Manuelito Domingo, lived for just three days. Even these "facts" do not go wholly uncontested, and as the tale is fleshed out with detail, revisions and additions multiply. Magdalena first appeared in the town of St. Maggy's when she was thirteen (according to Mother Maurina) or fifteen (according to Papee Vince). She was brought up in the bush among Warrahoons20 (Amerindians), yet she sported a Hindu tilak in the middle of her forehead. Johnny's own family members regard her as the illegitimate child of Barto, Johnny's paternal grandfather, and Mother Maurina, his sister-in-law (who is probably one-fourth Amerindian). The frogchild (or "crapochild,"21 as he is frequently called) Manuelito was apparently the equally illegitimate issue of Barto and his own daughter, Magdalena. Dr. Domingo, Johnny's father, swears that Magdalena's hymen was imperforate, yet she was pregnant and gave birth, evidently through Caesarian section. Dr. Domingo also insists that Magdalena committed suicide (after seeing the baby) by holding her breath, even though he acknowledges that such a feat is "impossible" (p. 116). Later, Mother Maurina admits to suffocating her daughter with a pillow. Still later, Papee Vince (or, it must be stressed, Johnny's recollection of Papee Vince) reveals that Magdalena did not die at all but was nursed back to health by the Warrahoon bush doctor, Brito Salizar, who may have been Granny Myna's grandfather. As Johnny turns these matters over and over in his mind, he is acutely aware that the legend of Magdalena Divina associated with a statue in a nearby chapel "belonged to a time much older than Mother Maurina" (p. 39). How then, he wonders, could the Magdalena known to his father and grandparents have been, as they claim, the woman behind the myth? Johnny Domingo's effort to find answers to this and many other questions is the novel's constant. The basis of his inquiry is epistemological, and like the search for V. in Pynchon, it is complicated by a seemingly endless proliferation of signs. Johnny's confusion is evident from the novel's first episode, in which he recalls making his way down the ten

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miles of Divina Trace to the Maraval Swamp clutching a large glass bottle containing Magdalena's supposedly dead frogchild. It is the night before his thirteenth birthday, and his Granny Myna has asked him, on her deathbed, to remove the frogchild's body from the family plot so that she will not be buried next to her late husband's bastard. At the end of this section Johnny remembers opening the bottle, tilting it, and watching the creature, miraculously alive after so many years, swim into the dark waters of the mangrove swamp. The incident, whether real or imagined, haunts Johnny Domingo his entire life; it is, in his mind, the experiential link that connects his own story to that of Magdalena and, through her, to the entire island. But as information about the frogchild accumulates, so does Johnny's bewilderment. That his bewilderment might itself be part of the story's dynamic does not become clear to Johnny until very late in Divina Trace. Once again, the explanatory voice is that of the novel's historian and most nearly impartial narrator, Papee Vince: I can only give this story back to you the way life give it to me—the way the story asks itself to be told—with all its many deceptations, and combructions, and confufflations. Because all that is as essential to the telling of this story—as essential to the understanding of it—as any amount of poetry pile up in the po beneath you bed Because of course, in the end, as with any other tale told of man or monkeys since the beginning of time, you can only tell your own story. You can only hear your own story too. (p. 342)

Papee Vince makes two vital points here: the "deceptations" of story reflect those of reality, and every story is a product of the creative minds of both teller and listener. Furthermore, if Magdalena's story is really Johnny's own, the architecture of the novel, with its overwhelming emphasis on Magdalena and her child, argues that the most important parts of all our stories do not lie in the routine events marking our lives but within our imaginations. The linear, rational, conventionally "realistic" elements of Johnny Domingo's biography—his alienation from the Catholic Church, his decision to become a doctor, his education in the United States, his marriage and children, and his return to Corpus Christi to practice medicine—all emerge, almost as asides, from the interstices between blocks of narrative recounting his family history. It is important that Johnny has come back to the Caribbean, but it is the magic and terror of the Caribbean past, swarming in his thoughts, that has brought him there. The "combructions and confufflations" of Divina Trace certainly mirror an uncertain and fluid reality. Increasingly in the second half of the novel, however, Johnny Domingo's own imagination appears to play

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a role in shaping and even distorting the events purportedly described by others. At several points he confuses memory with dream, as episodes from his later life intersect in his mind with scenes from his early childhood. His recollections are strewn with anachronisms—K Marts, VCRs, and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets that can exist only in Johnny's memory, not in those of his long-dead relatives. One of those family members, Papee Vince, even refers to his own death when he "says" to Johnny, "If you recall the chronology of this story, you will remember how Evelina sheself wouldn't be dead fa good few years to come, and in fact, I myself would be dead fa good few months before her" (p. 346).22 Many of these elements, including the frequent repetition of words, phrases, and whole paragraphs, belong to the topography of an old man's past-plagued mind, but not all of the text's problematic features can be explained away so easily. The "chronology of this story" fiercely resists untangling. If Johnny Domingo is ninety years old in 1999, as he repeatedly claims, he would have been born in 1909; but when he leaves Corpus Christi on his eighteenth birthday, the year is "1938" (p. 234), according to a letter from his father. And although Johnny says that Granny Myna was ninety-six when she asked him, at age thirteen, to dig up the frogchild and throw it in the swamp, if he was born in 1909, the incident would have taken place in 1922. According to Papee Vince, Barto left Granny Myna "a widow at the age of thirty-six" (p. 397)—in 1899P The dates simply do not add up. Indeed, it would be a violation of the whole tenor of the novel if they did. There is no reason that time should be any easier to wrestle to the ground than any other aspect of the novel's reality. Moreover, the refusal of the novel's chronology to unfold in a linear and consistent pattern contributes to the sense of dimensions beyond the immediate reach of human perception, as in the Ramayana itself. Describing the Hindu epic, R. K. Narayan says, "The time scheme . . . is somewhat puzzling to us who are habituated to a mere horizontal sequence of events.... One has t o . . . get used to a narrative going backwards and forwards and sideways."24 Time in Divina Trace, reflecting Benitez-Rojo's characterization of Caribbean culture, "unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar."25 Chronology, like the varying and conflicting accounts of the events themselves, constantly dissolves and is reassembled, suggesting an irreducible indeterminacy in the very fabric of human experience. Dr. Domingo puts it bluntly: "Is you reality any less real than my own? All this confusion begins before we open we eyes, before the first stories begin to tell, so how can we ever expect to understand it?" (p. 102). Yet the telling of stories and their virtual reification as myths are the strategy by which human beings and human cultures try to understand and tame the unfamiliar and the uncertain. Antoni has long been interested in the

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evolution of storytelling into myth as a response to the "confusion" inherent in human experience. In an unpublished paper comparing "the myth-making process" in Absalom, Absalom! and One Hundred Years of Solitude, he enumerates several techniques used by both Faulkner and Garcia Márquez to transform their stories into myth. Among them are the use of "primeval, regional settings to achieve a universal context," the frequent repetition of events "to impart a sense of mythic importance," "the repetition of names and personality traits," the "disruption of temporal continuity to place the stories in the realm of discontinuous, universal, or mythic time," and the employment of the devices of "oral narration."26 Antoni eventually uses all of these techniques in Divina Trace; the list, in fact, serves as a useful introduction to his own work. But it is in another unpublished essay that Antoni most openly identifies the path he takes in Divina Trace: "In it I attempt to create the myth of my own origins, of my own family history, and I attempt to create it around the figure of a mother-goddess who has long inspired me: she is La Divina Pastora, the black madonna who features in the Catholic church of Siparia, a small East-Indian village in southern Trinidad."27 Papa God's Callabo

Mark Kurlansky relates a revealing incident that occurred when he was a passenger on a catamaran off the north coast of Jamaica in 1973. A man singing and playing a banjo on the boat fell overboard and drowned. When the catamaran returned to Montego Bay, "Everyone on the pier seemed to know what had happened, but they still wanted to hear the story. Knowing the story and telling it is the Afro-Caribbean version of immortality." Kurlansky goes on to say, "I never learned his name. It was the story that was important. A man was gone, he left behind his story."28 When people tell stories about themselves, they participate in the construction of their own cultural identity, both individually and collectively. This process is particularly important in the Caribbean, where historical disjunctions and ethnic diversity have intensified the "métissage without limits" that is the region's most elemental characteristic. Antoni's myth in Divina Trace grows out of a series of stories told by and about members of a single family, but it comes to encompass much of Corpus Christi's history and all of its principal religious traditions—the Catholicism of the European colonists, the Hinduism of indentured workers imported from India, and the belief systems brought to the "New World" by African slaves. The "mother-goddess" around which the myth gathers in Divina Trace, La Divina Pastora, is an object of devotion little known outside of Trinidad. C. L. R. James has described her simply as "a small image of

