I unofficially started this series two years ago with this excerpt from Ruel Johnson's "April" --a wonderfully sensitive, sexy focus on the body of a woman who has given birth and has the scars to show it. And I have since bemoaned the absence of sex in a book or two I shared with you, and highlighted "sex" moments in other books / stories for one reason or other--the most recent being this moment from Jose Almanzar's "Lulu or the Metamorphosis" with its incredulous description of an "immense appendage," and other humorous minor offenses. Somewhere along the line I tried to get some of you involved, and issued a "real sex" challenge, to which Peter Sam responded with this detailed riverside sexcapade (hey, send me yours too if you dare).
Here's the latest sex moment I'm adding to the series. It's from Pauline Melville's Eating Air. (I bring you the action in medias res so to speak. Prior to this, he teases her with insults, and then there's a "tugging off of jeans and the throwing aside of shirts and skirts.")
Aaannnd action!
She dug her fingers into his back to gain some purchase on his body and struggled to achieve for herself that dark inner whorl whose spiralling sensation would culminate in a delicious cuntquake. It eluded her. [cut].
Tell me what you think about it (good, bad, hits a spot, not). I'll send a copy of the book to the first two commenters.
[I like its realism, by the way. Frenzied action seldom leads to a woman's fulfillment. And "cuntquake" has a special appeal to me. Dunno why...]
It's snowing again, and they tell us to expect up to a foot of the stuff before it all ends in about 36 hours or so. Nothing much to do around these parts but read and entertain the kids who have been sent home from school. Some folks love the snow. They talk about its beauty and its ability to cover us all until we're an equal, enveloped mass of pristine whiteness, comfy and huddled together in our places of abode. And some of the folks around here get giddy-happy, and go out and play in it with their kids until they lose feeling in their hands and feet and have to rush indoors for delicious hot chocolate and the chance to lovingly rub away each other's cold.
Well...
All I can think about is the mad rush to the grocery stores to stock up for the coming undrivable weather. I think of the packed parking lots with crazy, angry, jostling people. I think of the long long lines, the slow-moving, squabbling older couples (why the hell do they shop together anyway?) and the impatient children tugging at my clothes. I think of the slushy ice that destroys my impractical shoes. I think of the hardened, slippery surfaces that I've fallen on (sprawling, badly hurt, and embarrassed) too many times.
(I have seriously contemplated the goodness of mud while on my backside on those occasions.)
And...
Despite the poetic views of some, the snow doesn't treat us all equally. The bad roads in poorer neighborhoods will worsen and remain unfixed. The parents who can ill afford it will have to take off from work (work doesn't shut down for the poor) to spend time home with their kids. The heating bills will escalate, as will food bills (people stuck at home tend to eat more), and the dry-weather cars will be completely useless, which will cause poor folks to take public transportation, which means time spent waiting (and getting sick) in the freezing cold for unreliable buses, and having to take off from work again to go to the doctor, and that means co-payments you can ill-afford, and all sorts of other expensive surprises in the mail.
On a good note...
Half the day is over, and we now have about 30 of the 36 hours of snow left to go.
Man: Babes... amm... babes remember the girl who call you up and cuss you the other day? Well aam... well she claiming she pregnant and she say is mine. I... aam...I ain really know how to deal here but aaam...she could be right...sooo...aaam...how you feel about it?
Wife (heavy-assed, bushy-haired, but elegant and Brontë-esque to the diacritical ë, looks at him quite unperturbed): My dear, darling husband, I'll respond when I find a fitting quote from this book.
I never held philosophers in high esteem and for good reason, I too dunce to understand anything they said and also up to now I can't say what they have done for me. I know of them, Kant, Hume and Comte to name a few and to date what they wrote and said is a mystery to me. I am not saying they did not change the way people think, it is just that how it affects me, I don’t know. So why don’t I write philosophy too, you know, about irrelevant things and make a big issue about it. Many years from now some jackass will quote me and say I came before my time.
