Charmaine Valere

On Karen King-Aribisala's Our Wife and Other Stories: Women inside and outside the possessive

I wonder where in the discussion of the condition of books (particularly fiction) in contemporary Nigeria would Karen King-Aribisala's Our Wife and Other Stories fit? The collection of short stories was published in 1990-91 by Malthouse Press (in Nigeria, according to my copy), and won Best First Book (Africa region) in the Commonwealth Writers Prize competition in 1991. King-Aribisala, born in Guyana, was at the time living and teaching in Nigeria. The collection of stories is currently out of print and that may be an unfortunate but understandable case of a publisher's decision not to print copies of a book that is not in demand. But might there be other reasons for its absence from the international online "shelves," some of which perhaps concern its most recognizable theme of cultural alienation, and the nationality of the author?

Before that last question can be fully answered or considered, another factor should be addressed. For it is quite possible that though Our Wife and Other Stories is not available to us in the US for purchase, it still enjoys a healthy shelf life in Nigeria, but copyright issues may be preventing its publisher from making it available online. The owners of Cassava Republic, a publisher based in Nigeria, pointed out that though there has been a lot of international demand for the books they publish, they only have "Africa rights," which present territorial boundaries for their books. [Read full article here]. If some of Malthouse Press's books (Our Wife and Other Stories included) are barred from international shelves because of copyright issues, then this essay would lean towards a completely other culturally alienated world, so to speak--a much less interesting world for a lit blogger, I confess. So back I go to the more arbitrary and abstract.

At the heart of Our Wife and Other Stories, as King-Aribisala describes in a brief introduction, is the theme of cultural alienation--an abstraction which nevertheless has concrete resonance for her protagonists, who are immigrants in Nigeria, and who feel (real or imagined) they are outsiders, cultural and otherwise. King-Aribisala's protagonists are all female--Nigerian, West Indian, and European--and their stories are compact, short explorations of the theme, and perhaps best show how a close look at the dynamics of their marriages can be useful for examining some of the complexities of their condition of alienation. But King-Aribisala's protagonists aren't all married women; some are researchers and academics and there is no mention of their marital status. Their experiences outside of marriage give a broader range of culture clashes in the collection.

The first story in the collection is appropriately (for an optimistic start on a "marriage" of cultures) one about an engagement ceremony between a West Indian woman and a Nigerian man. The West Indians (The Brownlows) are unfamiliar with the details of the traditional Nigerian ceremony, and are tense and anxious to please. They are described as a "worthy family of good taste and fortune," but the narrator / bride-to-be adds, "It was true that as West Indians we did not have a cultural leg to stand on." The West Indian family has nevertheless put on a spread for the ceremony, which takes place in Rome:

Heavy curtains of beige hung from the windows. In one corner of the room, cabinets of teak and mahogany gleamed with crystal and the finest bone-china. And a carpet had been newly purchased by my mother for the occasion. All her savings were poured into it. It was Persian, with beautiful circular and octagonal designs, full of Eastern mystery. Hardly the setting for a traditional Yoruba engagement ceremony.

The nervous, anxious mother-of-the-bride is horrified when at the end of the ceremony (and the story) the Adelabu elder performing the ceremony spills an entire bottle of good wine all over the fine Persian rug. This first story works structurally as the opening "engagement" with the subject of culture clashes and presumably an opening attempt to engage the reader as well--Rome, Nigeria, West Indians of good fortune, any guesses who? In this initial moment of engagement, the awkward tensions between the two families, caused by a lack of knowledge, are masked by pretensions, and the spilled wine on the expensive rug (possibly deliberate), followed by Mrs Brownlow's reaction are a typical mix of the attitudes and tones--mocking, jocular, anxious, disruptive--used to describe culture clashes throughout the collection.

Once they are married and living in Nigeria with their husbands, King-Aribisala's foreign female  protagonists experience many forms of cultural barriers and try to identify them. They are not always successful at making identifications. One wife identifies (as her barrier) the man who guards her home and whose job it is to protect her from possible intruders. She is unsettled by his actions--he frequently ignores her calls, he shaves his head in the yard, he pees in public--and sums it up as the general problem with Nigeria: "There's no bloody order here. Nothing. No one knows his rightful place. No wonder the country's a mess." In her adversarial stance, even the landscape --"...so vulgar . . . No subtlety..."--is  an opponent. That she is a white woman and possibly sexually attracted to the man she finds so despicable, and he to her, gives the story an additional layer of complexity. But when she attempts to resolve her problem by asking her husband to fire the guard, he thinks she has misjudged the man and refuses to do so. Her story ends with her in an unresolved, agitated, powerless condition.

Another wife imagines her concrete foe in the borrowed cultural clothing she wears. At a celebration for the dead, she suffers under the wrapper of heavy woven material (asoke): "It zagged and cut its edge into my alien unaccustomed flesh, until every movement was agony," she says. But for her, there is some comfort in knowing the senior wives in the family, who view her as a foreigner, do not mind her reluctance to join in the dancing and food serving required of her in the celebration. It gives her a chance to rest her damaged heels for some time and to observe her surroundings. She eventually gets up and participates in the ceremony despite her pain because she recognizes a similar kind of suffering in the eyes of the woman whose husband had died. And as she dances and serves dutifully, she imagines she too is bravely enduring her pain.

Other foreign wives fear the local woman and are constantly made aware of the maxim that "Nigerian women will do their utmost to steal your husband from you . . . Nigerian women don't like foreign women. Especially those married to Nigerian men." Some of the foreign wives in the stories accept this as an inevitable truth and permit polygamous marriages or accept their husbands' extramarital affairs. The foreign wives who refuse to believe the maxim are forced into its truth nevertheless. One initially jealous wife embraces the trio of companionship she experiences as a result of her husband's affair with a Nigerian woman. Another, who tries to prevent her husband from having a mistress by becoming a "good Christian wife," eventually realizes that even faith couldn't move "mountains of buttocks" (her view of her husband's mistress, I might add).

The foreign women who enter Nigeria with views of love as adventure or with romantic notions of the country's (continent's really) capabilities for yielding cultural riches, or for individual self-discovery are rudely awakened and are forced to realize they didn't come equipped for the emotional and physical warfare which they encounter. The women who are most likely to survive are the ones who, as wives, find ways to negotiate within the possessive culture of marriage. They do so mostly by forming connections with other women and by maintaining a contemplative space between their initial romantic view of the place and their newly discovered reality. The same attitude is required for survival by the women who enter Nigeria as researchers desirous of making cultural connections and / or of self-discovery.

For the cultural researcher, the realm of the supernatural presents one area of distancing between cultures. A Guyanese woman compares her cultural obeah with Nigerian Ju-ju in a half  serious manner as she acknowledges the importance of the supernatural in certain cultures:

...Their brand of black magic might be more potent than ours, I reflected. The West Indian variety is probably watered down. After all, it's quite possible that over the years, we West Indians forgot crucial ingredients in our obeah. Our black magic was only a branch, a by-way; they were the source, the main road.

This idea that one culture is a weaker (subset) of the other--the West Indian one a branch, the Nigerian one the main road--occurs elsewhere in the collection. A West Indian woman is questioned by airport officials in Nigeria as she seeks entrance based on her academic status:

 The officials are relentless. "Where are you from?"

"Ikeja," I say stupidly, gazing at my African brothers.

"This is no time for nonsense. What country?"

