Welcome to the Plantation, Part Two

Aug 22, 2010 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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Three Novels by David Dabydeen

By Keith Jardim

(CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK)

These thoughts are the result, again, of the question: “Why, Mrs. Rutherford wanted to know, did I become an engineer?”
Our narrator eventually comes under a contemplative spell caused by the African masks and Rutherford’s questioning. The spell also leads to proto-historic considerations, a quest, through his talks with Rutherford and the Irishman Christie, who is of a different class and works on the sea-wall (he’s another who’s been subjected to the whims of the Empire), to understand the origins of the desire for empire.
The narrator’s name disappears in these attempts, as I see it, to respond to such profound matters: it’s as if the larger consideration reigns so supreme, it obliterates the self, showing him what he truly is, a child of empire, like Christie, Mrs. Rutherford and others, but each with their own relationship to it. Dabydeen makes connections with the proto-historic age in more ways than one through his narrator, who is a sifting consciousness that responds to the prods of Rutherford and Christie, who both seem to act as guides in the narrator’s proto-historic contemplations.
A passage early in the novel cuts coolly to discussing the primordial state of the world, with particular reference to the sea, to its omnipotent power to shape and reshape the world, in effect deciding what will live and what will die. Empire may be, ultimately, Dabydeen seems to be saying, a response to this force of Nature. It is a response that originates in a fear that is deeply primal and deeply rooted in our beings.
As the narrator examines his past, we enter the Guyanese jungle, into a Conradian situation, but one Dabydeen very much makes his own. If there is one character who has escaped the situation of the others, who is in the world, who even has a kind of freedom, it can be argued, a man who is a literary descendant of Kampta in The Counting House, it is Swami, the leader of the labourers on the Guyanese jungle coast where the narrator is in charge of building his first sea-wall. Swami answers to him. And he can answer anything, almost; the Anancy figure is apparent. (Swami collects his retirement money in the gold he replaces his teeth with):
‘With all that fortune in your mouth you ought to keep it shut more often,’ I said, partly in resentment, partly in admiration of his character. ‘So you reckon you’re golden in speech too? I hear reports that you are the leader of the tribe, a man of princely words and enchanting stories.’
‘Come come chief, you playing sport with me. I is a humble backward coolie, you know that,’ he said in a mock-ingratiating tone, ‘I does only talk bruk-up English, I don’t know vowel from tree fowl. Is bushman I am, from since I was born.’
‘So why do they listen so avidly to you? How come you exert such control over them?’
‘Because I wander all over the place, from the coast to the interior. I criss-cross and sideways the country, up and down, in and out, by and by, hither and yonder. I cross trench, canal, swamp, river, savannah and mountains, high and low, to and fro like the crow does fly. In my journeys I eat snake, turtle, alligator eye, iguana tail; all manner of meat these gold teeth chew and ponder on. Indian people does only eat special diet – no cow, no pork, no low-caste or creole food – so that’s why they see me as special. I eat my way to high status and I crown my glory with gold teeth.’
The ending of the Guyanese story isn’t pretty, but it’s one of the most interesting sections in the novel. In England, finally, the narrator realizes he has to find another place, one where he can escape, even if it’s only for a while, the repetitions of history, the creating of new empires from the ashes of the old. If such a place exists, it may be in the next novel, The Intended, a wonderful story of a boy who grows up to find his freedom in books.
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Welcome to the Plantation – Part Three

The novel The Intended feels very autobiographical and the transitions Dabydeen makes from London student days to “his” childhood in Guyana are adept and moving. The characters of the Guyanese landscape are vibrant and sad, poor and struggling. And the strength of their portraits and stories are excellently done. Here’s just a minor example of one:
I looked at Auntie Clarice’s limbs, deformed with pain, and nodded. She broke into a cackle of laughter. ‘Only death can cure me, son, no medicine make by man or witch. Only de Lord will succour me from tribulation and tempest. I too damn old for me own good.’
And truly she was old, her African face sprouting hairs between the cracks, like a golden-apple seed. She was as old as the village, old as the huge tamarind tree, heavy with fruit, that cast a broad shadow over one side of the yard which her father had planted when she was a child, and as black as the trench water in which every day of her life she dipped her bucket and took to the house to wash pans, scrub floors, bathe children.
Auntie Jessica brought a handful of plums and gave them to me. ‘Tek some to Englan and when you see white man give him and say you Auntie Clarice send him gift from she back garden in Albion Village, Berbice, Guyana, South America, all the way across the Ocean, you hear, and that he and he race must be kind to you and we, for all body on dis earth is one God’s people, not true?’
The novel opens in London and ends there, but it’s the memories of Guyana, of his family, that sustain our narrator. These passages are at times so moving and human that you want to run outside and read them to the first person you meet. There are a few that brought tears to my eyes, and for that reason I cannot quote them here, except to say Dabydeen really understands mood, how to set it down, both in his poetry and prose. It’s the mood that arises from the landscape of the Caribbean, and enters your blood if you have lived there long enough and permitted yourself her charms, her smells and colours, showing you what is worth loving in this world.
In London two young men – Shaz, born in England but of Pakistani parentage, and Joseph, an aspiring filmmaker from the Caribbean – are the two most influential friends our narrator has. There are other characters, quite important, that dramatize the racial problems of London to a higher degree than our three musketeers. There’s a scene of violence among a group of white men that reminded me of the atrocities the Russians committed on the Germans near the end of WWII, and those committed by forces loyal to Milosovich in the former Yugoslavia territories, where camps were set up to rape and murder women, execute men and boys.
In this first novel you can see the concerns of empire developing in Dabydeen’s writing. The scene of violence in The Intended rises with a blow off the page, for its relevance in a world gone mad with violence. What makes the racial attack on Nasim, one of their friends, never mind he’s not too liked, so banal and yet disturbing is the contrast you get when you read the scene with those white men gone mad trying to kill their own. The point here is that there is a solution to racism, but is there one for violence? The other novels seem to answer that question in the negative.
Joseph in The Intended is that Caribbean character we have seen before, but nowhere, as far as I can recall at the moment, as affectingly drawn here. He is a young-Charlie-the-cricketer in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Errol John, that youth abundantly talented but who never gets the chance to make it, to develop his potential.
Wastage, like those human beings tossed overboard in Turner’s great painting, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On, 1840), and the subject of Dabydeen’s reissued (by Peepal Tree Press) book of poems, Turner, wastage is what Joseph so memorably illustrates, a human mind going to waste.
Joseph is one of the most human characters in the novel, also one of the most talented and caring. He can’t read or write, but he can figure out things, he can think. And while at times he’s good for just a laugh, his insights on occasion into Conrad’s Heart of Darkness show his situation all the more poignantly.
Dabydeen has some hilarious scenes with Joseph, who takes up filming, playing the artist, and being the artist, to an extent, he was meant to be. Shaz, like Kumar (another character, but minor until the end; he complements Shaz, somewhat), is a businessman, but not the kind who actually cares about the world he lives in; he sees it as an opportunity for profit, and almost nothing else. Only in the narrator and Joseph do we see, and in the narrator’s memories, perhaps idealized at times, of Guyana when he was a boy, the human being’s triumph and purpose: to look at the world and its people and to see them for what they are – magnificent, disturbing, provoking, and, in the end, venerable and loveable, if you’re lucky.
Peepal Tree Press’s reissuing of these three novels –and also others by major Caribbean writers in its Caribbean Modern Classics series – is an important contribution to the region’s literary history; these efforts should go a long way to providing an opportunity for a better West Indian future. Nothing else will.
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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

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