"In Georgetown, Guyana, there is a canal, an arterial network of waterways that runs through, and feeds the entire city: the Lamaha Canal.
Throughout my own lifetime, I have seen, with the growth of the city, the Canal at different points along its course, mean different things to different times."
When I read the above opening lines of "The Blacka," I thought it would focus on the community through which the canal runs, but the story (as do many of the stories/pieces in Ariadne and Other Stories) focuses on the individual in his environment.
But before we get the individual narrator's views on his relationship with his environment(s), we get small, vivid sketches of the city's people. They are the "rich fat ladies of all hues and shades . . . little street children, the ones not yet into drugs or guns or selling their innocence . . . doing back-flips and somersaults into the stretch of the canal that divided South Road and Croal Street . . . a mud-caked entity . . . a living monument of the plight of the poor." These sketches of city folk give us a microcosmic view of the city's mix of social classes, and of the thin lines between the city's innocent and their opportunities to lose that innocence.
Then there are a few longer sketches of the narrator's childhood friends--"cack-eye" Kojo, big strong, unnaturally healthy Chappy, mellow Felix, and Vaughn, the saint--who accompany him at points along his quest to understand his relationship with his environments.
The narrator's early influencing environments include a section of the Lamaha canal known as "The Blacka," where he and his friends discover a bridge and a trench, and create a Bacchanalian paradise, and President's College, where social class lines appear nonexistent. As he plays in the trench with his friends, he is able to imagine and experience a "golden world of flying liquid jewels, flailing brown limbs and friendship," and at President's College he can imagine an even more dazzling world that he sees in the homes of his rich friends "with their private pools, lounge chairs and cans of imported fruit."
When he leaves President's College however, reality sinks in. The bridges and lines (figurative and actual ones) are distorted. He returns home to find that the bridge in his childhood paradise has been removed, and the social lines that seemed blurred or nonexistent at the college reappear outside of that environment. He considers the bleak moral of it all to be that "all life is begun with its own impulse of destruction."
The story illustrates where the environment feeds or supports the person(s) dependent on it for physical, psychological, or other growth, and where it stops or discontinues that support. When that support stops, according to the narrative, the dependent person(s) becomes stunted. This condition is well illustrated in the narrative.
BUT, the narrator lingers too long on the point. After a while the melancholy sounds a bit whiny.
What rescues the story from this potentially destructive whiny path is a moment of exhilaration when the narrator and his childhood friends regather--at this point they are all either physically or psychologically maimed by the harsh realities of life in Guyana for poor people--and frolic in their old childhood spot. It's a return to innocence with a wry twist of humor, and it succeeds in bringing something new to the saying "you can't go back home."
"The Blacka" is the narrator's everyman quest for meaning after he reaches a new stage in life. Its setting may be deeply rooted in a specific geographic location, but its questions, its conclusions, its narrator are all easily recognizable anywhere.
[Coming next Saturday: Signifyin' conclusions on Ariadne and Other Stories.]
