Book Review… Anchoring on Shifting Sands

May 12, 2019 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

Book review: Bivouac
Author: Kwame Dawes
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

More than any of his recent work, ‘Bivouac’ clearly demonstrates the genius of Kwame Dawes. With driven certainty ‘Bivouac’ delivers a haunting indictment on a people that has lost all cultural and spiritual bearing.
Against an opaque and arid backdrop, an existential crisis looms with deadly implications. Dawes’ characters are losing a wrenching battle to find meaning in a world that is nasty and unforgiving.
Ferron, the lead character is a sympathetic, forlorn figure, an anachronism that struggles to fit in. He’s educated from known pedigree, but there are no rewards here. His world is hostile. He recoils physically, escaping into the wilderness, escaping from his own inadequacies. But there’s no respite, for his burdens he carries, unable to unload.
He was made from the rib of his father, George Ferron Morgan, a politically and culturally astute man – scholarly – a tired revolutionary-turned-writer, from whose unpublished material we inhale the stench and fatalism of Jamaican society. His is the voice of a vanquished man: “I knew they were telling me that I could die. Be killed. Of course my comfort here is nonsense. I am nothing, here. I am nobody.”
There is resignation, a fait accompli. He is professionally defeated, “How many read the papers for news anyway?”
He is snide, bitingly critical of his peers, an affront to Jamaica’s tradition of great writers, world class writers, he argues. His sense of schadenfreude is his only defence against self-dissolution.
His writings speak of a broken nation, “Here we are in the glorious decade – Restoration Jamaica. Now we can put off puritanical austerity and buy American apples and grapes, import good shoes from foreign and to hell with turning a hand to make fashion. The whole thing seems like such a pathetic farce now, an absurdity. Why I listen to music, Bob Marley is dead, and it is as if everyone is smoking cockiness or that crack to make music.”
Colonialism has dealt a death blow to a striving nation. “It’s roots time, reggae time, man time now…”
His demise stirs rumours, conspiratorial ones; the downing of a promising revolutionary. Lucas thinks so. But Ferron has his doubts but he’s led down a road fraught with intrigue. After all, is he not being followed? Is his father’s passing the work clandestine political operators or just one of so many preventable mishaps? And his father’s comrade-in-arms, Femi, is convincing: “They killed him, they cared that he died, because they were there when he died, and it mattered to them. Because they is a necessary construct – a political necessity.”
Whatever the case, “he is dead revolutionary. Look where it got him.”
Dawes’ paints a society shredded by the weight of existence, an existence wrought with violence and fear. It is no secret. One character speaks volumes, “The place is virtually a ghetto now, those people a real worthless set of tenants. But you tell them that, nuh. Tell them and them liable to just shoot you.”
Not unlike Ferron, Lucas, his enigmatic brother, is a complex character, a man teetering on full blown neurosis. There is more to Lucas than imagined. He is the archetypal representation of the dysfunctional family. In a psychoanalytic sense he represents libidinal frustration and psychic regression. The death of his father opens unresolved wounds and we easily peer into his unconscious terrain. He shouts, points fingers, jockeys with his siblings and projects his guilt on those around him.
The foundation of a once rooted house buckles despite the effort of the matriarch, Mother Miraculous, her sobriquet, “for always managing to keep them together, always the family first.”
And of Bivouac’s many disturbing scenes, the derailment of Ferron’s intimacy with his fiancée stands out. No doubt, he is very much a victim as his deflowered victim.
Feelings are frayed and their future doomed: “[T]he rape had objected something emotional into the relationship. That she felt it was unfair to blame him was clear. But that she still, despite that, blamed him and felt great anger toward him was even clearer. What he felt was resentment, even anger, at the idea of having to feel something…”
Bivouac signals more than the tragic end of political ideals. It is a compelling odyssey into the worst of humanity. Somehow there is truth behind the words of Ferron’s uncle: “We are all killed, you know? When we die, most of us, somebody harbours murder in their hearts for us – somebody wishes us dead…They can wish these things into being.”
Bivouac is raw and unapologetic, leaving us terrified of our own fate – our own regrets, disappointments, resentments and loneliness – not unlike its many characters, all groping for light in blinding darkness.

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Bivouac by Kramer Dawes
Publisher: Akashic Books, Brooklyn, NY
ISBN: 978-1-61775-710-5
Available at Amazon
Ratings: A Must Read