"I'm West Indian. My ancestors are from Africa."

"Are they now? Well Miss West Indian of African ancestry, you can't go in. We cannot allow aliens to come in here just like that." 

The woman contemplating the differences between obeah and Ju-ju, and the woman mocked for her claim to African ancestry are both mostly dismissive of the cultural comparisons which relegate them to a lesser position. They choose to remain attached to their common, but uneasy "brotherhood" with "African" people. One of the women describes the forged anguish of her condition: "I feel manacled to these brothers. Soldered, sewn with ancestral wing of ancestral tissue and blood..."

The author makes two appearances in the collection (both times as a writer / researcher), which may serve to drive home the idea about maintaining a creative space (so to speak) in order to negotiate as someone who is / feels culturally alienated. In one appearance, she talks  to a black American woman (also living in Nigeria), a woman, she says, who thought she had "magicked herself into African woman," but who is considered Oyinbodudu skin by African brothers--a term indicating Atlantic difference and divide. The woman's particular "magic" act appears to be that she is accepting of polygamy because "there are so few black men around it only makes sense to share our men with other women," she explains. The narrator / author responds, "My Karenesian eyebrows raised. Share my man with another sister? Not this sister. I'm not that black." It is, thematically speaking, a point of negotiation between buying wholesale, and maintaining a safe, reflective distance. And as if to show why her skeptical distancing is necessary, the narrator relates a Nigerian woman's comment on their conversation: "Yes. You people come over here thinking you can be more African than the Africans."

In another appearance, the author is in a cab and is confronted by a Nigerian man, a "soothsayer" of sorts, who tells her she will die in seven days. He offers her a chance to change that inevitability which requires her to spit in her hands. She is skeptical:

My thoughts mused. I spat in my hands. I, Karen King, spitting in my hands? For what purpose? To write a short story? To get to the bottom of fears and superstition? To unravel the knot of ju-ju, of evil forces in the world which I could not, did not, ultimately want to know about? Man is evil. That is the only indelible fact I need to know. Never mind how the West was won. Those exploring Europeans also decimated several Amerindians to win the West. That was the degradation of the human spirit. Their spirit.

This lowereing of my spirit could not result in anything positive. And so I shouted at the top of my voice, "I don't believe a word you're saying."

She is put out of the cab for her actions, but it's another kind of bargaining moment that she wins on her own terms. And, of course, she doesn't die in seven days as he predicts.

The final story presents (for interpretation purposes) the collection's culminating idea on cultural alienation, and a heavy-handed "time is of essence" runs through it. At the start of the story, the protagonist, a foreign woman living in Nigeria, is in a hurry to meet up with her husband before he leaves on a trip. Because she's in a hurry, she enters a taxi cab she wouldn't normally travel in: Its color is the "common yellow of Lagos taxis, but its yellow was anaemic and sickly. The taxi was dying. It was only a question of time." And like his cab, the taxi driver appears "diseased . . . His cheeks were sunken and mal-nourished, throwing into sharp relief his neatly etched tribal scars." The woman's desire for speed or quick forward movement is out of her control. She is powerless as a passenger jammed in with strangers and stuck in traffic. Along the agonizingly slow journey are signs of the country's ills and ironies: the radio broadcasts ads for a "War Against Indiscipline," sponsored by the new government (by way of a military coup); the ads exhort Nigerians to avoid bribery (among other ills), meanwhile the cab is pulled over by police and the driver has to pay a bribe to get back in traffic. He overcharges her for the trip, and in her aggravated haste, she spills the contents of her purse and realizes once she gets in her house that she is not only too late to see her husband off, but her watch is missing. She is immobilized by the thought that the cab driver stole from her and goes to bed--stops time for a while, so to speak. But her sleep is interrupted by the cab driver who comes to her house to return her missing watch. He refuses her monetary award for returning it, and as he departs she notes, in a renewed view of his humanity, that the once anaemic yellow of the cab "seemed to be gradually changing into a vital healthy bloom of energetic yellow . . . sun-yellow . . . The taxi was still gagging and wheezing in its peculiarly asthmatic way, but I knew with a solid certainty that sooner or later it would see a return to health. It was only a question of time."

In this final story, as in the collection overall, the abstract and the concrete are juxtaposed: time and movement with the physical, political condition of the society; quick with slow; distance with closeness. The foreign woman's desire for quick movement to close the gap between distances (between where she begins and her home and husband) is hindered by her mode of transportation and by her physical circumstances. Her desires and frustrations are those of the collective foreign womens' experiences in Nigeria. And it all looks rather grim until the taxi cab driver returns her watch. His act is a simple but interpretively loaded moment in the story. His act changes the area between her perception of him and who he might actually be. His act also reduces the abstract notion of cultural alienation to a more concrete person to person interaction, where it is made clear that a simple act can change a mindset. The collection ends on that note, which stretches out the positive message of the small act. But by the time you get to that final moment in the collection it certainly does not feel like a simple reduction. It is--structurally, thematically speaking--a well-earned moment, a necessary return to civility.

My final note on Our Wife and Other Stories is a plea really. As I mentioned in the beginning, it is currently out of print, or at least unavailable through online shopping sites. If it is available in Nigeria, maybe it is accepted as part of the range of diverse African experiences, available through text, that local publishers claim (Cassava Republic, for example) to be aiming at providing for local readers. But perhaps its award-winning, unflinching, and still relevant fictional explorations of culture clashes and alienation are more suited to a wider (diaspora) audience. My appeal to Malthouse Press is to consider that wider audience. I'd be the first to order copies.

_____________

 

 Related links:

--cbsnews.com [Article, January 2012] : "Nigerian Authors Look West to Gain Their Fame."

"Unfortunately, no matter how well the book is written, writers who come into prominence, come into prominence because they are recognized by the West," says Nigerian author Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani.

--Langaa-rpcig.net [Article, April 2010] : "Feeding the African Imagination: Nigeria's Cassava Republic." 

Bakare-Yuuf: “A lot of the books published in the West tend to apologize, in my view, for the African experiences and reality, and overemphasize the more negative aspects. We’re focused on stories about Africa, which show daily life, and we need to constantly be reflective of the diversities of our experiences.”

--The Africa Report [Article, December 2011] : "Book Ends and New Beginnings in Publishing.

"Prolonged economic stagnation means publishers are increasingly risk averse. "Five years ago, I could have got £20,000 ($31,000) for a good first novel. Today, I'd be lucky to get half that," says David Godwin, the literary agent who brought Indian author Arundati Roy to global attention – and got her a $1m advance in the process. "I think publishing is going through a rough patch. There's a loss of confidence. People are much more cautious," he says.

--signifyinguyana[Blog, April 2008] : "A Review of Karen King-Aribiala's The Hangman's Game.

"The novel makes startling and not-so-startling comparisons between a slave society, and contemporary Nigeria.  But what makes it a compelling read is the narrator/writer whose anxieties over the novel she is writing, the child she is carrying, her questions about religion, her role as a wife, and her upper-class life in a sharply stratified society keep you wondering page after page if she would eventually lose it."

Caribbean Women Writers: An excerpt from Joanne Hillhouse's forthcoming novel, Oh Gad!

Antiguan writer Joanne C. Hillhouse was a guest blogger here last year when she shared her thoughts on the challenges of being a Caribbean writer living in the Caribbean. According to Hillhouse, the first of those challenges is "when your 108 square miles is so far from the world where books are made and dreaming impossible dreams is encouraged..." [read her entire post here].