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some two feet in height which stands in the Roman Catholic Church at Siparia." She is "nothing more than a symbol of the divine" to many, but to others she "possesses limitless powers."29 A more recent account, in a travel guide to Trinidad, fills in some detail. The devotion to Mary as Divine Shepherdess was brought to South America and the West Indies by Capuchin monks from Spain. As the years passed, Hindus "and other non-Catholic groups" adopted her as their own, the Hindus even identifying her as the goddess Kali.30 In the novel, Papee Vince expounds upon the significance of the fictional black madonna's appeal across the ethnic and religious spectrum. The statue has appeared "to the Panyols as Divina Pastora, to the Amerindians as Akambo-Mah,31 to the Africans as Mamma Latay, to the East Indians as Kali Mai" (p. 377). All that was required, he explains, for her truly to become Corpus Christi's own patron saint was for her "to resurrect and reunite she previous four incarnations" (p. 377), and this was accomplished through her association with Magdalena Domingo. Of the three religious traditions that shape and vitalize the myth of Magdalena Divina in Antoni's novel, Christianity is the most prominent, both because the cult of La Divina Pastora originated with missionary monks and because the Domingos themselves are Catholics and their history on Corpus Christi is intimately, if not always amicably, linked with that of the church. The name of the island itself has religious significance, and the island's biggest celebration—almost a National Day—is the Feast of Corpus Christi. In Divina Trace the festival honoring Magdalena coincides with that holiday, which is celebrated on Holy Thursday,32 so that several important elements of Christian doctrine and worship—the Mass, the Blessed Virgin, the Passion—come into play. The Carmelite convent and St. Maggy's Cathedral are the hubs of Catholic power and influence on the island, but there is a major difference between them. The cathedral is the official seat of a church whose headquarters are in Europe; the convent, which promotes the cult of Magdalena under the direction of Mother Superior Maurina, comes to embody nascent nationalistic feelings among Corpus Christi Catholics. But even from the time of its establishment (by none other than Barto Domingo), the convent has been seen as a kind of rival to ecclesiastical authority centered in Rome. As Mother Maurina recalls, "They said Barto is going into competition now with Papa God in He cathedral on the other side of the square" (p. 138). Mother Maurina, according to the voice of Papee Vince, "was the first to tell this story. This story of Magdalena Divina. She was the only one to know it complete, perhaps even better than Magdalena sheself' (p. 383). Her central role in the novel not only reinforces the Catholic core of the syncretic myth that accrues around Magdalena, but it also al-

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lows Antoni to indulge in some further forays into mythic territory. Maurina's own version of the story—some of which approaches stream of consciousness—is emotionally charged and frequently lurid. She insists that the frogchild was "the son of Papa God" (not Satan, as Evelina believes) and that his mother, Magdalena, was a saint. The proof lies in the fact—agreed to by everyone and confirmed by Johnny's father, Dr. Domingo—that her hymen had never been penetrated: "Magdalena have this special veil of the church to protect her, that no wajank could never push heself inside no matter how hard he try" (p. 132). The frogchild himself dies, is buried while still alive, is dug up and thrown into the swamp, is kept in a bottle in Uncle Olly's lab, or is boiled in a callaloo33 and served to the Domingo family for dinner—all depending upon which account is "true." But it is Magdalena—as virgin, daughter, and mother—not her child, who becomes the object of the cult, and Mother Maurina appears to be largely responsible for encouraging its growth, even asserting that Magdalena's name was given to her in a dream by an "oldman dress up head-to-toe in tin paper shining beautiful as the angel Gabriel" (p. 144), the same angel who announced the birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary. During her sections of the novel, Mother Maurina's religious ecstasies are scarcely distinguishable from her sexual ones, and she (or Johnny's memory) also frequently conflates elements of her own story with those of her alleged daughter. The most startling passage of this kind is Maurina's account of watching Barto and Magdalena make love. Syntax and memory alike take on new and strange forms as Magdalena's experience seems to become Maurina's own: Standing here at the end of this bed looking down again through the dark murky water of my dream with my feet to my knees in the mud of my own terrible passion without escape, here looking down again through the dark water seeing myself again my own beautiful daughter struggling helpless here in the mud of my own hopeless longing to lie again beneath my husband-father-son-of-my-son in nomine Patris Filii et Spiritus Sancti. (pp. 154-155)

The rest of this reverie defies expository analysis. Suffice it to say that Mother Maurina's imaginative appropriation of these events as she describes them is simultaneously orgasmic and sacramental. Barto, in her mind, is lover, father, son, angel, Holy Ghost, and perhaps even Papa God himself. Robert Antoni's unpublished paper on Joyce and Freud sheds a good deal of light on the psychosexual implications of the myth that lies at the heart of Divina Trace. In analyzing the similarities between Freud's re-creation of "the Primal History Scene" in Moses and Mono-

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theism and Joyce's version in Finnegans Wake, Antoni concludes that the mother figure is "conspicuously missing," or at least highly attenuated, in both. One of his purposes in Divina Trace is to restore "the absent mother" to her rightful place in the "earliest of primeval memories handed down to us as part of our phylogenetic inheritance." In Freud's formulation, social organization began with the sons' reinstitution of the father's prohibitions (against copulating with their mother and sisters) after they had killed and eaten him. Antoni argues that although Freud's emphasis is on the father and the sons, "the mother's position in the Oedipus complex is as . . . important as the father's, at least insofar as she is the forbidden object of desire." In Antoni's reformulation, the horde of sons, after killing the father, rape the mother. Later they repent and give the mother "an exalted status" equal to that of the dead father. These modifications of Freud's scheme, Antoni believes, would help explain the evolution of mother-goddesses from ancient times to the present, including Christianity's conception of the Virgin Mary as quasi-divine. Antoni tries to rehabilitate the mother figure in Divina Trace by incorporating his revision of Freud's ideas into the genesis of his own Caribbean myth. For example, there are several accounts of a gang breaking into the convent and raping Magdalena. The gang is led by Gomez, St. Maggy's chief of police, who may be the son of Mother Maurina and Barto. In this context the conflation of Maurina and Magdalena becomes very important, since Gomez and his "brother" policemen can be said to violate both their sister and their mother. Similarly, Johnny Domingo's recollection (or, more probably, his dream) of finding his grandfather Barto still alive and shattering his skull with a rum bottle reenacts the murder of the primal father. The preoccupation with Magdalena's virginity and her imperforate hymen is just as pertinent. If the killing and eating of the father is ultimately expiated by the elevation of a totem meal to divine status (as in the Eucharist), then the original rape of the mother could have been expiated by having "the primeval mother declare herself eternally virgin." In this way "the Mother could dissolve our guilt for the primeval rape, since as Virgin she was herself proof it had not occurred."34 In Antoni's multilayered myth, Magdalena is both Mary and Magdalene, Mother of God and (in Papee Vince's words) a "consecrated whore" (p. 49). The two other principal strands of Corpus Christi's religious inheritance—those brought to the island from India and West Africa—are less pervasive than Catholicism in the fabric of Divina Trace but are just as integral to the novel's meaning and design. The Hindu element is concentrated in Magdalena's verse declamation, a syncretic and idiosyncratic