I will write about the right front tyre of a 1982 Toyota land cruiser travelling on an out back road at fifty miles an hour. Now wait a minute isn’t that what philosophy is all about? A man sitting and thinking about the things he feels are important? I mean here is a tyre and more specific the right front tyre, turning and bumping in the pot holes on a road built by cheap labour, by the mining company who used it to take out and transport the wealth of my country. You see how a topic is building right in front your eyes?
I can go into details about this and show how the rubber that the tyre was made from came from the rubber plantations where poor natives are working for the capitalist men but remain poor for all the hard work they put in. Here is a right front tyre by itself and part of a whole vehicle but oblivious to the rest of the whole and the human at the steering wheel. Now if that was not a philosophical entry right there then the Earth flat; I know some philosophers who said the Earth was flat, killed others for disagreeing too.
In this philosophical narrative I can also give a personality to the tyre and show comparisons to situations right here. I am of the opinion how ever wrong it is that that’s what philosophy is all about, then again if I am to be a serious philosopher I must be adamant that what I say here is the right thing, a fact, I have to defend this to the death.
I must now show that this tyre is like the politicians in all third world countries and the pot holes are the people and communities they roll over and leave in dire straits. So here is it that I am writing about the philosophical meaning of a right front tyre on a 1982 Toyota Land Cruiser bumping along an old pot holed road and its political implications; I am now a great philosopher.
In my philosophical journey I would like to introduce topics that sound like total enlightenment, like the “Socio economic impact of a painful ingrown toenail of a working man on the economy of a small nation state”. I would like to introduce new topics, new ideas never before heard and the little things that affect the bigger things, maybe write a book called “How Erectile Dysfunction affects the outside mistress and the Wife" (a discussion on stress).
These few words put a drain on me, so I think I will skip becoming a philosopher and concentrate on real things, like sex, money and how I can get them in good measure. For those of you reading this, if it makes sense to you then come off the medication the doctor prescribed or change the weed you smoking. As for me, I still don’t get what the philosophers were talking about.
I thought New Jersey was a liberal, progressive state until its senate voted 20-14 against legalizing gay marriages last month. And some of the language used against the bill sounded rather illogically restrictive (love my adverbs and dem)…un-progressive. Take this statement, for instance: “gay marriage would weaken the social fabric by redefining one of society’s bedrock institutions…” Now where do I begin listing the many other factors that have redefined (and continue to redefine) this “bedrock institution?” And what on earth would America's social "fabric" be without gays? (Okay, that was unnecessary).
But maybe the vote can be understood if you believe there is a natural inclination to go the other way when one view of how society should operate seems to be dominating. Maybe electing a black president was a huge left swing that needed an immediate right check back in the other direction. Maybe that’s the check/balance system at work in a real democracy.
I read this last night about societal checks and balances…
Buckley, a British Secret Service agent in Pauline Melville’s novel, Eating Air, observes:
“ …To maintain order in a liberal society the population needs to believe that any person could be under surveillance at any time, subject to ID checks, DNA databases and so on. People internalize this and police themselves. Look at the way people slow down when they see speed cameras. I’m all for a quiet life although I suppose it could all lead to a police state.”
I tend to agree with Buckley, though I don’t know that a liberal society needs surveillance any more or less than a non (or less)-liberal society. Seems to me one would want to safeguard, protect, or control unwanted access to plenty as much as to little.
I like the idea of surveillance cameras. They tell the truth when people can't or won't. A New York politician (someone paid to help safeguard the rights and freedoms of citizens of a "liberal" state--another state that recently rejected a gay marriage bill, by the way) who was caught dragging his bleeding girlfriend down a flight of stairs just got booted out of office because the building's surveillance cameras told a truer story than the one they concocted for the courts. I hope he heard the click-check sound loud and clear as he left the building.