Hillhouse is back on blog today with an excerpt from her forthcoming novel (release date: April 2012) Oh Gad! http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Joanne-C-Hillhouse/82696756

 _________

 

From Oh Gad!

She’d observed him observing her for much of the late-afternoon-to-early-evening. He approached during a rare moment when Marisol wasn’t holding her hostage. She had a moment to panic and wonder where Jazz, her buffer against such intrusions, had wandered off to before he was on her taking up more space than a man had right to.

He wore a navy suit with a pale greyish-blue silk tie and paler still blue shirt in the warm evening. While she couldn’t fault his taste, it was something else - in addition to the enormity of him; not fat but tall, a man with heft and presence – that made him stand out from the others in the dirt yard around him. The other men had long ago chucked their cheap, ill-fitting jackets, which ranged from trendily colourful to dark and dour, and rolled up their sleeves.  He though was as unwrinkled as if the day had not even begun; no sign that he’d sat in a too narrow, hard-bottomed and straight-backed pew, stood too-long at a squishy grave site, grieved or sweated.

He reminded her a little of Terry; so cool in a hot suit on a warm day. As was the case with Terry, this man’s suit was clearly custom made and of very high quality.  It sat comfortably on his broad shoulders, and neither swallowed nor cinched as it ran the considerable length of him. There was a respectable pocket square the same hue as the tie; silver buckle, tie pin and cuff links. Everything about him bespoke a sort of practiced affluence. She imagined that, like Terry, he was a man who’d pulled himself up from nothing, and slipped in with the boardroom crowd, whatever passed for that here in Antigua, as if he’d always belonged. She used to imagine that if she chipped away Terry’s practiced cool, she’d find not a man but a scared boy inside; or maybe she just longed for a twin to the little girl hiding inside of her; misery loves company and all that. She suspected, however, that Terry’s chiselled exterior was so set there was nothing of the boy growing up in a hard knocks existence left, not enough to understand all the insecurities that lived inside her. She looked the part, that’s what had attracted him to her in the first place, she supposed, when he’d plucked her from the crowd at one of those here-today-gone-tomorrow New York City clubs. She wasn’t much for the club scene, but sometimes things – and people – are meant to converge; and there she was, there he was, clearly not a regular either and they danced up to each other, the rest, as they say, being history.

Now, in Mama Vi’s backyard, here was this one dancing up to her. He moved with big, certain steps, but it was a dance nonetheless, no way of missing the interest in his eyes. Nikki realized she was frowning by the time he came to an expectant stop. She forced another smile, one of many pained smiles that day.

“Nikissa Baltimore,” he greeted, too loudly. “My condolences on the passing of your mother. She was a fine woman.”

Nikki frowned at the use of her full name. It reeked of over-familiarity. No one called her that, not even her father, who’d raised her, or her mother, who’d named her. She stared at him. He couldn’t have been one of the boys Fanso and Tones knocked around with when they were kids; he had at least 15 years on her, by her estimation.

He pressed on, his smile that of a smarmy salesman peddling something you neither needed nor wanted; or a politician. “It’s been a while,” he said. “But I grew up right here in this village. Remember you coming home for summers, a time or two anyway. Hensen J. Stephens; I’m the parliamentary representative for the area.”

Nikki found she was more confused than ever at this bit of news. Her mother’s opposition to the dynasty that had ruled this country long before political independence – ruled it still – was legendary.

He laughed outright at her expression. “Don’t look so shocked, Nikissa…” he began.

“Nikki,” she cut him off.

He blinked at the tartness of her tone, but the smile didn’t slip. “Nikki,” he said, offering a slight nod. “And, please, call me Hensen.”

She couldn’t help but smile at that. “If I have occasion to call you, I will.”

His laughter became brassier, trombone-like in pitch. This, for the first time, marked him as one of the village; made him fit finally with the people eating and drinking, chatting and laughing as twilight settled around them. This laughter was real, open and rich. It recalled rare instances of her mother, laughing – tied head thrown back, body rocking with unexpected and unaccustomed glee, dress riding up, and the muddy between her parted legs briefly forgotten.

Memory? Or invention? Nikki had no way of knowing. Tears sprang to her eyes.

The concern on Hensen’s face was immediate. “You okay?” he asked, gently.

“My mother is dead,” she responded; quietly, desolately.

They were suspended: Jazz, nearby suddenly, eyeing her worriedly; Hensen J. Stephens at a loss for words. Incongruously, that tickled Nikki, a politician, one that exuded confidence as surely as he did his assertively spicy and faintly leather-scented cologne, at a loss for words. When she started laughing, that same backyard belly laugh, a timbre of laughter she didn’t know she had in her, Hensen and Jazz wore matching expressions of worry.  She must look all kinds of crazy; teary-eyed and laughing, unravelled like the wisps of untamed hair brushing her wet cheeks. She couldn’t bring herself to care. She wondered if this was what crazy felt like as the weird trembling she’d been feeling since coming here stirred in her again. It was a weird thing like being inside an earthquake as it rumbled outwards towards the surface where things would fall over and come apart. That image struck her funny somehow and soon she was laughing harder, more people turning at the sound, and her caring even less. She laughed until tears flowed stronger. People, even Jazz, kept their distance as though afraid her craziness would infect them. The only real thing was Hensen’s hand suddenly on hers. It was solid and, weirdly, quieted her. She hiccupped a breath, and another. Two breakdowns in as many weeks, Nikki felt like she was making up for lost time. She was present enough now to feel embarrassed and to feel the awkwardness of this man she barely knew grounding her with a half-touch. A part of her wanted to lean into the bulk of him and lose herself for a while, but she shook off the feeling, the last of crazy’s beckoning.

She retracted her hand, reluctantly, hiccupped another breath, declared, “I need a drink,” before turning toward the makeshift bar under the palm tree where Mama Vi once held court. “A Heineken, please,” she told the boy manning the bar, as sound stirred up around her again.

***

Joanne C. Hillhouse is a University of the West Indies graduate and international fellowship recipient to the Breadloaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont. Hillhouse also participated in the Caribbean Fiction Writers Summer Institute at the University of Miami. There she began work on her first book, The Boy from Willow Bend, which is on Antigua and Barbuda’s schools’ reading list. In addition to her second book, Dancing Nude in the Moonlight, Hillhouse has published in African, Caribbean, and American journals. She’s been announced as the 2011 recipient of the David Hough Literary Prize by the Caribbean Writer and previously won a UNESCO Honour award for her contribution to the literary arts in Antigua and Barbuda. That contribution includes her Wadadli Youth Pen Prize project – http://wadadlipen.wordpress.com Joanne C. Hillhouse is a freelance writer and editor. For more visit http://www.jhohadli.com

Caribbean Women Writers (series): The best of 2011

You can’t spend time reading, rereading, and then writing on a book without feeling as if you’ve gotten a bit closer to the writer herself. And so I feel as if I’ve gotten to know something more than I initially did about the women whose works I featured this year (and last year as well). In most cases, that something more is very likable, and I heartily recommend their work to readers everywhere: read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and (my favorite) Good Morning, Midnight for their haunting, memorable female characters; read Myriam Chancy’s Loneliness of Angels, and Lorna Goodison’s By Love Possessed  for provocative female perspectives on contemporary Haiti and Jamaica; read the many forms and ways of expressing the erotic in Caribbean Erotic; take along a copy of Liane Spicer’s Café Au Lait to the beach or on your next vacation; celebrate and mourn with Mahadai Das as she describes the enchantment and disenchantment of nationalism, and a nation’s heroes and heroines. 