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retelling of the Ramayana. The Ramayana was first written down in Sanskrit by the poet Valmiki about two thousand years ago, but the legends it records are much older. Valmiki's "original" text tells the story of the noble lovers Rama and Sita, the ideal couple of Hindu tradition. Although the poem's length (some twenty-four thousand verses!) and complexity make it impossible to summarize adequately, a few words about the plot are essential to suggest its relationship to Divina Trace. In the Ramayana, Rama is the son of Dasaratha, the king of Ayodhya, by his wife Kausalya. Dasaratha also has two sons, Lakshman and Satrughna, by his wife Sumitra and another, Bharata, by his wife Kaikeyi. When he attains adulthood, Rama marries Sita, foster daughter of the king of Janaka. Sita lives in the city of Mithila (nicely transformed by Antoni into "Mythmythilia"). Eventually, Rama is banished for fourteen years through the trickery of the jealous Kaikeyi, who is ambitious for her own son. During their exile, Sita is kidnapped by Ravana, the demon ruler of the island of Lanka. The monkey demigod Hanuman and his monkey army help Rama rescue Sita, and during this period Hanuman tells the embedded story of the monkey race—a subplot that to some extent parallels the main plot but which is probably much older. Some versions of the Ramayana continue the story of the couple after their triumphant return to Ayodhya. In these accounts they are separated again because of unfounded suspicions that Sita was unfaithful while held captive by Ravana, but they are ultimately reunited in the heavens. To many Ramayana bards, such a conclusion must have seemed appropriate, since Rama and Sita were incarnations of the gods Vishnu and his wife Lakshmi. This is only a small part of the epic's plot, but it is enough to demonstrate the uses to which Antoni puts it in Divina Trace. Nearly all the characters in Magdalena's Ramayana are surrogates for figures in the novel, and Antoni has subtly shaped her retelling of the ancient poem so that its plot corresponds at many points to that of Divina Trace. For instance, since Rama and Sita parallel Barto and Magdalena, Sumitra and Kaikeyi are converted from stepmothers to wives so that they can serve as analogues to Maurina and her jealous sister, Granny Myna. Perhaps more significant than these kinds of modification (and there are many) is a change that is almost theological: in Antoni's version, Rama is an incarnation of Shiva, not Vishnu. This much more fundamental alteration of the Ramayana seems designed to emphasize the connection between Magdalena and Kali, who was the wife of Shiva. La Divina Pastora, the actual prototype for Magdalena Divina, has been worshiped as a manifestation of Kali by the Hindus of Trinidad, and in Divina Trace she is said by Papee Vince to be one of Magdalena's avatars. It also seems fitting that Barto as Rama should be an incarnation of Shiva, the Destroyer, rather than Vishnu, the Preserver.

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There are many other correspondences between Magdalena's Ramayana and the various accounts of her own story that form the rest of Antoni's novel. In fact, virtually the entire plot of Divina Trace is retold by her (in Caribbean dialect and with many Caribbean references) as if it were the tale of Rama and Sita. A s a literary act in itself, the poem brilliantly exemplifies (as does the whole novel) Benitez-Rojo's dictum that a "syncretic artifact is not a synthesis, but rather a signifier made of differences." 35 In this part of the novel, the figure at the center of the novel's myth tells the story directly as a myth, incorporating into the texture of the ancient story elements that give it life for a new, composite culture. It is this cardinal theme in Magdalena's Caribbeanized Ramayana—the genesis of myth in storytelling and the power of myth to enter history and shape cultural identity—that binds the poem most closely to the rest of the book. Evelina, the Domingo family's black servant, is the medium through whom Antoni introduces the novel's third major constellation of religious traditions. Both of her sections of the book are filled with talk of African gods, obeah, and the curse brought on the family by Barto and manifested by the birth of the frogchild. Although her grandmother Aiyaba may have worshiped the Yoruba gods alone, Evelina, the daughter of a Shango priestess, practices a syncretic religion that combines a modified Catholicism with African beliefs. In the early days of slavery in the Caribbean, the displaced Africans tended to use Christian saints as surrogates for the African gods who were the true objects of their devotion. Over the years various kinds of amalgamations occurred throughout the region. The close association of Ogoun with St. Michael and of Eshu with Satan, for example, is found both in Trinidadian Shango 36 and in some of the other African-derived syncretic sects. Eshu in particular is quite at home in Divina Trace. His connection with Satan probably derives from his reputation as a mischief maker and lord of misrule. "The early missionaries and their converts," Phillip Allison points out, "regarded Eshu as the Devil, but he should be more properly regarded as the spirit of chance and uncertainty."37 Henry Louis Gates agrees, finding that Eshu's characteristics include (among others) "parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation." It is not difficult to detect the presence of many of these qualities in Antoni's text, but there is even more. Gates also argues persuasively that Eshu "is the Yoruba figure of the meta-level of formal language use, of the ontological and epistemological status of figurative language and its interpretation." He is, as well, "the guardian of the crossroads, master of style and of stylus, the phallic god of generation and fertility, master of that elusive, mystical barrier that separates the divine world from the

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profane." 38 Gates's characterization of Eshu and his many roles gives this playful African god as rightful a claim to be called the presiding deity of Divina Trace as any in the Christian or Hindu pantheons. Evelina's version of the story is different from either Mother Superior Maurina's or Magdalena's. Instead of seeing Barto as a hero—Christian angel/lover or avatar of a Hindu god—Evelina portrays him as another kind of incarnation, a man possessed by the devil. The frogchild, she tells Johnny, is "beget by dis wajank-diab who is Satan self, who . . . beget dis diab-crapochild and bring down he curse pon you, pon all Domingos, pon dis whole island of Corpus Christi, pon all de earth" (p. 69). Evelina swears that Manuelito, who is indistinguishable from Eshu in her mind, still lives beneath the ground in Domingo Cemetery, but that he cannot come out "to reap combruction" (p. 84) if Johnny goes to the graveyard each year on the night of the crapochild's birthday (April 16) and works the obeah spell that she teaches him. A good part of Johnny's terror in this scene derives from his conviction that he has already, three years earlier, dug up the frogchild and loosed it on the world, an event Evelina knows nothing about. In the language of her Yoruba forebears, Evelina invokes the powerful god Ogoun and tries to banish the trickster Eshu. She prays in Latin to St. Michael himself, pleading with the warrior archangel to thrust Satan into hell. Evelina certainly comes by her interpretation of the story and her hostility toward Barto Domingo naturally enough. She is, it seems, the illegitimate daughter of Barto, who was at least indirectly responsible for her mother's suicide. Evelina found her mother's body in a cane field, "and me," she says grimly, "could only always hate he fa dat" (p. 322). Johnny also appears to learn from Evelina that her African grandmother Aiyaba was actually owned by Barto. 39 Not long after these revelations, in the dream-order of Antoni's narrative, Johnny Domingo remembers, or dreams, that he has killed his grandfather Barto—rapist, slaveholder, and patriarch. The "confufflation" of religious, psychological, and political implications involved in the ritual murder (whether real or imagined) of this man—a source of near-mythic authority and object of both fear and adoration—can scarcely be exaggerated. The political power of the Magdalena myth as a whole grows directly out of the syncretic nature of its origins. Because the cult of Magdalena, in its very genesis, partakes of the "density of codes" 40 that Benitez-Rojo astutely identifies as intrinsic to the Caribbean, it is able to speak to the culture in a language it already intuitively understands. The changing of the name St. Mary to St. Maggy, Mother Maurina's unsuccessful attempt to have Magdalena officially canonized, and the subsequent de facto canonization of her by the peoples of Corpus Christi—all are part of the process by which the culture produces the myth that will

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redefine and ultimately liberate it. When the myth takes hold in Divina Trace (or, in Papee Vince's account, when Mother Maurina, as storyteller, brings Magdalena's story "to life"), the island is "miraculously transformed." It is "a single moment in history, a rebirth, not simply fa Mother Maurina's Magdalena in the black madonna, but fa Corpus Christi sheself' (p. 384). The island, in effect, becomes Magdalena Divina's child. And even though Corpus Christi continues to contend with the social ills resulting from "half a millennium of Colonial and Church subjugation," the people manage "to come back to life every year fa one day"(395). It is not irrelevant that the saint honored on that day is a woman. Restitution of the mother figure to her rightful place of honor is the act that, at least for Corpus Christi, takes some of the sting out of those centuries of colonial/ecclesiasticaiypatriarchal domination and perhaps restores to the culture a trace of its spiritual and psychic balance as well. The nature of the holiday itself is significant, and virtually every major episode in Divina Trace takes place on, just before, or just after it. The Magdalena/Corpus Christi fete is the novel's version of Carnival, complete with parades, steel bands, and "playing mas" (p. 126). In Trinidad, Carnival's ritual enactment of alternative reality has a powerful transformational effect on the whole society, as it clearly also does on that of Antoni's fictional island.41 But Antoni is careful to make his carnival truly transformative only insofar as it transcends the officially sponsored Christian holiday and assumes, in Bakhtin's words, the attributes "of becoming, change, and renewal."42 In his analysis of medieval European carnival, Bakhtin distinguishes between "the official feasts" of the period, which "sanctioned the existing pattern of things and reinforced it," and legitimate folk carnival, which "celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order."43 This is the carnival that Corpus Christi Day becomes when it is infused and regenerated with the power of the people's own myth; and for Antoni, this is the carnival that lies at the very heart of creolization throughout the Caribbean: an open-ended, spontaneous, improvisational, and culturally authentic exaltation of the power of imagination to refashion reality. Papee Vince correctly insists that Magdalena's "most salient feature" is "she universality, the all-embracing all-comprehending expansiveness of she great love" (p. 347). Her mysterious origins and ambiguous ethnicity only reinforce that universality; she is whatever her votaries need her to be. The Magdalena cult is specific to Corpus Christi, but its quality of "all-comprehending expansiveness" relates it to the essence of the Caribbean. Benitez-Rojo makes much the same point in his discussion of the Cuban devotion to the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. The Virgen, whose origins are as syncretic as Magdalena's, can be read as particularly or exclusively Cuban; but the cult