And in presumably less-liberal Georgetown, Guyana (any hope for a gay rights bill there?), the Mayor and City Council recently used a press release to liberally attach words like "wanton" and "compromises the integrity of the environment" to the city's litter problem. And it got me thinking that maybe one way to change the course there (in a city apparently stuck in one direction) is to install 24-hour surveillance cameras to identify and make stern examples of the offenders. Think that'll work?
I always wondered about this hell and heaven thing, and if I would make it to heaven or hell. I don’t think I all that bad to go to hell and I can’t see why I should not at least get a hearing at heaven's gate. Which ever way, I planning my defence before. I can’t say I am religious and for good reason, religion is taking us no where as humans, and it is hard to separate it from politics.
I don’t want to go to hell, but if there is where all the rum and whores and sex are, then lil heat can’t hurt. You see this is how I see it, in hell all you doing is all the things you wanted to do but could not do on earth because it was illegal or was not good for you to do. There you can do it all and live forever to do it again and again. If big batty Rosamond who used to make styles on you when you were on Earth end up in hell, then you sure will get sex from her there, and then go take a drink afterwards. I sure rum free there. According to how I was taught it in church, "this is for an eternity", means you do all that forever.
Well I don’t see much difference in heaven. You live forever and you only get non alcoholic beverages and lots of honey, plus free harp lessons, free white tunic and slippers of gold...that must be damn heavy to wear. I still think I would be able to get lil sex there though, because I am sure God can’t stand music all the time and he must want a quiet moment for himself. I always ask myself if all you get is milk and honey and walk around playing harp, who looking after the cows and bees, and who making the milk and honey beverage; I will bet all I have is black people.
The white man really play a smart one on us though...God white, Jesus white, the Angels white, the throne is gold and for good reason; who like gold more that white people? Why you think they come looking for the new world? You think it was because they like to travel? Is gold they were looking for. If you take stock in all this you will see the whole make up of heaven resemble a medieval government setting with king on a throne judging people with sceptre in hand. I don’t buy any of it, sorry.
I always say though, if I reach the pearly gates and my name not on the list there, I would ask Saint Peter fuh flex cause it got a banna in heaven who owe me some money since we was lil, and all I want do is go in and get it from he and come out back. Then when he let me in, I will do like so many Guyanese living abroad, stay and work there illegally. Is still a win win for me, because if they ketch me they will deport me back to Gt and when I come back all who bad mouth me at me funeral will pay dear.
I am still trying for heaven though because I don’t do well in heat.
Who was E.A. (Archie) Markham the man, the writer, the scholar? Is it true that he had many disguises and identities? Was he an ambiguous, elusive thinker, a trickster, a close guarder of his personal life as some have said? Or, was he an accessible, out-spoken, prolific and identifiable, spokesperson for a disaster-ridden Montserrat, a distinguished son of the Caribbean, as some have said glowingly of him? Can answers to those questions be found in his autobiographical work, Against the Grain?
Well, if you are strongly convinced of his elusive, enigmatic persona, then his autobiographical Against the Grain probably won't convince you otherwise. Even though (and this was a first for me) it contains studious chapter endnotes--as if to provide veracity and openness--you may leave the book feeling as convinced as ever that he is hard to pin down. Rather than serving the purpose of creating a look of openness and veracity, the endnotes may appear scholarly and dense, even amusing, to the person seeking to know the man.
So what can you expect from the book?
Markham's story focuses (mainly but not exclusively) on the 1950s--a period of significant change for him and the period during which many of the themes and events for his later writing begin to form and take place. It is the period when he leaves Montserrat and moves to England with his mother and one sibling. In many ways, his story is typical of the immigrant / writer experience, but it is also uniquely characterized by his roles in aiding, organizing relief, and relating Montserrat's history and its experiences with natural disasters. His story is both personal and political, both apparently intended for documenting his family history and his personal writer's journey, as well as for documenting a broader condition of the Caribbean immigrant at a certain point in time.
Let me say the worst first...
