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Aug 15, 2010 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

Keith Jardim

Part One

Three Novels by David Dabydeen

The Counting House, Disappearance, and The Intended. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.

By Keith Jardim

The recruiter had promised romance, comparing it to the story of Lord Bharrat’s journey to Dandaka forest to meet his bride, but in the three long months to Guiana and the two long years following, she met only with the sickness of greed. That was all there was… and she might as well find a way of profiting from it. – The Counting House
There’s a kind of flickering, Harold Sonny Ladoo-type of vulgarity in David Dabydeen’s The Counting House and while this is somewhat present in The Intended, neither novel by Dabydeen has what some might consider the scatological delights of the murdered novelist’s Yesterdays. Ladoo’s title is worth mentioning for in The Counting House, Dabydeen’s purpose – one of them – is to show us the making of the West Indian East Indian, the descendant of those who arrived on the Empire’s ships after Emancipation, to slave on the plantation.
At times, though it is faint, you can hear the Indian accent merging into the West Indian Guyanese. The novel shows, too, the West Indian talent for the most obscene and vicious cursing, one that has glittered across the centuries and is now treasured (by some) for its ability to put our history on pause. You can see Ladoo’s Yesterdays coming at you through Dabydeen’s work with a number of culturally and racially divisive insults.
Despite this, there’s a fairytale type of story for the most part running through the first half of The Counting House, not one that, by any means, discredits the experience of Indentureship, but one that highlights the wickedness of it and the fairytale both: their constant obsession with money and power, young love, and the well-intentioned yet ultimately destructive animadverts who, by the grace of their sanctified ignorance, hold sway over the innocents until all is lost.
Vidia and Rohini are in love as children (as far as this idea of fairytale in poverty-laden early 1800s India goes) but in Guiana, as married adults, things fall apart; they reel under the demands of work and baby-making attempts, and the Afro-Guianese presence has a significant cultural impact in wounding, and nurturing, their lives. Add to this the plantation owner Gladstone’s machinations and you have the classic colonial situation: Massa, the African and Indian servants, their estate work, and the petty rivalries – in short, the classic, defining dynamic of West Indian society.
The novel is short and pungent, showing the curse of slave work under the colonial system: how it destroys love, friendship, self-respect, humanity – and yet Dabydeen shows how human beings will survive in ways they never imagined. But what’s the cost? The belief always seems to be that life might get better; and regardless of those early fairytale dreams becoming compromised, and the characters settling for less, the dreams never die completely (well, not until the love dies; not until people die), so our Romeo and Juliet continue to live in hope, no matter how pathetic and warped it is.
And the behaviour that comes to define friendship and marriage in these conditions is one based on rivalries and jealousies, the foundation still, alas, for the politics of the country and region, and the development of greed and many other possible corruptions.
It is interesting that Dabydeen rarely presents Gladstone (who was an actual person); when we see him, we see him through the minds of Rohini, Vidia, Miriam (his African mistress, among other things), and Kampta. One of the wicked, Kampta is the most admirable character in the novel; he aspires to kill, to change things, if only to get his dignity back. Wisely, he does not carry out these actions: the history of British response to revolts in Guiana is extremely severe and bloody, and he knows it.
The stories the Afro-Caribbean slaves that remind the East Indians of British brutality to uprisings seem an effective deterrent in Kampta’s plans for rebellion. So what Kampta does, mostly, is dream of another life, one with the Amerindians, for which he is labeled a coward. But the life on the plantation harbours the kind of soul/character destroying grief that creates a masochistic-sadistic cycle that he can’t resist after he has been immersed in it for a certain time. He wants to stay around and see who will live and who will die. There are friendships he has, never mind the hate that defines them, that are difficult to leave. These are the things that have made [shaped] him and he knows it.
The Counting House tolls a bell for the future of West Indian society.

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Part Two

David Dabydeen

A quotation by Gladstone in the Prologue of The Counting House is a fitting introduction to the novel Disappearance too (in a roundabout way), a Wilson Harris kind of contemplation, with echoes of Naipaul and Conrad among others, on the aftermath of empire.
“No account of coolie history can ever be complete for they are the scraps of history.”
The Counting House is an attempt to deal with this utterance and others in its Prologue. What Disappearance does is examine the situation within modern-day England, at Hastings to be precise, of the origins of empire, its traits, even where they come from. Dabydeen is no ordinary literary man, for this is an extra-ordinary undertaking; here, he is in search of something for which there are no scraps of recordings – none whatsoever.
The protagonist is a Guyanese engineer boarding at Mrs. Rutherford’s house (her husband has disappeared, as has much else). This is a strange novel, mysterious, soberly and beautifully written, and this style is maybe reflective on occasion of what has disappeared from the narrator himself (an Afro-Guyanese) – his passion, a true sense of spirit needed to live fully in the real world, much of which has disappeared because of empire. (This is something that Wilson Harris, the great Guyanese writer who is long overdue for a Nobel [but recently awarded a Knighthood] addresses in his work – that real/other world).
But our protagonist has retained his curiosity, absolutely, and Mrs. Rutherford is quite willing to cater to his questions for the most part, having prompted them herself. His engineering career, which Mrs. Rutherford asks about repeatedly, plays an important role in this novel’s realization of the futility of freedom and the ever-present potential of empire, which can reside in the simplest things.
I could be misleading here, for it certainly doesn’t reside in the serving of an afternoon tea, does it? Not with dear Mrs. Rutherford (at least that’s how I first thought of her), who has our narrator’s clothes freshly pressed and laundered on his neatly made up bed when he returns from the nearby coast where he has spent the day supervising work on a sea-wall to prevent the erosion of the cliff which supports the English village.
What is intriguing, and the novel never lets up on it, is the purpose behind Rutherford’s actions and conversations. She is quite provocative, sexually and otherwise despite her age, but she succeeds not in tempting our Guyanese engineer with physical, plantation-like intimacies. He contemplates anthropologically (as she does him) the choice of clothes she lovingly places on his bed each afternoon which, after showering, he dons and joins her for sherry, tea, and conversation as the sun sets on the British landscape.
The attention in the first chapters to the collection of African masks – particularly Bambara, which Rutherford’s husband collected – and the anecdotes of Mrs. Rutherford’s years in Africa with him (he seems to have gone there for sexual reasons and to lord it over those who suspected him of good intentions only) recalls the man of empire descending on the colony in the manner of a credit-card armed and unsupervised child entering a toy store. The museum-like details of Rutherford’s house are notable too: the order revealed is significant for its cultural purpose; and the masks Rutherford has kept of her husband’s collections from their travels in Africa in the 1950s-60s, entice our narrator and the reader with questions: “They looked so full of spite, evoking vague stories of primitive violence. They forced me to connect the smudged photograph and Swami’s death, and, before that, the rape of Amerindian women, malarial fever, the drowning of my Dutch predecessors [engineers] and the wastage of slave bodies. These images which I had buried piecemeal in my mind surfaced in a ritual sequence of shame. The masks glared down at me like the floodlights which had once mocked me, before I attacked them with stones.”

The conclusion of this article will be published next week
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Keith Jardim is from Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana. He has an MFA in Literature and Writing from Emerson College in Boston, and a PhD from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing and Literature Program. He taught fiction writing, literature and English at the University of the West Indies, the University of Houston, Houston Community College, and Rice University’s School of Continuing Studies. Dr. Jardim is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Gulf University of Science and Technology. His first book, Under the Blue: Stories is due in 2011 (Peepal Tree Press).
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The editor of The Arts Forum Column, Ameena Gafoor, can be reached by e-mail: [email protected] or by telephone: 592 227 6825