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can also be read "as a meta-archipelagic text, a meeting or confluence of marine flowings that connects the Niger with the Mississippi, the China Sea with the Orinoco, the Parthenon with a fried food stand in an alley in Paramaribo."44 Johnny Domingo's journeys—to the swamp, into himself, into his past, to the world beyond the Caribbean and back again— are part of that dynamic, part of that confluence. Above all, it is his telling and retelling of the story that places him within the ceaseless, meta-archipelagic ebb and flow of Caribbean culture. Evelina bestows this project on him as a sacred duty: "And if dere is anybody could explain all dis confusion to dose yankees, dat dey understand who we is and where we come from dat we can scarce even understand weself, it could only be you" (p. 313). In the Labyrinth of Banyans The swampy matrix of storytelling in Divina Trace is human consciousness itself, and Johnny Domingo's journey into the mangroves and mud of his family's past carries him just as deeply into the thickets of his own mind. It is a personal "voyage in," but a voyage that has cultural and political implications because the consciousness he confronts is creolized at its very core. At one point, unable to decide whether either Mother Maurina or her account of Magdalena is real, he reaches out to touch Maurina's headdress and conceives that act as touching his "own imagination," which he calls the "farthest extremity of my deepest, most sacred self" (p. 156). Only a few pages later, just before the beginning of Magdalena's poem, he elaborates on the nature of that deepest self. Recalling the night when he opened the bottle and watched the crapochild swim into the dark waters of Maraval Swamp, Johnny reflects, My aloneness had been suddenly violated, split in two by that swimming frogchild, as though in that frogchild I had suddenly seen myself, my other self, the constant companion of my ongoing silent conversation, my twin brother. I had seen the other I. Not the imagined I but the I of my imagination: the imagining I. The third eye in the middle of my forehead through which I saw myself—the Hindu tilak in the centre of my consciousness with which I heard myself, my essential self, God within, (p. 170)

The third eye is a recurring motif in Divina Trace, but all of those eyes (including a hilarious account of a glass eyeball in a man's anus) are in a sense only traces—préfigurations or echoes—of this one: the I that sees what the eyes cannot. Johnny externalizes his imagining I as the frogchild Manuelito because it is such a monstrosity—a part of himself so unsuspected, so alien, so mysterious, that it seems not even to belong to him.

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But it does belong to him, and Johnny instinctively understands that he must face it again: N o w . . . I know the only way to find that frogchild still hiding somewhere alive in the labyrinth of those innumerable mangrove banyans, i s . . . to surrender myself up to this monkey of my imagination and let him speak, even in his own impenetrable monkey-language—to turn around and go back to the beginning once more. (p. 172)

The implicit association of the monkey imagination with the frogchild/"imagining I"45 is reinforced in Magdalena's poem when Valmiki and the monkey god Hanuman gaze "on each other as if in a lookglass" (p. 184). In the second half of the poem, when Hanuman (who has previously served only as a scribe) is charged with completing it, he ponders its characters and realizes how to proceed: "Only when Hanuman inform dem each, / With he mirror-form simple enough / . . . Did Hanuman begin to dress he story in Valmiki shacksloka" (p. 215).46 That is to say, Hanuman can compose the rest of the epic himself only by reaching into his own monkey imagination, "informing" the story with it.47 These lines provide a crucial link, too, between storytelling and interpretation, suggesting as they do that each story as read and interpreted is a new story told. When Johnny thinks about the "farthest extremity" of his "deepest, most sacred self" (p. 156), he moves into territory much stranger than the ancient legends lying behind the Ramayana. He calls it "a source deeper than my conscious mind, deeper than reasoning" (p. 157). Antoni attempts, through Hanuman's tale of the monkey tribes, a direct literary representation of that wellspring of consciousness. It is possible to go through this section and string together enough phrases to form a reasonably intelligible account of the Ramayana's Hanuman subplot. But those phrases are insistently interwoven with a dizzying welter of words and other signs relating in manifold ways to Divina Trace and the monkey imagination that informs its characters. Although this part of the novel is saturated with signification, its meanings are not accessible to the usual strategies of reading and interpretation because it is a verbal facsimile of the disorganized, preverbal flux that Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic. At the very center of Hanuman's speech is an aluminum mirror-page: a startling objectification of the nonverbal core of consciousness and a means by which the reader must literally "inform" the story with his own "mirror-form."48 The symbolic is, to simplify Kristeva's explanation rather coarsely, the regulation of the semiotic into the logic and order of discursive language and rational thought.49 According to Kristeva, "The two modalities are inseparable within the signifying

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process that constitutes language, and the dialectic between them determines the types of discourse . . . involved";50 but it is perhaps not too naive to view the semiotic, being necessarily preverbal, as a kind of matrix (from mater, mother) out of which the symbolic arises, through struggle, and upon which it depends for its nourishment. The myth of Divina Trace fulfills itself in many ways. The cognitive acts produced by Kristeva's dialectic can be seen as storytelling at its most elemental: the means by which we define ourselves both as perceiving subjects and as objects within a wider reality that includes us but which we can know only through our perception of it. The entire vast concentric edifice of Antoni's novel is an elaborate attempt or series of attempts to extract a trace of definition from the formless semiotic swamp. By retracing in his own mind stories he has heard or imagined about the island's history, Johnny Domingo constructs a composite cultural identity of which he is a part. The telling of the stories must be collective because the Caribbean reality that those stories ceaselessly yearn to define is itself collective, a "multiple series of relationships";51 and the telling must be speculative because the story of the past, like all other stories, is fashioned by the imagination. If the recuperation of a disputed past by multiple and mutually contradictory voices (Said's "voyage in") lacks the solidity of historical discourse proceeding from received authority, it also lacks official history's distortions. As Glissant explains, history as a linear, hierarchical formulation "is a highly functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone 'made' the history of the World." To perpetuate the fantasy, "the collective memory was too often wiped out," and the Caribbean writer (as we have seen in the case of Caryl Phillips) must "dig deep"52 to retrieve fragments of it. The goal of this collective, tentative, and distinctly nonauthoritarian evocation of a scattered past is nothing less than the construction of a Caribbean consciousness, and the conception of history-as-story underlying the enterprise is not simply the restrictive, "othering" discourse of the West but a magically transformed one—fluid, changing, and potentially liberating.53 "A magical notion of reality," Glissant points out, "is based on beliefs hidden deep in the collective past."54 Even in his short stories Robert Antoni's reading of human experience encompasses more than the empirical, and in Divina Trace a vast reality of possibilities emerges from the re-creation of the past by the collective imagination. It is a reality incalculably enriched by ubiquitous encounters between the natural and the supernatural. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is perhaps the most obvious of these epiphanies, if only because it is implicit in every reference to the island's name. Corpus Christi is the feast that eel-

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ebrates the Eucharist, in which the humanity of the participants becomes consubstantial with the divine nature of Christ. In a bizarre parody of the Eucharist, Granny Myna boils the frogchild in a callaloo (or so Johnny remembers her telling him) and serves him to her family for Christmas dinner. His name, Manuelito, is a diminutive form of Immanuel ("God is with us")—the name of the Messiah as prophesied by Isaiah. But all sorts of gods, angels, "diabs," and demons (not just Christian ones) parade through the carnival of Divina Trace, and many of them are equally at home in heaven and on earth. Eshu, the trickster deity so feared by Evelina, is also the Yoruba messenger god, the guardian of crossroads and boundaries, and the mediator between this life and the next. He crosses those boundaries at will. Rama and Sita, in Antoni's version of the Ramayana, are human incarnations of the gods Shiva and Kali. The very idea of incarnation (or the conjunction of this world with a dimension beyond it), so closely bound up with the novel's central myth of Magdalena and its effect on Corpus Christi, becomes a metaphor for all the ways in which the magic latent in imagination can transfigure human experience. The little statue of the black madonna with which Magdalena has been linked is believed to be the incarnation of several different goddess figures, including the Virgin Mary, but it is the coalescence of all these avatars into Magdalena Divina, a patron saint for all the people of Corpus Christi, that marks her story as a new myth belonging to a new creóle culture. Papee Vince explains the process with reference to the relationship between Magdalena Domingo and the statue: Magdalena did not precede, or anticipate, or in any way inspire the creation of this black madonna. She did not give birth to this statue: the statue, or more precisely history, gave birth to Magdalena. And history took she life too—long before she was dead—only so that history could give Magdalena a second birth, could bring her back to life in this black madonna which preceded her. (pp. 381-382)

Born out of history, out of the stories ordinary human beings living within history tell, myth reenters history through a tracery of beliefs and values that form the nucleus of culture, and it works as a cohesive force within culture precisely because it is seen to embody those same beliefs and values. But more than that, the infusion of history with the ahistorical impulse of faith has a transubstantiative effect, both within individual lives and in the lives of civilizations. That is why Papee Vince is deadly serious when he says to Johnny, "You see son, it is not so much the telling of this story. It is the believing in it"; a story told without belief is just "windballs and airfritters" (p. 396).