I read around on Markham before and after I read Against the Grain, and I found the most apt description of his writing in this Bruce King review of Marking Time:
Markham can both delight and bore. At his best you want to quote him, but his writing can seem interminable.
I found the book dreary and struggled to finish it (putting it down and forgetting about it for periods at a time), but I found him remarkably illuminating, and I quote him liberally in my review.
The young boy with his grandmother in Montserrat
I was close to my grandmother; I felt ridiculously privileged. I wasn't allowed by her carers to see her the last week before she died; and that's why, perhaps, I have so obsessively, through the years, set out to revisit those times.
If there is an over-whelming sentiment in the book, it is of trying to recover loss. One gets that feeling from how he writes about his grandmother and of her role as his primary caregiver. As a child he was awed by her ability to control even though she had a handicap, which kept her in her room for most of the years he spent with her. He describes her as a woman who was not modest of her status: upper class, the owner of a 12-room house on a hill, which had survived two hurricanes. His idyllic early life spent with her in the huge home, and his abrupt separation from her seem to have shaped his later transient, dissatisfied attitude towards homes he lived in and owned.
The young working immigrant in England
So all this 'factory' culture seemed to me an adventure, infinitely preferable to being marooned on a small island in the Eastern Caribbean, waiting for something to happen . . . you were determined to present your West Indies to the world.
The words describe much of the sense of exploration and expectation many immigrants have spoken of. He isn't deterred by the anti-foreign sentiment prevalent in the "Keep England white" signs in parts of London during the period when he begins to work and make decisions about his future (1956 and onward). His experiences with prejudice seem to have prompted the major questions which influenced his thoughts about writing at the time, one major question being, "how do you write about racism?"
As he explores that particular question in the book, he allows himself to make accusations of the British system, especially the system's ethnicizing of identifications such as "Caribbean / West Indian" into a generalized "black."
(Walter Rodney--still on my mind--spoke of the same condition. He observed that once outside of Africa, Africans lost the identification "African" and were given the degrading identification "black.")
One of the "grains" against which Markham sets out to write is the condition given to him and others like him in England--a generic, limiting condition of blackness. He can be understood as a writer who reclaims and celebrates his Montserrat-born, European-lived unique identification.
Irreconcilable maybe?: Markham as distant son
On his journey to find the ruins of his grandmother's house in 1997, Markham is struck by the sight of a breadfruit tree on its side, damaged, virtually split in two, but straining to recover, bearing fruit. His companion on the journey (Obeahman) comments: "If the tree doesn't leave its root, why should you leave your root?" And it's reasonable to assume that despite his recognition as one of Montserrat's most famous sons, and despite his efforts to place Montserrat on the map in a positive way, his distance from the country may have been a troubling, irreconcilable fact / issue. Near the end of Against the Grain he wonders, "If the house in Harris' [his grandmother's house] were to be reclaimed wasn't writing about it very much second best to going back and pruning the fruit-trees?"
Another "grain" against which Markham writes can be understood as the condition of being a spokesperson from a distance, and of trying (improbably) to go back to physically reclaim an intangible loss by searching for a house. At the end of the book, he may have attempted to lessen the sting of the futility of his quest with the acknowledgment that "there are so many houses owned by the family, in so many places, it would be churlish to complain about the loss (or lack) of home."
Conclusion
In prose that is eloquent, pragmatic, reflective, and guided by theme, relationship to place and people, rather than by chronology, Markham relates the major grains against which he goes during a period of significant psychological and physical movement in his life (1950s). The book is a quiet herald to survival of the trauma resulting from such movement--personal survival, familial survival, and by extension (I dare add) the survival of a certain characteristic of Montserrat. It is an intimately close and ironically distant story about recovering loss.
I remember going to buy something for my mom one evening, while passing the parade ground near the Promenade Gardens there was a crowd of people and I heard him. There was a white Mazda 616 parked and this guy with an Afro was talking about the tyranny of Forbes Burnham and how “he will be tried for his crimes." If u see people.