But topping my list of best reads of 2011 are without a doubt the works of five women writers who graciously shared both their writing and a bit about themselves with us this series. They are--from first to most recently featured--Vashti Bowlah (“Catch of the Day”), Debra Providence (“Heart String”), Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné (poems), Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (“Avalanche”), and Barbara Jenkins (“Monty and Marilyn”). Read them again or anew and enjoy!

Note: I’ll feature one more writer before the year is over, but the Caribbean Women Writers series will resume in full swing next year. Thanks for following and supporting!

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Romance and Relationships: Barbara Jenkins's "Monty and Marilyn"

One of the memorable readings at Trinidad's Bocas Lit Fest earlier this year was Barbara Jenkins's reading of her story "Monty and Marilyn." In well-paced and aptly inflected tones she gave us two unforgettable female characters. It was a special invitation into her well-crafted world of intrigue.

Bio: After a career as a teacher and textbook author, Trinidadian writer Barbara Jenkins began writing fiction, and is currently an MFA student at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Among other writing prizes, Jenkins has the distinctive honor of being a back-to-back winner (Caribbean region) of the coveted Commonwealth Short Story competition. She won with "Something for Nothing" in 2010, and "Head Not Made for Hat Alone" in 2011. Jenkins's work has been published in The Caribbean Review of Books, The Caribbean Writer, and in Moving Right Along, an anthology of short fiction by participants in the Cropper Foundation Writers' Workshop (2000-2008).

 

From "Monty and Marilyn": 

Leo: Last night, I see Sandra watching Oprah, and she making sign for me to come and watch too. I get a beer from the fridge because, you know, I can’t watch them women show dry so. Well, I stretch out on the sofa, put my two foot on top of Sandra lap, and I watching too. [Read here].

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Mahadai Das's A Leaf in His Ear

To describe a woman’s writing as sentimental, or as filled with intense feeling (a bad comb-over for sentimental), may still be fighting words in some circles. But though it has been a word used to describe women’s writings (and men’s at times) in a belittling manner, the word sentimental has seen its fair share of credible reevaluation, one of the most discussed being feminist Jane Tompkins’s view of it as the “cultural work” of women (see reference below). But even as I acknowledge the worth of reevaluating a belittling term, I’m rather wary of attempts (good or bad) to make writing gender-specific. Nationalistic writing can make as clear a case as any that sentimentalism is not gender-specific. Both men and women writers from the Caribbean have documented with intense emotion their experiences with the fervor for nationalism, followed by anger and exodus, or quiet disillusionment at home--all part of the history and contemporary condition of many Caribbean countries. 

From Guyana we have (the best known) “man of feeling,” poet Martin Carter, who was recently celebrated at an Alice Yard event in Trinidad, as part of the 30th Annual West Indian Literature Conference held at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus. And thanks to the efforts of Peepal Tree Press, we also now have available a compilation of nationalistic (and other) poems--A Leaf in His Ear (2010)--by the late female Guyanese poet, Mahadai Das. The compilation contains poems from Das’s published and previously unpublished work. In the introduction to the collection, Denise De Caires Narain Gurmah tells us Das’s poems are distinctive for their dramatic and decisive mapping of the (said) trajectory from nationalism to disillusionment in Guyana. I selected lines from two poems from Das’s first collection that best illustrate the mapping Gurnah describes. And I have also selected two other poems from her later collections that I believe show another remarkable aspect of Das’s poems: her fecund, evocative images of women’s work and their lives as a whole.

Das came of age in the 1970s while she was a student at the University of Guyana and a member of the Guyana National Service, and her first collection of poems, I Want to be a Poetess of My People (1977), is filled with the excitement and promise of the period and with awe for Forbes Burnham.

From “He Leads The People”:

In the era of the people
I stand astride the excitement of reconstruction.
Eagerness is a sparkling ray in my eye
The blood races through my veins.
. . . .
In the era of the people
The horizon beckons the vision to rise like the morning sun
In the sky.
And in the forefront of battle
He leads the people
Tall, his vision communing with the light on the horizon.

Das’s second collection of poems, My Finer Steel Will Grow, published in 1982, captures a changed set of realities in Guyana, marked by an increasingly “tyrannical” Burnham regime, according to Gurmah.

From “Untitled III”:

Birds break through the wall of heaven
and everywhere angels
are chained to darkness.

Now that the Prince’s sceptre has rusted
and the legs of his gilded chair totter --
even now the heavy clank of chains
is heard in his cellars.

But even within the darkest sentiment of this second collection, one can find images of hope. And though they are somewhat “primitive” and distant, they are perhaps well-suited to the uncertainty and terror of the times.

From “While the Sun is Trapped”:

But the day to come crouches, holding

his long spear in the night.

. . . .

the vengeance of heaven waits armed
in the shadows.
The sun comes up in a coup
for the golden day.

Two other of Das’s poems in Leaf in His Ear, from her third and fourth collections (My Finer Steel Will Grow, and Bones), show her in ceremonial mode (both joyous and mournful). The poems present female images in a robust tone similar to the speakers’ voices in her political poems, but the images are a change from the comparatively less complex images found in the political poems. In “Untitled VIII,” the speaker pays tribute to the women’s morning ritual of getting ready for the day. The first line, “Awaken my love,” introduces the poem’s formal tone (pertinent for a ceremony, perhaps), to a familiar addressee. Following that are lavish and playful descriptions of rituals: gathering of skirts, and plaiting of hair “with a song.” Lines about the sun’s rays, described as “morning bangles,” and “delicate wrists of morning light,” and the speaker’s calls to the addressee(s) to “sling our pails / upon our arms’ strong rods / and dance to the well,” present combinations of delicate and sturdy, which overall give us an optimistic, romanticized view of the women’s work.

“Untitled VIII”

Awaken my love.
In the distance, conches
cry.
Let us rise, gathering our skirts
about our knees.
With a song we will plait our hair.
The sun’s rays shall be our morning bangles.
These delicate wrists of morning light shall sustain us.
Let us sling our pails
upon our arms’ strong rods
and dance to the well.
Our men will still be sleeping
while we stoke the fire. The coals
will leap like joy in our hearts,
to flame. Our lords will wake
to hot curries and fresh-baked
wheat.
And while it is yet dark, they,
will make their way to the fields.

The title poem in Bones, begins with the line “Grotesque jewels, they hang” and I’ve singled it out here, because it almost begs for a comparison with the “bangles” in “Untitled VIII.” From the delicate and strong (pretty-sounding) images of bangles, we move (by way of comparison) to the contrasting images of grotesque jewels and petticoats that “jangle” continuously. The poem’s most striking images are of noisy, plaintive decay and abandonment, which fits its idea of skeletons in the closet (stories) clamouring to come out. But in the last few lines, the mood of the poem changes from plaintive to something more upbeat and buoyant.

“Bones”

Grotesque jewels, they hang
in my closet beside prom dresses
and red pumps.

When petticoats are sleeping,
they continue to jangle.
They make a strange noise.
Moonlight shadows their gauntness.
Pumps and brogues are blind to their squeals.

Veils thin to a fringe on their bony blades
They could tell a tale.
They want a say, without doubt.