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Divina Trace reenacts the process by which stories told collectively as folktales can gather into the contours of a myth, but it also probes, through the meta-narrator's relentless journey into his own psyche, the unfathomable source of storytelling and belief in the individual creative mind, as well as that mind's kinship with the cultural matrix to which it belongs. A form of incarnation, or at least a variation on the concept, comes into play here, too. Johnny Domingo looks down through the corridors of his memory at the living frogchild and sees a version of himself. Resorting to the lexicon available to him, he calls it "the imagining I . . . my essential self, God within" (p. 170). Johnny's quasi-Blakean characterization of his imagination as God parallels other links between consciousness and divinity that can be found within the teeming mythologies of Divina Trace. Eshu—a god closely connected with language and interpretation (as well as with misinterpretation)—is frequently depicted holding a calabash that contains "the very ase with which Olodumare, the supreme deity of the Yoruba, created the universe." Gates translates ase as logos, in the sense of "understanding" or "the audible, and later the visible, sign of reason."55 And in Magdalena's version of the Ramayana, the very composition of the poem results from the conjunction of consciousness and divine intervention. Valmiki first hears the tale of Rama in a dream,56 while dozing beneath a "sacred samaan tree" (p. 175), but he is unable to cast it into poetry until the goddess Kali57 gives him the ability to do so, suggesting that the raw matter of story can be articulated as art only through a catalyst believed to be extrinsic to the normal circuits of the conscious mind. The branches of Valmiki's samaan spread over much of Divina Trace, as they do over much of the Caribbean itself. The samaan, or rain tree, is native to the region and has long been linked with fertility in Amerindian lore, possibly because its leaves fold at night, allowing rain to fall (and therefore vegetation to grow) under it. For many in Latin America and the West Indies, the tree evokes political liberation and rebirth as well because of its association with Simón Bolívar.58 In Antoni's novel the samaan witnesses all forms of creativity—biological, religious, political, and artistic. According to Evelina, Barto impregnated Magdalena under the great samaan tree beside Maraval Swamp, thus hastening the birth of a myth that would galvanize Corpus Christi culturally and politically. And near the end of the novel, after he has spent the whole night remembering, Johnny Domingo goes for a walk, falls asleep beneath that tree, and dreams the words that begin Divina Trace. Both the crapochild of myth and the crapostory that embodies the myth are engendered, appropriately, under the same tree, on the edge of the same swamp. But Johnny's uniquely Caribbean identity—that mysterious communion of consciousness, creativity, and faith that he finds in his own

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inner swamp—is finally something that can be approached only through the obliquities of metaphor; all he can do is circle around this enigma, continuing to tell and retell the story that reveals itself to him as an endless orchestration of voices, their registers indefinitely suspended, as in a dream, somewhere between the harmonic intercessions of archangels and the inchoate croaking of frogs.

Every boundary line is a myth. Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock, from The Guyana Quartet When Johnny Domingo says," There is no end to any of this. There is only beginning, and between, and beginning again" (p. 62), he describes not only the plot of Divina Trace but the Caribbean itself, for the region's cultural discourse, as Benitez-Rojo observes, is always additive, never subtractive or delimiting: The literature of the Caribbean seeks to differentiate itself from the European not by excluding cultural components that influenced its formation, but rather, on the contrary, by moving toward the creation of an ethnologically promiscuous text that might allow a reading of the varied and dense polyphony of Caribbean society's characteristic codes. 59

The evolution of Caribbean identity and culture is a process with many beginnings but no true end. For that reason alone, a traditional conclusion to this b o o k — a synthesizing summary or a reductive listing of themes—seems to me as inappropriate as the proclamation of a thesis would have been in the first chapter. From Mackandal to Mrs. Mabel Morgan, the metamorphic task of creating a new world, richer and stranger than any Prospero himself might have conceived, has depended on the magic of Caribbean storytelling—a magic that the critic's "conquistadorial" categories of thought cannot even truly understand, let alone violate. Becoming Caribbean may well be "an intellectual dream," 60 but as David Dabydeen has eloquently written, "Folk that know bone / Fatten themselves on dreams / For the survival of days." 61 The multifarious dream of Caribbean consciousness originates in the collective, often painful, experience of generations and emerges as the transformative "arts of the narrator" in story after story, text after text. The waves and echoes of West Indian voices can be traced in the passages of all those artists, not just the ones explored in the preceding

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pages. The world those storytellers weave is a protean world, a work in progress constantly being added to, filled in, repaired, rewritten, and increasingly invigorated, in Wilson Harris's words, by "the pursuit of enduring cross-cultural spirit in arts of dialogue with unsuspected and supportive myth."62 Notes 1. Mark McWatt goes so far as to call "a preoccupation with the past" "a dominant feature" of West Indian literature. See McWatt, "TTie Preoccupation with the Past in West Indian Literature," Caribbean Quarterly 28.1&2 (1982): 12-19. 2. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 216. 3. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James E. Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 3. Many of these same motifs and patterns can be seen in Antoni's impressive second novel, Blessed Is the Fruit (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), which appeared as this book was going to press. Blessed Is the Fruit, though in many ways simpler in design than Divina Trace, is just as much a literary embodiment of the ongoing construction of a syncretic Caribbean identity. Both novels relentlessly resist what Edouard Glissant calls "the premeditated ideological dogma of those who do not focus on the cross-cultural contact between people" (Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989], 232-233). 4. For a discussion of this issue as it pertains to Jean Rhys, see Louis James, "Sun Fire—Painted Fire: Jean Rhys as a Caribbean Novelist," Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 8.3 (1977): 111-127. 5. DeLisser is often referred to as "white," but Claude McKay (who was his contemporary) calls him, in a letter to Nancy Cunard, "a mulatto." See McKay, ALS to Nancy Cunard, 27 March 1932, Harry R. Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX. 6. Antoni himself, who claims mixed ancestry, prefers not to be labeled "white" and deplores the sorting of people—especially in the Caribbean—into rigid racial categories. His view of this matter is best articulated by a character in Divina Trace, who says that the whole of his island is "nothing but one big callaloo with all of we boiling up and swimming together inside, and nobody could know any longer who was who and what was what, much less care to make a difference." From Divina Trace (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1992), 365. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 7. Edouard Glissant, "Beyond Babel," World Literature Today 63.4 (1989): 561,368. 8. Robert Antoni, "TVvo-Head Fred and Tree-Foot Frieda," The Missouri Review 8.1 (1984-1985): 87. Subsequent page references are to this edition. 9. The grandmother in the story is not named; I use her Divina Trace name here for convenience. Antoni's current project, nearly completed, is a collection of tales told by this grandmother. 10. Robert Antoni, "My Grandmother's Story of the Buried Treasure and How She Defeated the King of Chacachacari and the Entire American Army with Her Venus-Flytraps," Conjunctions 18 (1992): 290. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