I passed and as I was approaching Christ Church Secondary School I saw a group of men running towards the ground with clubs and sticks, these were beastly looking men, psychopaths, men willing to kill for the PNC. I continued my errand, and I heard about it later. Rodney and the rest had to scoot, and the men broke up the meeting.
I remember when the news of Walter's passing broke my mom said “when oil is hot it is still." I believed her and as young as I was I was afraid. It was expected that the Guyanese would have rebelled, this was the time for conflagration, and justice would be served from the hands of the oppressed Guyanese people. I walked over by my neighbour who was a Portuguese woman. (She had four children, three boys and a girl, the two older boys were both my school mates and friends.) I told her what my mom had said, and she told me "Peter nothing is going to happen, this thing will blow away and be forgotten". I disagreed, and she told me about some things that happened in the 60s, the Abraham family was one, and some others too then she ended by saying “just like those, so will Walter’s”. I lived to see that she was right.
I realise we as a people are sufferers in the land our fore parents died for. Nothing has changed. I know of no time when injustices of significance were ever righted. From Cuffy to the Enmore sugar workers who were gunned down, from Paul Bogle to Garvey, they all died in vain only to be resurrected by our oppressors, not the white man, but those who replaced him, “we mattie”.
I am not hateful, I am disappointed in my country, I am disappointed in the Caribbean, and ashamed of most of the independence leaders and the legacy they left. We adore men who have for the most part left us poorer than they took us, Burnham, Manley, and Eric Gairy to name some. We like to celebrate all the wrong people. For a region of “blue water” music and promises to be bread basket to caress men of speeches and “undoers” just shows our emptiness.
Even today we mourn not for a scientist, not for a great pioneer of industry but we mourn the dancers, the talk men, the ones with words, yet for all the dancing and speeches, I can still be chased out like a dog from any Caribbean country, as Black and looking like them as I am. Long live the integrationalist, long live the poets and long live the nothing people that follow them. Haiti? Ask our “brothers” in the Bahamas.
Five years after he started the project, and a few months after its November'09 debut at UWI in Jamaica, Guyanese filmmaker Clairmont Chung's W.A.R. Stories, a documentary on the life, activism, and death of Dr. Walter Rodney, was screened last evening (2/8/10) at the Brecht forum--a New York arts venue with a mission to feature the work of radical leftist movements and activists, operating since 1975.
The film's narrative on Walter Rodney is told by over 15 narrators, all people who knew him well or who were tremendously influenced by him. The narrators include some of his Working Peoples' Alliance (WPA) fellows in arms, and some of his UWI classmates Rupert Roopnaraine, Eusi Kwayana, Abbyssinian Carto, Andaiye, Karen DeSouza, Denys Vaughn-Cooke, Richard Small, Robert Hill, Tacuma Ogunseye, and Horace Campbell. The narratives and narrators crisscross, go back and forth across continents, build on each other, and they are filled with humor, horror, sentimentality, and awe.
Their stories span Rodney's early childhood, where he is described as a person who always seemed to be free to roam and think for himself, to his Queens College years where he gained respect and a following as a sharp intellect, to his years at UWI, where he continued to excel, and gained repute for being the man who not only ventured into the places where they lived, but who also brought RASTAS! on UWI's middle-upper class campus, and finally to his assassination in 1980--still an angering and heart-felt emotional recollection for some.
The narratives are spliced with music--Louie Lepkie's wailing lyrics about his killing featuring prominently (listen below)--and footage from newsreels, newspapers, as well as footage from two films about Guyana. The combination of sources, and the varied forms of telling lend credibility to the film, and present the message that Rodney's influence was both far-reaching and unforgettable.
Salient moments / highlights on film: from light moments to awe-inspiring events, then to the sudden (still fresh for some) news of death:
In no particular order of importance or chronology...