Long ago, they were supply fleshed,
But then, all meat fell away
from the bone. Some teeth
and hair remained.
Someone should examine their story.
After all, it’s not that they dwindled
into dust altogether. Besides,
these bones could make more than music.
They’re a fire-tried instrument.

They have no wish to stay in the attic.
They want to be part of the world.

Oh they are hungry for wind to sing
through their tissue, so hungry.
They wait for the earth at the plough.
After winter’s fallowness
and all its severity,
when earth is torn up
by the diligent farmers,
when golden seedlings
offer
love to their heavens,
they wait without praise or reprimand.

So when these white flutes
send a note out -- a golden apple
from the Mexican border -- it takes to air,

Full shape climbing,
rising

helium balloon forever.

If it’s possible to read romance in lines of poems taken out of their worlds of meaning and synthesized with other lines of poems taken from theirs (as I have done here), then the lines of Das’s poems give us a romantic sentimental visioning and revisioning of Guyana, relevant to the 1970s, the 80s, and even beyond--a quality which certainly makes them as nationally and regionally relevant as Carter’s poems. In addition, her poems give us a sentimental set of female aesthetics that celebrate the cultural work of women and that insist (metaphorically) the “hidden” lives / stories of women need to be heard, and their work celebrated.

***

Related Links:

--Enotes.com [Essay] : “American History Through Literature.” -- Joyce W. Warren highlights Jane Tompkins’s contribution to a revised view of mid-nineteenth-century sentimentalism in her book, Sensational Designs (1985).
--Trinidad Express [News article, October 2011]: “Dreaming of Change: Tribute to Martin Carter.”

--The Caribbean Review of Books [Review of A Leaf in His Ear]: "Her Scarlet Tongue." 

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Romance and Relationships: Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro's "Avalanche"

The writer featured this month is from Puerto Rico. Her story, "Avalanche," was originally written in Spanish, and was submitted to the series in English. The version you will read is additionally adjusted from its original language by my edits; however, I tried to stay as true as possible to the enchanting voice of Arroyo Pizarro's narrator in translation.

 

 Bio: Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (1970, Puerto Rico)  is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction published in Spanish in Puerto Rico. She is also the 2008 winner of the National Institute of Puerto Rico's Literature Prize, and the 2011 receipient of the Latino Writer Residency Award, from The National Hispanic Culture Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Arroyo Pizarro is the Director of Puerto Rican writers participating in the second Puerto Rican Word Festival in Old San Juan and New York in 2011. Her most recent publication is a collection of poems titled Saeta, the poems (imaged left). She blogs regularly at Boreales.

 

 From "Avalanche":  She speaks first, and I lose the shyness and the suspicion about her presence. She says she does not like how the nurse looks at her. She also says that because of that, because of exactly that same look, she stabbed her husband. [Read here].

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Telling Stories: Lorna Goodison's By Love Possessed

My favorite short stories work like cinematic vignettes, which is to say that they are essentially portraits or scenes I am pulled into by a purposeful narrator or speaker, who gives me a quick tour or perusal of the scene or portrait, and simultaneously causes me to experience a quick wringing-out impression of the substance of that scene or portrait and leaves me a bit breathless--both from pace and matter. Connecting in some major way with narrative voice, whether it is first, third, or some other perspective, is for me the key component to enjoying short fiction. The Caribbean short story has a fascinating history of writers’ experimentation with narrative voice, which is one of the subjects discussed in The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, a recently published collection of essays, edited by Caribbean scholars, Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt, and Emma Smith. In one intriguing study, Suzanne Scafe focuses on a fat chunk of the history of the short story in Jamaica (1938-1950) and makes the following observation:

Some of the most effective . . . in the dominant expression of Jamaican culture were those that privileged the use of Jamaican creole, not as dialogue, a form to which many readers had already become accustomed, but as either the narrative voice or as a means of articulating a complex interiority.

In her latest book, a collection of short stories titled By Love Possessed, Jamaican writer Lorna Goodison continues in the tradition of presenting narrative voice as a key element to understanding mindset, character, and even country in some regards. The 22 stories in the collection are cinematic vignettes, short shorts threaded through and held together by several elements, including a lively orality--compact with humor and mixed tones of derision and empathy--on recurring situations where characters confront or avoid issues concerning toxic love, hypocrisy of many forms, poverty, and old personal or psychological haunts.

The clear-visioned heroine

The first story in the collection, “The Helpweight,” gives us a female character whose no-nonsense attitude about love and relationships is a dominant one in the collection. In the story, a pair of former high-school sweethearts contend with the left-over emotions from their past relationship. She is now a successful marketing manager, and he is a lawyer. Their relationship ended years ago when he got married to an Irish woman he met while studying in England, but he has returned to Jamaica (wife in tow) and seems bent on resuming their relationship. She’s clearly not interested (she is about to become seriously involved with a doctor), but she lets him get close enough to publicly humiliate him a few times--including making him wait outside her office for over an hour before she sees him--then she finally cuts him off completely for having the “unmitigated gall to suggest that she settle for being his concubine.” In the story’s parable-like construction, she is presented as a heroine with the clear vision to see through his empty promise--“...You are number one, you will always be the queen”-- and recognize that he is no better than men like the deadbeat father of her house helper’s children, a man the helper says “is not a helpmate, ma’am, him is a helpweight. All him do is help weigh me down.” As a woman who has done well for herself, she can effectively challenge and reject the weight of a number system (so to speak) of power and ownership designed to benefit men. Her rejection strikes a decisive tone for the female-focused collection.

This clear-visioned Jamaican heroine is present in many of the stories, including those with women who are not as financially successful as the female protagonist in “Helpweight.” One such woman, a struggling artist, receives an offer to become the girlfriend of a wealthy man who asks her out, but tells her he doesn’t have much time in his life for “something like this” (time to invest in a serious relationship, perhaps?) but he can get her anything she wants. Her rejection of his offer is made particularly significant when she recalls seeing a woman of “house colour” (explained as the name Jamaicans give to the complexion one gets from spending most of one’s time indoors) taking inventory of her possessions in a jewellery store. She imagines that the woman’s collection of  jewelry is the result of a  life spent with someone who didn’t have time to invest in a serious relationship with her, and doesn’t want that for herself.

Sometimes though, as another story illustrates, a woman in a relationship with a “busy” man can negotiate her way into a compromise that pleases her. But she’ll require some help from divine sources. In “Jamaica Hope,” (name for a “champion” breed of cattle, which the narrator tells us were “bigger than most men”) Lilla, who “pledged her head, hands, heart, and hopes into building a life with Alphanso,” (her own version of a champion breed, perhaps) spends ten years living with him and bearing children for him without being married. Her contentment changes when she discovers he is seeing someone else. She then decides she wants the security of marriage and asks him to marry her. The ensuing dialogue about marriage--he talks to his brother; she talks to her mother--tells a story (though not the story) of Jamaican cultural beliefs regarding marriage:

“Bob, hear my crosses now, Lilla want get married.”
“All woman want to get married.”
“You know how much people live good good then them go and get married and everything crash?”

“Mama, Alphanso don’t want get married.”
“No man in Jamaica ever want get married.”

Lilla prepares to leave him and Alphanso seems uncaring of that until his brother (who lives alone) falls ill and Lilla takes care of him. He finally gives in and agrees to the marriage. 