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11. The phrase is from a famous wartime calypso by Invader: "Since the Yankees come to Trinidad / They have the young girls going mad. / The girls say they treat them nice, / And they give them a better price. / They buy rum and Coca Cola / Go down Point Cumana / Both mother and daughter / Working for the Yankee dollar." Quoted in Elizabeth Saft, ed., Trinidad and Tobago (Singapore: APA Productions, Ltd., 1987), 240. 12. Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 4. 13. Henry James, Notes on Novelists (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), 348. 14. Odillo (Robert) Antoni, "A Piece of Pommerac," Paris Review 111 (1989): 170. 15. John C. Hawley, in a useful introduction to Divina Trace, describes this process as "the central narrator's ritualistic entry into the layers of his own consciousness, his own identity and personal mystery, and his re-emergence not only as an individual but as a Caribbean." See Hawley, "Robert Antoni's 'Divina Trace' and the Womb of Place," Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 24.1 (1993): 93. 16. Philip Lutgendorf, Introduction to Odillo (Robert) Antoni, "A Piece of Pommerac," Paris Review 111 (1989): 168. 17. Aamer Hussein, "The Voices of Myth," review of Divina Trace, by Robert Antoni, Times Literary Supplement, 22 November 1991:21. 18. His search bears more than a passing resemblance to Quentin Compson's in Absalom, Absalom! The two novels share, in addition to multiple narrators, a preoccupation with the relationship of history to myth and an inquiry into the devices of storytelling and the links between narration and knowledge. Like Divina Trace, Faulkner's masterpiece poses "problems in the epistemology of narrative and the cognitive uses of plotting in a context of radical doubt about the validity of plot." See Peter Brooks, "Incredulous Narration: 'Absalom, Absalom!' " in Modern Critical Views: William Faulkner, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 247. Antoni himself tips his hat to his distinguished predecessor: While away at medical school, Johnny Domingo's father had a Canadian roommate named "Shreve" (p. 118). 19. The novel contains a page from an actual medical text describing (and depicting) an anencephalic fetus; the photograph is reproduced at the same point in the second half of the book, in the form of a negative representing an X ray of the child. The mystery of conception and childbirth, obviously a subject that fascinates Antoni, also plays a central role in Blessed Is the Fruit. 20. The real Warahuns, like the ones in Divina Trace, were indigenous to Venezuela, and some of them did come to Trinidad, though not as many as in the novel. See Melville J. Herskovits and Frances H. Herskovits, Trinidad Village (New York: Knopf, 1947), 224. 21. From the French crapaud (frog). The tale repeatedly told in Divina Trace is often referred to as a "crapostory," and indeed it is both a crapaud-story, a tale of a frog, and a story full of crap, or a bit of a tall tale, like Tristram Shandy and Finnegans Wake. 22. This occurs at another point in the novel when Johnny remembers "Evelina sheself" referring to "de problem you mummy and daddy was ga have burying me in Domingo Cemetery" (p. 325). 23. There are many other conflicting dates in the novel. Johnny recalls, on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, Mother Maurina stating that she is 113 years old. If he was in fact born in 1909, this would fix the year of her birth at 1814. But

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she also claims to be the mother of Magdalena, who is fourteen or fifteen when she gives birth to the frogchild in 1899. Mother Maurina, therefore, would have become a mother at the age of seventy! At another point Evelina supposedly tells Johnny, when he is sixteen (presumably 1925), that his grandfather Barto has been gone "fa longer den forty years" (p. 335). Since Barto disappeared shortly after the frogchild's birth in April 1899, Evelina's words to Johnny cannot have been uttered until at least 1939. And so on. 24. R. K. Narayan, Gods, Demons, and Others (New York: Viking, 1967), 126. 25. Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 11. 26. Robert Antoni, "The Myth-making Process in Absalom, Absalom! and One Hundred Years of Solitude," 3-4 (unpublished). 27. Robert Antoni, "Fifty Years After Freud and Joyce, Moses and Finnegan: Re-writing the Primal History Scene for the Absent Mother," 23 (unpublished). 28. Mark Kurlansky, A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993), ix-x. 29. C. L. R. James, "La Divina Pastora," in Stories from the Caribbean, ed. Andrew Salkey (London: Elek Books, 1965), 150-151. 30. Saft, Trinidad and Tobago, 173-174. 31. Although this particular deity appears to be Antoni's invention, many Amerindian religions included devotion to a mother goddess. The mainland Caribs of the Surinamese coast, for example, believed that the "universe has its source in Amana, a virgin mother and water goddess who has no navel (i.e., was never born)" and who "is the essence of time, has borne all things, can adopt any shape." See Walter Krickeberg et al., Pre-Columbian American Religions, trans. Stanley Davis (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 246. 32. Corpus Christi is the feast that honors the Blessed Sacrament (the Body of Christ as transformed by the Mass). For centuries the Catholic church has placed this important holiday on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday—many weeks following Easter. However, the "natural day" for Corpus Christi is the Thursday before Easter. It was apparently observed on this day by early Christians, and Antoni chooses to restore the original day to the feast in Divina Trace, but his reason for doing so is that the actual festival of La Divina Pastora in Siparia, Trinidad, takes place on that day. It seems that when the Divina Pastora cult was taken up by the Hindus, many of whom were sugarcane workers, that holiday weekend was the only period during the year when there was enough time for them to travel from different parts of the island to take part in the celebration. See The New Catholic Encyclopedia IV (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 345. 33. A West Indian stew, especially popular in the southern Caribbean, made of dasheen leaves, seafood, and other ingredients. "Any and everything goes into a good callaloo" (Divina Trace, p. 318). 34. Antoni, "Fifty Years," 3,22,25,28. For the sake of space, I have greatly condensed and simplified Antoni's argument. 35. Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 21. 36. Herskovits and Herskovits, Trinidad Village, 321-339, discuss Shango worship in great detail. 37. Phillip Allison, African Stone Sculpture (New York: Praeger, 1968), 20. Eshu's identification with Satan is widespread throughout the Caribbean. Benitez-Rojo mentions that as far north as Cuba, "the santería cult represents

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him sometimes as the devil, and consequently it is said of Eshu that at times 'he speaks backwards.' " The Repeating Island, 227. 38. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfroAmerican Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6. Philip John Neimark adds that Eshu, a "carefree" and "fun-loving" figure, will "easi l y . . . provoke conflict or mischief among others simply to get some action going." See Neimark, The Way of the Orisa (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 80,78. 39. This is another indication of the elasticity of the novel's chronology. Slavery ended in the British West Indies in the 1830s. 40. Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 192. 41. For a subtle and detailed treatment of the role of Carnival in Trinidad's cultural life, see Earl Lovelace's novel The Dragon Can't Dance (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1988). 42. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. 43. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 9-10. 44. Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 16. 45. The association is further stressed by the repetition of the word "frogmonkey" (pp. 197 and 208) in Hanuman's tale of the monkey tribes. In the novel's vast web of connections, Evelina's identification of the frogchild with Eshu, the lord of uncertainties, strongly hints that the meaning structures projected by the imagination should be taken as suspensive and contingent, not absolute. 46. This word, like many other references in the poem, is a creolized composite of East Indian and West Indian material. Valmiki's verse form was the sloka; the "shack-shack" is a musical instrument (also known as "maracas") popular in Venezuela and Trinidad. 47. Henry Louis Gates speculates on a possible link between the "signifying monkey" in West African cosmologies and the god Eshu (or Elegbara) in his role as linguist and interpeter. See Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 13-17. It is also true that the monkey was associated with language, writing, and interpretation in the religion of the Mayans, whose territory abutted the western Caribbean. The patron deities of the powerful "caste of scribes (ah dzib)," who "controlled epigraphic, astronomical and historical information," were Itzamnâ "the Creator God and legendary inventor of writing, and the Monkey-Man gods of the Popol Vuh." See Michael Coe, Dean Snow, and Elizabeth Benson, Atlas of Ancient America (New York: Facts on File, 1989), 119. 48. For Kristeva, following Lacan, the "mirror stage" is essential in the development of signification. Analysis of the mirrors and reflections in Divina Trace, drawing on both Kristeva and Lacan, is one of many approaches to the novel awaiting further exploration. 49. A signifying system "constructed exclusively on the basis of the semiotic" would have to be nonverbal, like music. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 92. The Greek word from which "semiotic" is derived can have as one of its meanings "trace." 50. Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, 92. 51. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 139. 52. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 64. 53. Antoni's presentation of history as neither fixed nor objective is also consonant with postwar "relativist" trends in historiography. See, for example, R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,

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1946); E. H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Knopf, 1962); and Timothy Paul Donovan, Historical Thought in America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973). 54. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 243. 55. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 7. 56. In the dream Valmiki sees "heself a boychild again . . . de boychild toting an infant." When the old Valmiki questions his younger self about the infant, the boy replies," 'Dis popo is you and me together. / All we three persons in one. / Father, body of we mummy, son' " (p. 175). If the boy holding the baby in Valmiki's dream can be construed as an image of Johnny toting the frogchild in a glass bottle, then we have a narrative scenario something like this: Johnny Domingo dreams, remembers, and imagines Divina Trace, in which Magdalena relates a version of the Ramayana, in which the Ramayana's "real" author, Valmiki, meets Johnny Domingo in a dream. The boy in the dream is Valmiki himself (as a child), his son (as his dream creation), and his father (as the metanarrator of the whole novel). 57. Traditionally, it is Brahma, not Kali, who intervenes. Antoni's own myth obviously works better if a goddess is the source of inspiration. See Narayan, Gods, Demons, and Others, 136. 58. Bolivar is said to have encamped his army of liberation under a gigantic samaan tree near Maracay, Venezuela (the same astonishing tree earlier described by the naturalist Humboldt). Outside the room where Bolivar died, on a ranch near Santa Marta, Colombia, stands another samaan and, beneath it, a statue of the Liberator. See Flowering Trees of the Caribbean (New York: Rineh a r t & Co., 1951), 56-58. 59. Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 189. 60. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 139. 61. David Dabydeen, "Coolie Odyssey," in Caribbean Poetry Now, ed. Stewart Brown (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 145. 62. Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), xx.