--Vaughn-Cooke's story of a late-night genip-tree raid by a group of QC boys, that could have gotten them expelled save for the fact that Rodney (an admired student) was one of the raiders. Vaughn-Cooke provoked laughter from the small, packed room when he related that as they were being berated by the head master at assembly, the accused sat quietly, surreptitiously, sucking on the stolen fruit.
--UWI classmate's description of Rodney's penchant for discussion and street-exchanges as a "breath of fresh air" as well as a new and frightening thing for some who thought intellectuals should only talk to each other.
--"He always sought to make real what he thought" : Horace Campbell's placement of him as a thinker and activist who extended C.L.R. James's theories on social justice by actually seeking to act on them in Africa and in the Caribbean.
--Several descriptions of Rodney as someonewho always managed to disturb and antagonize those who were in positions of authority wherever he went. And Kwayana credits him with having raised the level of intellectual debate (which according to Kwayana was non-existent) upon his return to Guyana in 1974.
--Rupert Roopnaraine and Tacuma Ogunseye recount details of Rodney's escape from surveillance and his arrival in Zimbabwe where he had been invited to join their celebration of Independence (April, 1980). Burnham was there too, and according to Ogunseye, was probably personally offended (embarrassed too, since Rodney showed up despite his attempts to bar him from leaving Guyana) when Rodney was asked to speak. That may have been (they theorize) the event which spurred on the plot to assassinate him. He was assassinated in June of 1980.
--American poet Amiri Baraka in his usual jocular, irreverent manner providing some thoughts for connecting threads, connecting Walter Rodney's activism in the 1960s to occurrences in the American Civil Rights struggle during the same period. Baraka's comment about people who were reluctant to shed blood for the cause resonated most since it was apparent that Rodney and members of the WPA had at some point decided they needed to arm themselves for that kind of fight.
--Shocking moment? Rupert Roopnaraine admitting they were amassing arms in preparation for a bloody war (if it came to that).
--Cringing moment? A slightly amused, mocking Burnham (in an interview shortly after Rodney's assassination), subtly spinning the theory of a jail-house bombing gone wrong.
--Nice moment: A hearty round of applause when the late Rex Nettleford appears on screen. Though his speaking moment is brief, we are treated to the sight of him going through dance moves in the studio.
--Praise and departure: Footage from two Guyanese films are shown throughout the film--The Terror and the Time (1981), and In the Sky's Wild Noise (1983?). [Chung notes that much of Guyanese art (film included, I suppose) has a dreamy, mystical quality or feel, and though he pays tribute to some of that tradition in his film, his realism is certainly a departure from that genre.]
--One can certainly appreciate the ending narratives (Roopnaraine's admonishment of the absence of teachings on Walter Rodney's life and legacy in Guyanese classrooms being particularly noteworthy), which attempt to bring some kind of closure to the killing of Walter Rodney. I felt however, the most appropriate ending to the film would have been the shot (or sequence of shots) of Donald Rodney fingertracing a detailed blueprint of the route he and Walter took that final fatal night. For me, it would have been the most fitting pointless articulate end to the story of a wasteful pointless killing.
What if? And What role can the film play?
Two questions drew the most discussion in the post-screening Q and A period. Someone asked about the WPA's immediate reaction to Rodney's killing, and panelist Abbyssinian Carto talked about how difficult it was to restrain from striking back in kind. He said ultimately reason ruled, and many acknowledged that killing servants of the state in street protests would not have been appropriate retaliation against the bigger evils. He admitted, though, it was tempting to gather and act on the physical anger of the many who wanted blood in retribution for the killing.
Another question about the reason (for) and role of the film led to another lengthy discussion on how Rodney's flame should be kept burning (so to speak), and about shared responsibility for keeping his flame burning. The general feeling in the room was that each of us is responsible. And it's clear that Clairmont Chung's W.A.R. Stories, though not yet available for circulation, has taken great strides towards that end.