Though Lilla may have been successful in getting the kind of relationship she desires, the collection, which shows a wide range of relationship situations, is full of other women whose efforts to build their lives solely around men are predictably unsuccessful. And where the women remain stubbornly persistent in trying to make those relationships work, the narrator pokes merciless fun at them. One woman, for instance, who pays a man’s way into a movie theatre when he claims his pocket had been picked, and who then becomes involved with him, is criticized by the narrator:
 

If she had been seeing straight, she would have noticed that some people were laughing when he raised the alarm. But she didn’t see anything except the handsome brown-skin man with “good hair,” straight nose, and a mouth like a woman’s.

The complex male

Though the major focus of the collection’s vignettes is on the agency or lack thereof of women in mostly dysfunctional relationships with men, and though (to that end) we get rather superficial and dismissive portrayals of the men with whom they are involved, two of the stories with male protagonists give a deeper look at a certain male condition. “Henry,” is the story of a young boy who is sent by his mother to “fight life” for himself when she determines his presence in the home is a hindrance to her relationship with her boyfriend. Henry tries to make a living selling roses on the street and he dreams of being rescued one day...

The sliver cloud will stand still, the rear window will be eased down, and the wife of the Governor General will call out . . . ‘Hello you, you little one in those red corduroy trousers that must be so hot on you, come dear, and let me find a place for you to live. You really should not be out on the street like this.'

His context for being rescued--by a wealthy mother-figure who singles him out for special attention, and who appears out of a “silver cloud”-- is as childlike as one would expect for someone his age (he’s 12), but it creates an undeniable pathos, especially too that the roses he sells are not only his reality--a way of life--in the story, they also become part of his idealist longing for something sweeter, prettier than his grimy street reality.

Because Henry’s story is so similar to the childhood of Albert’s, the protagonist in “Big Shot,” it’s possible to consider their stories as part and whole--a continuum... Like Henry, Albert once lived in poverty and aspired to be rescued from it. Like Henry, he was abandoned by his mother, though he had a grandmother who raised him and saw him through to college abroad. He returns to Jamaica and attempts to distance his present life as a successful lawyer as far as he possibly can from his past. But like many of the female protagonists in other stories, he is made aware that he can’t simply immerse himself in a new life and pretend the past doesn’t matter. When he left Jamaica to study elsewhere, he had abandoned a pregnant girlfriend, and he gets his comeuppance for that abandonment when the mother of his child confronts him in his office. That’s where the story ends, but along the way we are allowed to pinpoint societal and other destructive cyclical familial factors, patterns of behavior that may have contributed to the condition of a man who desires to hide from his past.

Voices of the community:

While “Henry” and “Big Shot” present possibilities for a wider range of reading the collection’s depiction of a certain male condition in Jamaica, “Bella Makes Life” presents possibilities for a wider geographical reading of how immigration can affect the value system upon which a relationship is based. Bella leaves her husband and children for New York and he assesses (through the letters she writes him, then later on through the clothes she wears) the ways in which she becomes a different person. In her first letters she seems focused on their relationship, telling him “You know I’m only here to work some dollars to help you and me to make life when I come home. Please don’t have any other woman while I’m gone. I know that a man is different from a woman, but please do try and keep yourself to yourself till we meet and I’m saving all my love for you.” But in later letters, she appears focused on herself and on telling him about her jobs and social life, declaring, “I figure I might as well enjoy myself while I not so old yet.” The narrator presents reactions to the changes in Bella which seem in part her husband’s, and in part that of a larger communal-sounding ridicule:

Enjoy herself? This time Joseph was working so hard to send the two children to school clean and neat, Joseph become mother and father for them, the man even learn to plait the little girl hair. Enjoy himself?

When Bella returns to Jamaica, Joesph is embarrassed at the clothes she wears and her over done accessories, and he longs for a simpler, less fussy woman. But the woman he turns to (Blossom) becomes just as unrecognizable when she leaves Jamaica for the United States and returns. Once again, because the narrator does the telling, we can sense a larger circle of ridicule pointed at Blossom, "a big woman, dressed in black socks with lace frothing over the top of her black leather ankle boots." One can certainly argue that these women have the right to wear whatever they want, but one is also quite tempted (seduced by the amusing narrative voice/s) to join in with the mostly valid indictment of those who seem to equate “making it” in America with becoming owners of a wardrobe of clothing--of ever-changing trends--from which they can choose and assume any outfit / identity, whether or not it suits them.

But sometimes, as another story shows, the “voice” of the community is clearly unfair. In “Fool-fool Rose Is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah,” the narrator tells us of a woman who confides in a friend about her relationship and is betrayed by that woman who joins with other women in the community and ridicule her in secret. The narrator, who is an older woman, tells the young woman being betrayed a story she hopes will help her be less trusting. The layering of stories demonstrates good and evil effects of “telling” stories: those that damage, and those that teach and heal.

The final story in the collection, “I Come Through,” is both in title and themes, the collection’s culminating piece. In it, a famed Jamaican singer gives an interview and tells her life story, during which she revisits some of the collection’s dominant themes: abandonment; tricksters posing as friends and/or lovers; reading the ‘signs’; the surrogate mother or grandmother; and, healing and renewal in telling stories, including telling one’s own life story. From first story to the last, the collection has an engaging purposeful feel, with each slice of life producing a cohesive whole...

The collection’s best accomplishment:

In the tradition of Caribbean short fiction, which Scafe and others before her speak of, and which seeks to capture an articulate narrative voice that is true to place and time, Goodison’s narrators and speakers in By Love Possessed (who are sometimes single-voiced, and other times plural-sounding) secure an important place in the genre by effectively giving us a language and a sensibility that is true of many Jamaicans / Caribbean people living in the Caribbean as well as outside the Caribbean...true to a condition of living that requires adaptability and flux. The language is standard English inflected with accents, rather than a specific creole, persay. The reader who is not Jamaican or Caribbean can possibly detect the accent in the language, but is not excluded from it (no glossary needed here). Considering its language and its contemporary and universal themes, the best of what we get in By Love Possessed  is a carefully constructed dualism of sorts: it is nationalistic and global, time-and-place-specific, and transcendent.

 __________

By Love Possessed, by Lorna Goodison (McClelland & Stewart 2011, 272 pp).

The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, eds. Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt & Emma Smith (Peepal Tree Press 2011, 356 pp).

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Love is Poetry: Poems by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné

During this month of September, which will bring me cooler weather and a quieter atmosphere for reading and writing (my kids are going back to school), I'm featuring the works of four female poets from the Caribbean. The first is Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, a rising star from Trinidad and Tobago...

Bio: Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and artist from Trinidad. Her work has previously been featured in The Caribbean Writer, Bim: Arts for the 21st Century, Tongues of the Ocean, Anthurium, Small Axe Literary Salon, Canopic Jar, Poui: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, and St. Somewhere Journal. She was awarded the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize for first time publication by The Caribbean Writer in 2009, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by St. Somewhere Journal in 2010. Some of her work can be found on her blog, Half Broken Things.

I am thrilled to include three of Danielle's poems in this year's Caribbean Women Writers series. [Read here]. 

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Romance and Relationships: Liane Spicer’s Café au Lait

It’s been a while since I read one--a very predictable, formulaic contemporary romance novel. From the first connecting glance of its too-beautiful, antagonistic and sexually charged pair of lovers, through its language used to describe the pair’s staged encounters, fraught with drama, and to its happy ending, Liane Spicer’s Café au Lait is familiar territory for those who (like me) spent many years thrilled and throbbing through the pages of Mills and Boon and Harlequin Romances.