Bibliography

The works listed here influenced my thinking, in one way or another, during the writing of this book. A comprehensive bibliography of West Indian literature and criticism, along with related materials, would fill at least an entire volume. Allfrey, Phyllis Shand. The Orchid House. London: Virago, 1991. Allison, Phillip. African Stone Sculpture. New York: Praeger, 1968. Allsopp, Richard, ed. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Anthony, Michael. The Year in San Fernando. London: Heinemann, 1985. Antoni, Robert. Blessèd Is the Fruit. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. . Divina Trace. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1992. . "Fifty Years after Freud and Joyce, Moses and Finnegan: Re-writing the Primal History Scene for the Absent Mother." Unpublished essay, n.d. . "My Grandmother's Story of the Buried Treasure and How She Defeated the King of Chacachacari and the Entire American Army with Her Venus-Flytraps." Conjunctions 18 (1992): 281-300. . "The Myth-making Process in Absalom, Absalom! and One Hundred Years of Solitude." Unpublished essay, n.d. . "A Piece of Pommerac." Paris Review 111 (1989): 168-183,271. . "Two-Head Fred and Tree-Foot Frieda." Missouri Review 8.1 (1984-1985): 87-100. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Babin, Maria Teresa. "Trends in Caribbean English Fiction." Caribbean Studies 20.1 (March 1980): 69-74. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1969. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. . Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. 175

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Index

Abeng (Cliff), 49n, 79n, 80n Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 155, 170n Africa, 1,7,10,44,49n, 58,60,64, 71-73,87,117,125,135-137,139n, 144,158,160,161 Allfrey, Phyllis Shand, 146 All Souls' Rising (Bell), 2 Alvarez, Julia, 12n Amerindians, 1,10, lln, 62,145,152, 156,170n, 171n; Black Caribs (Garifuna), 54,56,60,63-64,80n; Maya, 58,60,62,172n "Ancestral Poem" (Senior), 25-26 Angel (Collins), 67 Annie John (Kincaid), 9,13n, 56,67 Anthony, Michael, 3; Year in San Fernando, The., 13n Antoni, Robert, 3,45,9,144-173; Blessed Is the Fruit, 169n, 170n; Divina Trace, 5,7,8,10,144,145, 146,148,149-168; "My Grandmother's Story of the Buried Treasure," 146,148-149; "Two-Head Fred and Tree-Foot Frieda," 146-147 "Arrival of the Snake-Woman" (Senior), 7,19,36,40,43-47,55,64, 117 Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories (Senior), 19,23, 30-32,34-35,38-47 "Ascot" (Senior), 20-21,30,35 Austen, Jane: Mansfield Park, 131

Bachelard, Gaston, 75,79,127 Bahamas,The, 1-2,5, lln, 145,146 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 162 "Ballad" (Senior), 27-30,36,46 Banana Bottom (McKay), 3 "Beauty Contest, The" (S. Naipaul), 88 Beka Lamb (Edgell), 4,7,8,52-66,67, 68,69,75,76,78,119 Belize, 4, lln, 52-79; creolization in, 53,60-62; ethnic groups, 56,58,60, 63,80n; history of, 52,57-58,63-64, 69-70,73-74,80n,81n Bell, Madison Smartt: All Souls' Rising, 2 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio, 5,6,10,13n, 30,130,144,149-150,154,160,161, 162-163,168,169n, 171n, 172n Bennett, Louise, 17,18,116 Beyond the Dragon's Mouth (S. Naipaul), 85,86,87-90 Bim, 54 Blessed Is the Fruit (Antoni), 169n, 170n Bolivar, Simon, 167,173n Booker Prize, 4 "Boy Who Loved Ice Cream, The" (Senior), 23-24 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 8,10,18, 145-146 "Bright Thursdays" (Senior), 23,25 Brodber, Erna, 3 Brother Man (Mais), 49n Bustamante, Alexander, 19,20

183

184

Index

calypso, 5,170n Cambridge (Phillips), 4,7,10,116,117, 130-139 Caribbean (Michener), 2 carnival, 5,148,162,172n Carpentier, Alejo: El reino de este mundo, 2 Catholicism, 53,61,65,153,155-158, 161,162,171n Chip-Chip Gatherers, The (S. Naipaul), 5,7,85,90,98-107,108 "Chocho Vine, The" (Senior), 47 Clarke, Austin, 3 Cliff, Michelle, 3,12n; Abeng, 49n; No Telephone to Heaven, 49n Collins, Merle, 3; Angel, 67 Colly more, Frank, 54 "Colonial Girls School" (Senior), 54 Columbus, Christopher, 1,2, l l n "Confirmation Day" (Senior), 25 Corpus Christi, Feast of, 156,171n Coteau, Delano Abdul Malik de, 6 "Country of the One-Eye God" (Senior), 19-20,26,35 creolization, 5,7,10-11,22,47,53, 60-62,90,92-93,101,112n, 144-145, 162,163 Crick Crack Monkey (Hodge), 13n, 49n,67 Crossing the River (Phillips), 4,117, 130,139n Dabydeen, David, 168 Danticat, Edwidge, 12n Dash, J. Michael, 29,138 DeLisser, H. G., 13n, 146,169n "Discerner of Hearts" (Senior), 35, 36-38,40,67 Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories (Senior), 19,23,30,33-34,35-38 Divina Trace (Antoni), 5,7,8,10,144, 145,146,148,149-168 "Dolly House, The" (S. Naipaul), 88, 89-90,97 Dragon Can't Dance, The (Lovelace), 8,172n Drayton, Michael, 146 East Indians, 5,12n, 43-47,84-107, 108,112n, 155,156,158-160,171n

Edgell, Zee, 3,4,5,9,52-81,144; Beka Lamb, 4,7,8,52-66,67,68,69,75, 76,78,119; In Times Like These, 4, 56,66-79,111,122,125,127 Eliot,T. S.: "Little Gidding," 117 El reino de este mundo (Carpentier), 2 Emigrants, The (Lamming), 69,70 Eshu, 160-161,166,167,171n, 172n European Tribe, The (Phillips), 117, 140n expatriation, 4,7,12n, 69-70,84, 116-124,140n Far Tortuga (Matthiessen), 2 Faulkner, William: Absalom, Absalom!, 155,170n Final Passage, The (Phillips), 4,68, 116-124,126,130 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 158,170n Fireflies (S. Naipaul), 5,84,85,88, 90-98,101,103,107,108 Freud, Sigmund: Moses and Monotheism, 157-158 Froude, James Anthony, 111, 132 Garcia, Cristina, 12n Garcia Márquez, Gabriel: One Hundred Years of Solitude, 155 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 160,167,172n Gikandi, Simon, 13n, 18,80n, 81n Glissant, Edouard, 5,6,11,29,49n, 73, 90,131,138,146,165,169n Guyana, lln, 107,113n Haiti, 2 Hanuman, 150,159,164,172n Harris, Wilson, 3,5,8,10,11,18,90, 169 Hearne, John, 3,17; Sure Salvation, The, 7,131; Voices Under the Window, 31 Heath, Roy A. K.,3,12n Higher Ground (Phillips), 117,130, 137,139n Hijuelos, Oscar, 12n Hills Were Joyful Together, The (Mais), 8 Hodge, Merle: Crick Crack Monkey, 13n, 49n, 67 "Home Is the Heart" (James), 125

Index

Hot Country, A (S. Naipaul),74, 107-111 House for Mr. Biswas, A (V. S. Naipaul), 84,91,94 Incarnation, the, 165-166 In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming), 8,9,67,127-128 In Times Like These (Edgell), 4,56, 66-79, 111, 122,125,127 Jamaica, 16-47; creolization in, 10; language, 16-18,48n; race and ethnicity, 20-21,25,29,31-33,36, 49n James, C.L.R., 4,155-156 James, Kelvin Christopher, 4; "Home Is the Heart," 125 Jonestown massacre, 87,107,112-113n Journey to Nowhere (S. Naipaul), 87, 107,112-113n, 127 Joyce, James, 8,23,157; Finnegans Wake, 158,170n Jumbie Bird, The (Khan), 7,13n, 140n Khan, Ismith, 5; Jumbie Bird, The, 7, 13n, 140n Kincaid, Jamaica, 3,56; Annie John, 9, 13n, 56,67; Lucy, 9,12n, 54,55; Small Place, A, 132 Knight, Franklin W., 25,133,141n Kristeva, Julia, 164-165,172n Kurlansky, Mark, 25,124-125,155 Lacan, Jacques, 172n La Divina Pastora, 155-156,171n Ladoo, Harold Sonny, 3 Lamming, George, 3,7,12n, 35,54,55, 73; Emigrants, The, 69,70; In the Castle of My Skin, 8,9,67,127-128; Natives of My Person, 131 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 61 "Lily, Lily" (Senior), 40-43,45,138 "Little Gidding" (Eliot), 117 Lovelace, Earl, 3,43-44,55; Dragon Can't Dance, The, 8,172n; Schoolmaster, The, 48n; Wine of Astonishment, The, 127 "Love Orange, The" (Senior), 39 Lucy (Kincaid), 9,12n, 54,55

