THE ARTS FORUM

Jul 19, 2009 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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THE ARTS FORUM is a platform entirely devoted to increased awareness in the literatures, arts and culture of Guyana. Its work extends to The Arts Journal, a refereed Journal that offers fresh critical perspectives on the literatures, history, arts and culture of Guyana and the Caribbean.

A BOOK REVIEW by
Professor Emeritus Frank Birbalsingh
of a novel by Guyanese writer, Moses Nagamootoo
Hendree’s Cure: Madrassi Experience in a New World
(Leeds, Peepal Tree Press, 2000, pp.149).

Hendree’s Cure: Madrassi Experience in a New World is the first novel by Moses Nagamootoo who served as Minister of Information in the People’s Progressive Party Government of Guyana from 1996 to 2001. The novel is concerned with one section of the Indo-Guyanese population, descendants of Telugu- and Tamil-speaking indentured Indians who boarded ship for Guyana at the South Indian port of Madras — hence their being labelled “Madrassis” — rather than at Calcutta, from where the large majority of Indians left for Guyana during the indenture period from 1838 to 1917.

On the first page of his “Foreword”, Nagamootoo writes: “I have attempted to recreate the lives, aspirations and oral traditions of the early Tamils or Dravidians from South India and of their off-springs who lived in my village” (p.4). The village is Whim, sandwiched between the African villages such as Lancaster, Liverpool and Manchester, and second only to Port Mourant as a business centre on the Corentyne coast of Guyana.
Although, according to the author, the Madrassis of Whim are a rambunctious lot, given to heavy drinking, loud drumming and Kali Mai worship involving animal sacrifice, it is surprising to learn that during the inter-ethnic strife and violence in Guyana in the 1960s, when many Indians and Africans were killed: “Not a single act of hostility took place between the two races [around Whim]” (p.143).

Nagamootoo has no time in Hendree’s Cure for sophistication or etiquette. He uses a loosely episodic structure and a cataloguing, labelling or documentary technique that saturates us with myriad facts, figures and multiple names of characters, all of whom we could never remember because they are probably as many as those in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a novel almost ten times as long. There is not even a story as such, only a deceptively artless assemblage of sketches, portraits, episodes, anecdotes, incidents, memories, reflections or musings that feed into a rippling stream of oral narrative which seems, like Tennyson’s brook, set to go on forever.

As we may guess from the title of the novel, there is an ostensible hero — Hendree – who, has been taught by a “charcoal-black man-giant” ( p.53) drummer Changamma, and later presides as master drummer at village functions such as: “the ninth day christening of babies, seaside pujas, traditional weddings and dead-work [rites accompanying a funeral]”(p.54). Hendree may gain some sympathy when he loses his wife, Aydoo, to a visiting Frenchman, but he is not one to be deterred by such distractions, and sets about learning to “perform spiritual cures,“ (p.124) not because he feels a spiritual calling or wishes to help people, but because “in the healing business knowledge was power;” (p.128) and by the time he heals or cures Joe-Joe whose right arm was mysteriously paralysed by guilt, he achieves a notoriety equal to that Pundit Ganesh in V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur. Such are the trickster ethics of bare faced cunning and self-aggrandisement that ensure survival, success and respect in a rural, Caribbean colonial community in the first half of the twentieth century.

Yet, what takes centre stage in the novel is less the actions of hero Hendree than the village of Whim itself which, after all, serves as primary location and connecting link to the whole captivating parade of rustic gullibility that passes for life in the village. Superstition is rife and ”Whim’s own jumbie and churile stories were told at every wake” (p.41). Even the game of cricket is influenced if not controlled by superstition when the pitch itself “would come alive with the application of ingredients such as dried bird peppers, strands of horses’ mane and dog’s teeth” (p.93).

For good or, often, bad measure, there are also plenty of spirits – Moongazers, Dutch jumbies, or “backoos” — not to mention mermaids or the “Water-mamma”, all of which can be placated by magical arts, whether of Christian, Moslem, Hindu or Madrassi provenance.
We catch the improbable flavour of life in Whim from accounts, more likely tall tales, of extraordinary exploits that have entered the folklore of villagers, for instance, the brilliant exploits of the long distance runner Sonny Garbharran, or the extraordinary feats of the locally owned race horse Bright Steel. But it is the local speech in which all this is reported that contributes most to the flavour of village life.

When Hendree speaks out of turn, for instance, the reprimand from his guru Naga is swift and scorching: “You is a moon-pass coconut, a goodfunutting pin-stick floating like fraaf pon wave tap” (58). Such is the feudal authority of this denunciation that it is accepted without demur. Nor should we expect less raucous or ribald speech when the author praises the charms of Naga’s mistress Jessamie: “She was plump, fat like a pig on a slow fire and aroused appetite almost instantly” (p.61); raw language matches raw sexual desire.
Hendree’s Cure is by no means the first work of fiction to chronicle Indo-Guyanese customs and manners.

Two novels — A.R.F. Webber’s Those that be in Bondage (1917) and Edgar MIttelholzer’s Corentyne Thunder (1941) — appeared much earlier, and were followed by novels and stories, for example, from Peter Kempadoo, Rooplall Monar, Sasenarine Persaud, Roy Heath, and Oonya Kempadoo. The distinction of Hendree’s Cure is its unsparing, yet affectionate documentation of the brawling exuberance that is the crowning glory of South Indian Guyanese life.

As a politician Nagamootoo knows very well that his characters’ blistering invective and histrionic, ready-for-a-fight bravado are, in reality, nothing more than feeble gestures of instinctive resistance to their own sense of powerlessness brought on by centuries of colonial domination, exploitation and abuse. His “Foreword” succinctly states: “history needs to be recovered not only by scholarship, but also by acts of the imagination, especially when that ‘history’ has barely been chronicled in terms of conventional historical texts.” That is exactly what Hendree’s Cure does: it recovers aspects of Guyanese colonial history through a brilliant act of the imagination.

Moses Nagamootoo is a practising Attorney-at-law.

The editor of The Arts Forum column can be reached by E-mail at: [email protected]
or (592) 227 6825 (tel) or (592) 225 0712 (fax).

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