The novel opens with the pair’s first awkward meeting on a flight to Trinidad from London. She is Shari Zamore, a Londoner of Trinidadian parentage. She is tall, slender, graceful, an “untouchable loveliness,” “more an artist’s impression than a real woman,” and she’s going to Trinidad for the first time on an extended vacation to recover from a breakup.  He is Michael Chancery, Trinidadian, very attractive, and a prominent architect in the Caribbean. She thinks she recognizes him, though she is unsure where they might have met, and tries to strike up a conversation, “You look familiar. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” But he is rude and dismissive: “I doubt very much that we have met. I doubt that I would remember even if we had. And if you really do not mind, I would like to get some sleep.” She is shocked at the depths of ire he arouses in her and vows to have nothing further to do with him, and with that the novel’s main setting, tensions, and major characters are established. But though their romance follows a predictable course, it never ceases to thrill and works arduously to pull the reader in and keep you reasonably entranced in their world.

One very strong pull is the setting itself: Trinidad. Now reader beware that the Trinidad we get is a rather exotic, romanticized one, but its depiction is not without some intentional (seeming) humor that may make it palatable for the narrow-eyed and jaded. Shari’s view of the Savannah from her guesthouse suite is of an energetic and picturesque place edged with a variety of flowers, where couples stroll hand in hand, where children try to catch tadpoles with nets, and where vendors offer iced coconut water. Frederick street is a noisy, lively, stimulating place, and as she walks along Shari notices “individuals in the masses . . . of every colour, every shade, every race . . . with every possible combination. A melting pot...” At a carnival celebration shortly after she arrives in Trinidad, she is impressed with the detailed costumes and accompanying stories, but most impressive is the sight of Michael’s bare torso and sensuous movements to the music. The sight of him is so dizzying she returns to her apartment and faints (but, as we learn in the following chapter, it could have been just a bit of sunstroke).

At Blanchisseuse, a tiny fishing hamlet on the north coast of Trinidad, the “boundless” ocean, “limitless” sky, and the “ceaseless” sweep of the cool trade winds make her feel at home, and she concludes, “this must be the seduction of the tropics.” But of course she is very aware that part of the seduction is Tools, a shirtless, six-foot-plus, Blanchisseuse native with massive muscular shoulders and arms, and a tapered narrow waist. The last leg of her tour of Trinidad and Tobago is Tobago. She goes there at a low point in her romance with Michael, and is rejuvenated by all there is to do there: glass-bottomed boat rides, a swim in the Nylon pool in the middle of the Buccoo Reef, explorations to fishing hamlets and offshore islands, and bright blue-green water edged with lacy foam in which to swim. One can easily get pulled into the tour guide-ish feel of the novel, but it is always clear that the guide is Shari who is not a native Trinidadian, and that fact allows you the liberty to take a grain of salt to go along with it...so to speak.

Though the tour guide of Trinidad and Tobago can stand on its own, it is the backdrop for the romancing pair. Their vacillations between disgust for each other--he thinks he knows her love-em-leave-em “type” and she thinks he’s rude and obnoxious--and moments when they can’t keep their hands off each other are captivating fare against the backdrop of beauty and alternating liveliness and tranquility of the country, and when they finally have sex, it’s during the only bad weather we see in the novel--a rainstorm which causes roads to flood--but it takes place in his prized rose garden on the grounds of his huge house at the top of a hill...

He could stand it no more. The playfulness--all of their dancing around each other--vanished. Savagely, he pulled away the flimsy strip of fabric [her thong panties]. It came apart in his hands and he scattered the pieces heedlessly. He kissed her hard then, mad for her, bent to engulf her breasts, and finally, he found himself on his knees, his face buried in her black bush, in a posture that was both surrender and mastery. His lips sought and found the very essence of her. Totally out of control now, he kissed and bit, making strange strangled noises deep in his throat, while she moaned and gasped and twisted against him. He grabbed the round cheeks of her ass with his hard fingers and held her captive while he devoured her...

(Okay that’s enough. Buy the book if you want more.)

Their tryst lasts about a week, but since it takes place only about halfway through the book, that’s not the happy ending. They break up shortly afterwards, and she goes to Tobago (at the lowest point in their romance as I mentioned earlier) to try and forget about him. Of course all goes according to expected script and they are reunited, get married, and all’s well. And just to make certain we understand that all ends well, we see them ten years later in their beautiful home at the top of a hill, complete with three children, and the sex, by all appearances, is still good. Their romance is as fittingly impervious to male and female rivals, bad weather, and baggage from past relationships as any of its novelistic kind and it creates a fantastical enough world that should satisfy the reader who is looking for escape of that sort.

And if you are not necessarily a believer in marital bliss, there is the somewhat parallel story of Shari’s cousin Wanda with a different happy ending. Wanda is a native Trinidadian, also very attractive, and she has a good job, a busy social life, and (for a while) a hot on and off romance with Allan, a native Trinidadian. But after she and Allan become engaged, she breaks it off because as she claims, “I really can’t handle the committed stuff.” And to make sure we understand that she really can’t, ten years later, she is still single and happy being an aunt to Shari’s children, and she’s convincing enough that you don’t feel sorry for her.

Café au Lait would be the perfect book to take along on a trip to the beach. It offers a Trinidadian setting that would make any tourism board proud, its beautiful people appear deserving of happiness on their own terms, and it all works to take the reader on a leisurely enjoyable journey through the predictable plot and language.

Last gripe-ish though. Since I quoted liberally from the novel’s best moment--sex in the rose garden--I think it’s also fitting that I should quote from its worst moment, which just happens to be part of that same best moment:

Michael cursed suddenly and drew away, panting.
“Let’s go upstairs . . . I have some condoms . . . I almost forgot . . .” His eyes were strange and wild, and he tried to pull himself back from some unknown place, some unplumbed depths.
“Don’t worry--you said you’re okay . . . I’ve been tested too . . . It’s all right . . .” She could not bear to let him go, and pulled him back to her . . .
“Please--Michael--please--”

Now come on. In this day and age? She shoulda let him go get the condoms, no? As--uum...happy as I was for them at that moment, I was quite willing to pause until he got back...

_____________

 

Café au Lait is available for purchase in ebook form at BN.com and Amazon.com.

Caribbean Women Writers (series): Romance and Relationships: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

 ...Christophine came in with our coffee on a tray. She was dressed up and looking very imposing. The skirt of her flowered dress trailed after her making a rustling noise as she walked and her yellow turban was elaborately tied. Long heavy gold ear-rings pulled down the lobes of her ears . . .

“Taste my bull’s blood, master.” The coffee she handed me was delicious . . . “Not horse piss like the English madams drink,” she said. “I know them. Drink drink their yellow horse piss, talk. talk their lying talk.” Her dress trailed and rustled as she walked to the door . . .

 “Her coffee is delicious but her language is horrible and she might hold her dress up. It must get very dirty, yards of it trailing on the floor.”

 “When they don’t hold their dress up it’s for respect,” said Antoinette. “Or for feast days or going to Mass.”

 “And is this a feast day?”

 “She wanted it to be a feast day.”

 “Whatever the reason it is not a clean habit.”

 “It is. You don’t understand at all. They don’t care about getting a dress dirty because it shows it isn’t the only dress they have....”