185

Mackandal, 2,168 Mais, Roger, 3,17; Brother Man, 49n; Hills Were Joyful Together, The, 8 "Man of Mystery, A" (S. Naipaul), 88-89 Mansfield Park (Austen), 131 maroons, 24,49n Marshall, Paule, 12n Matthiessen, Peter: Far Tortuga, 2 McKay, Claude, 11,54,122,139-140n, 169n; Banana Bottom, 3 Melville, Pauline, 3 Michener, James A.: Caribbean, 2 Miguel Street (V. S. Naipaul), 13n, 55, 67,84 Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 157-158 Moses Ascending (Selvon), 17 Moses Migrating (Selvon), 125 Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (V. S. Naipaul), 112n "My Grandmother's Story of the Buried Treasure and How She Defeated the King of Chacachacari and the Entire American Army with Her Venus Flytraps" (Antoni), 146,148-149 Naipaul, Seepersad, 3,84 Naipaul, Shiva, 3,4,5,72,84-113,123, 144; "Beauty Contest, The," 88; Beyond the Dragon's Mouth, 85,86, 87-90; Chip-Chip Gatherers, The, 5, 7,85,90,98-107,108; "Dolly House, The," 88,89-90,97; Fireflies, 5,84, 85,88,90-98,101,103,107,108; Hot Country, A, 74,107-111; Journey to Nowhere, 87,107,112-113n, 127; "Man of Mystery, A," 88-89; North of South, 93,112n; Unfinished Journey, An, 84,85,86,87 Naipaul, V. S., 3,18,84,90,112n, 116; House for Mr. Biswas, A, 84,91,94; Miguel Street, 13n, 55,67,84; Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, 112n; Suffrage of Elvira, The, 67,92; Way in the World, A, 12n, 48n, 139n Narayan, R. K., 154 Natives of My Person (Lamming), 131 neocolonialism, 7,9,16,128

186

Index

New Day (Reid), 17 Nobel Prize, 6 No Pain Like This Body (Ladoo), 112n North of South (S. Naipaul), 93,112n No Telephone to Heaven (Cliff), 49n, 67,74,139 Nugent, Maria, 132 obeah, 37,45,134,160-161 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Márquez), 155 oral tradition, 1,3,4,13n, 16,18,21,27, 155. See also storytelling Panama Canal, 35,36,41^2 Phillips, Caryl, 3,4,5,52,69,116-141, 165; Cambridge, 4,7,10,116,117, 130-139; Crossing the River, 4,117, 130,139n; European Tribe, The, 117, 140n; Final Passage, The, 4,68, 116-124,126,130; Higher Ground, 117,130,137,139n; Shelter, The, 138; State of Independence, A, 4,9-10, 74,116,117,124-130,132; Strange Fruit, 116,121,124,125,129,137; Where There Is Darkness, 116,125, 126,139n Ramayana, 150,151,154,159-160,164, 166,172n, 173n Ramchand, Kenneth, 12n, 17,146 Rastafarian, 26,27,49n, 72,87 "Real Old Time Ting" (Senior), 8, 21-22 Reid, V. S. (Vic), 3,16; New Day, 17 Rhys, Jean, 3, ll-12n, 54,141; Voyage in the Dark, 69,122; Wide Sargasso Sea, 7, ll-12n, 89,131,145-146 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), l l n Roach, Eric, 8-9 Said, Edward, 2,86,131-132,144, 165 St. Kitts and Nevis, 116,130,139n, 140n samaan tree, 167,173n Sander, Reinhard W„ 12n, 13n Schoolmaster, The (Lovelace), 48n "Searching for Grandfather" (Senior), 41^2

"See the Tiki-Tiki Scatter" (Senior), 38,39 Selvon, Samuel, 3,5,12n, 16,69,112n; Moses Ascending, 17; Moses Migrating, 125 Senior, Olive, 3-4,5,9,16-49,52,54, 55,87,88,144; "Ancestral Poem," 25-26; "Arrival of the SnakeWoman," 7,19,36,40,43-47,55,64, 117; Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories, 19,23,30-32, 34-35,38-47; "Ascot," 20-21,30, 35; "Ballad," 27-30,36,46; "Boy Who Loved Ice Cream, The," 23-24; "Bright Thursdays," 23,25; "Chocho Vine, The," 47; "Colonial Girls School," 54; "Confirmation Day," 25; "Country of the One-Eye God," 19-20,26,35; "Discerner of Hearts," 35,36-38,40,67; Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories, 19,23,33-34,35-38; "Lily, Lily," 40-43,45,138; "Love Orange, The," 39; "Real Old Time T'ing," 8,21-22; "Searching for Grandfather," 41^12; "See the TikiTiki Scatter," 38,39; "Summer Lightning," 23,26-27,39,40; Summer Lightning and Other Stories, 16-30,39^0; "Tears of the Sea," 38-39; "Tenantry of Birds, The," 31,34—35,38,67; "Two Grandmothers, The," 38; "View from the Terrace, The," 31-32,33, 34,54; "Window," 35-36,41; Working Miracles, 4,13n; "ZigZag," 33-34 Shango: deity, 44; religion, 145,160, 171n Shelter, The (Phillips), 138 slavery, 1-2,19,44,58,117,130-138, 139n, 160,161 Small Place, A (Kincaid), 132 State of Independence, A (Phillips), 4, 9-10,74,116,117,124-130,132 storytelling, 1-2,7,8,30,37,43,45,47, 64-65,102-104,106-107,151,153, 154-155,162-165,166,167,168-169. See abo oral tradition Strange Fruit (Phillips), 116,121,124, 125,129,137

Index

Suffrage of Elvira, The (V. S. Naipaul), 67,92 "Summer Lightning" (Senior), 23, 26-27,39,40 Summer Lightning and Other Stories (Senior), 16-30,39-40 Sure Salvation, The (Hearne), 7,131 "Tears of the Sea" (Senior), 38-39 "Tenantry of Birds,The" (Senior), 31, 34-35,38,67 Thelwell, Michael, 86 Trinidad, 84-107,112n, 145; literary "awakening," 3,4,12n, 13n, 84; creolization in, 90,92-93,101; demographics, 12n "TVvo Grandmothers, The" (Senior), 38 "Two-Head Fred and Tree-Foot Frieda" (Antoni), 146-147 Unfinished Journey, An (S. Naipaul), 84,85,86,87

187

"View from the Terrace, The" (Senior), 31-32,33,34,54 Voices Under the Window (Hearne), 31 Voyage in the Dark (Rhys), 69,122 Walcott, Derek, 1,6,79 Way in the World, A (V. S. Naipaul), 12n, 48n, 139n Where There Is Darkness (Phillips), 116,125,126,139n Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 7, ll-12n, 89,131,145-146 "Window" (Senior), 35-36,41 Wine of Astonishment, The (Lovelace), 128 Working Miracles (Senior), 4,13n Year in San Fernando, The (Anthony), 13n, 67 "Zig-Zag" (Senior), 33-34

About the Book

Offering a critical perspective on new fiction from the West Indies, Patteson concentrates on five writers from diverse backgrounds and with differing perspectives and artistic strategies, who nevertheless share a commitment to an imaginative repossession of Caribbean life and consciousness. The writers discussed are Olive Senior (Jamaica), who combines devices of oral narratives and sophisticated plot structures; Zee Edgell, in particular her internationally acclaimed first novel, Beka Lamb; Caryl Phillips, who writes of the cultural displacement of being black in England and how this becomes a spur to "imaginative sustenance"; Shiva Naipaul (Trinidad), whose work focuses on what is lost when a new society is formed; and Robert Antoni (Trinidad), whose writing embodies the process of creolization. Richard F. Patteson is professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles and Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme, as well as more than twenty articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.

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