 

The scene, if one were to visualize it on screen perhaps, would be an amusing one. Picture a black woman in full elaborate Victorian dress in the 1830s West Indies (Dominica in this case) serving breakfast to a honeymooning pair--Englishman and creole wife--speaking scornfully of English madams, all the while dragging yards of dress as she moves. The explanation for her carefree attitude towards her sweeping dress--that she is treating their first day at the honeymoon house as a special occasion, “a feast day,” and / or she is putting on a show of riches for the couple--completes the symbolic-laden scene. We get the full dramatic effect of well-placed irony and contradiction, pretense, and enigma, with Christophine (a black woman) at its center. And though much of the critical discussion of the book--Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966--from which the above “scene” was taken centers around the honeymooning pair, and on the shifted and expanded gaze Rhys gives to Charlotte Bronte’s mad West Indian woman in the attic in Jane Eyre, a more inclusive look, which considers Christophine’s role, might provide deeper insight to Rhys’s handling (re-centering) of a nineteenth-century romance.

 
But first, the romantic structure of Jane Eyre...

In a 2002 article (which I chose for its clarity and online accessibility), Richard Griffiths sums up Jane Eyre and its romantic parts:

Jane Eyre has always been one of English Literature’s greatest and most popular love stories, offering as it does a first person account of a true love (that of Jane with Rochester) which, despite its complications, conquers all in a touching finale. The problem takes the rather unusual form of Rochester’s living first wife, who is an insane creole, locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s residence. That Jane only discovers this on the brink of a bigamous marriage adds to the drama. The resolution comes in the form of the wife’s death when she destroys Thornfield with a fire. Jane is reunited with Rochester, her true love, (having previously left him and inherited a large fortune from an uncle). Her love for him is unalloyed despite his blindness and disability caused by the fire. This is presented as fitting punishment for his previous foolhardiness and provides a moral tone to the unequivocal happy ending.  (More of Griffiths’ analysis here: http://apsenglishlanglit.edublogs.org/ ).

Griffiths identifies the main features of a romance novel many of us may be familiar with: the pair of (likely or unlikely) lovers, the problem, the drama it creates, resolution and happy ending, and the moral. Add Jane Eyre’s gothic elements to the mix, and we have the complete package of intrigue and grip that has permanently helped establish Jane Eyre as a classic. But what happens when you take that classic English novel into the West Indies? Rhys answers by removing Bronte’s Jane and replacing her with Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, who she renames Antoinette. Once the pair of lovers is set, then comes the problem, which in Rhys’s version is never resolved, though there are many morals to be understood.

Rhys’s Antoinette is a creole born in Jamaica. She is the daughter of slave owners, and as a young girl she experiences her family’s turn from prosperous slave owners to financial ruin, and the death of her father. There is a brief resurgence of prosperity  when her mother remarries, but then their house is burned down by newly emancipated blacks and Antoinette loses her younger brother to death, and her mother to mental illness. She is married off to an Englishman (assumed to be the young Rochester figure), and after a brief recollection of being married to him--their honeymoon--she herself succumbs to mental illness. The novel’s main romantic action takes place during Antoinette’s and her husband’s honeymoon, where both share narrative voice, and where the romance officially begins and ends.

In the beginning, the couple react differently to the landscape, and though their differences seem minor, it’s the first indication of a problem. On the way to the honeymoon house, Antionette’s husband, who is never named, assesses the place and his new wife:

Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger . . . Soon the road was cobblestoned and we stopped at a flight of stone steps. There was a large screw pine to the left and to the right what looked like an imitation of an English summer house -- four wooden posts and a thatched roof. She dismounted and ran up the steps. At the top a badly cut, coarse-grained lawn and at the end of the lawn a shabby white house . . . Perched up on wooden stilts the house seemed to shrink from the forest behind it and crane eagerly out to the distant sea. It was more awkward than ugly, a little sad as if it knew it could not last.  

But for Antoinette, the place is enchanting and she raises a mild challenge to her husband’s obvious disappointment:

“Is it true,” she said, “that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up”

“Well,” I answered annoyed, “that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.”
“But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?”
“And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?”
“More easily,” she said, “much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.”

Their distinctions for dream and reality in regards to place take on a more concrete reality as their honeymoon lingers on. Except for a few servants (who gradually dwindle in number), the pair is isolated in their unchanging setting, and though Antoinette’s husband grows to appreciate some aspects of their solitude--he likes the silent, reserved mountain people who don’t bother them, and he enjoys “breathless and savage” sex with his wife--he remains emotionally detached from her and place. A change in the monotony of their relationship occurs when he receives a letter from her cousin detailing her family history of mental illness and suggesting that she too will eventually go mad. He says, in reaction to the letter, “I felt no surprise. It was as if I’d expected it, been waiting for it. For a long time, long or short I don’t know...” The letter is indeed the novelistic catalyst that aids the rest of the pair’s unravelling. He has a loud sexual encounter with a servant in the room adjoining hers, and she (as the plot leads us to believe) never recovers from the deceit, and spirals into madness. He leaves for England with her, declaring in an oddly possessive manner, “vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.”    

Sargasso Sea is full of these odd conclusive moments, which may well be so because (as some critics have noted), it is a very self-conscious reactionary tale. But its clumsiness, persay, in language and plot allows for a valid sweeping assessment of the portrayal of Antoinette. She seems more than a woman, and rather the embodiment of several periodic West Indian-related tragedies: Hers is the tragedy of the impoverished creole in a post-Emancipation West Indies, the tragedy of being alienated and hated in the only place she knows as home, the tragedy of having to pay for ancestral crimes, of having the stigma of a possible hereditary mental illness, and the tragedy of exploitation by her English husband. She is Rhys’s version of a nineteenth-century romantic West Indian ideal gone wrong, at least for the slave owners and their progeny.

Madness, in Sargasso Sea, is the signal for the predicted end of Antoinette’s and her husband’s relationship, and it is also the signal for the collapse of a faulty societal structure. But a more grounded romantic ideal, a fitter structure, so to speak, can be found elsewhere in the novel in the form of Christophine. She is Antoinette’s housekeeper and former nanny and she had been a wedding gift to Antoinette’s mother from her father. In many ways, she is the antitype to what Antoinette represents: She is a wily sort of romantic heroine, who appears to be an outlaw of sorts for practicing obeah; she is an adventurous female black figure in the post-Emancipation West Indies, who has strong ties to both a domestic and a free-roaming land existence; she has survived being taken away from her birth place in Martinique at a young age by using her hands and her wit; she is regarded as different and alienated by the black women in Jamaica, but her alienation isn’t a tragic one, rather, it is an empowering one for her; she wields power which comes from supernatural sources and from her ability to discern truth, in particular, truth about character. When a distraught Antoinette comes to her for marital advice, she tells her, “pack up and go . . . When man don’t love you, more you try, more he hate you, man like that. If you love them they treat you bad, if you don’t love them they after you night and day bothering your soul case out . . . All women, all colours, nothing but fools. Three children I have. One living in this world, each a different father, but no husband. I thank my God. I keep my money. I don’t give it to no worthless man.”

Christophine’s voice and language are the clearest and most forceful in the novel. As she appears to be in the scene I presented in the opening--commanding of our attention and outspoken--she is both an old cultural archetype, and a mocking, shape-shifting new woman. She is, I contend, the novel’s sturdy, sneaky nineteenth-century romantic female ideal.  

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