Praisesong for the Widow (Grenada)

by Paule Marshall

courtesy of a special order from Auntie’s Bookstore

PRELUDE: Years ago, our manager at the bookstore was a man who had parachuted into Grenada during the U.S. invasion of that Caribbean Island. I never understood why. He couldn’t explain it! This book won’t tell you, but Wiki says it was to prevent Grenada from becoming BFFs with Fidel Castro. They would have been his neighbor. They’re in his hood.

But the U.S. invaded and saved the day. So now, Grenada’s healthcare sucks and poverty is rampant. You know, good old capitalism. Way to go, USA. I feel it is adding insult to the injury caused by bringing Africans from all over that continent to Grenada as slaves originally.

Praisesong for The Novel

A black American called Avey Johnson goes on a cruise with two friends (but one is more like a frenemy, or maybe an annoying relative!) I didn’t understand why they were friends. Anyhoo…

Unsettled by dreams, Avey gets off the ship by herself and decides to “go native”. She meets an old man in a rum shack who takes her on “the Excursion” to Carriacou–a yearly pilgrimage that people who live in Grenada always make back to their home island. Because of the way Avey looks, people keep mistaking her for a Grenada native, and speaking to her in Patois, which, as  New Yorker, she cannot understand.

She’s violently ill on the boat, purging herself of many things, then experiencing a kind of rebirth on the island as she is bathed like a baby by the old man’s daughter, and given healing herbs and made whole again. Well again.

For Lo, the Past Ye Shall Always Have With You

Carriacou Island, the destination of The Excursion

Avey dreams of her grandmother, a mystic who lived in South Carolina and was more like these islanders than either of her parents. Her grandmother used to tell her a tale of a slave ship arriving in South Carolina full of Nigerians, and how they came ashore and then just turned and walked away, back over the water.

I kept thinking the whole book was an allegory, the scenes a mixture of those times and these times, and it was so skillfully done. This author has a very light touch. I was thinking slavery and sugarcane, colonial masters and plantations, tribes living close to the earth in Africa and close to the water on the islands. Black life now, black life then. City people and country people. And a drumbeat connecting them all.

A Small Scene

Here’s Avey running into the old man as he’s closing the rum shop to go on The Excursion. She’s just about gotten sunstroke/heatstroke from walking too far down the beach from her hotel without any water:

“And what you is? What’s your nation? He asked her, his manner curious, interested, even friendly all of a sudden.

“Arada? Is you an Arada? He waited.

“Cromanti maybe? And he again waited. “Yaraba then? Moke?

“On and on he recited the list of names, pausing after each one to give her time to answer.

“Temne? Is you a Temne maybe? Banda?

“What was the man going on about? What were these names? Each one made her head ache all the more. She thought she heard in them the faint rattle of the necklace of cowrie shells and amber that Marion [her daughter] always wore. Africa? Did they have something to do with Africa? Senile. The man was senile. The minds of the old…

“She darted a frightened glance toward the door. She might be safer out in the sun.

“Manding? Is you a Manding like my mother, maybe? The Long-Foot People, we calls them.

“Wait! A smile began to work its way through the maze of lines around his mouth. Don’ tell me you’s a Chamba like myself…? He waited, the smile slowly emerging, his arms in the frayed shirt poised to open in a fraternal embrace.

“…I…I don’t know what you’re talking about…I don’t know what you’re asking me…

“I is asking if you’re a Temne, Mono, Arada or what? He had lost patience with her once again…”

WHY I LOVED IT

I love this scene because it’s funny, but it’s also deep. The old man sees that she looks Island, and thinks she is from there (which she is, but only several generations ago). She’s American now. She has the American attitude towards the old–not that they’re wise, as the old man proves to be, but that they’re senile, which makes her afraid of him!

I love the recitation of the tribal names (and the dance that he urges her to go to after the Excursion, which the remaining tribal members doing their special stomping around). I enjoy finding out about groups of people and languages new to me. This book felt natural. It’s not preachy, but it is sometimes melancholy, as any history about a person, no, a people, cut off from their roots has to be. It’s easy to read, and easy to enjoy.

Rating: 5 Carribean Stars!

The Sly Company of People Who Care (Guyana)

by Rahul Bhattacharya

This is a very dense novel. It’s packed full of people: in Guyana, 90% of folks live along the narrow coastal strip, and a few live in the interior jungles. I’m guessing those few are the original inhabitants:

• Akawaio
• Arawaks
• Arecuna
• Caribs
• Macushi
• Patamona
• Wai-Wai
• Wapixana and
• Warao

The others are descended from African slaves imported in the 17th century to cut cane and Indian indentured servants. There are “Rastas” from the Caribbean, “Putagees” (of Portuguese descent), and “coolies” from China. There is racial tension between the Afro-Guyanese and the Indo-Guyanese; the indigenous people seem to have been thoroughly marginalized. Throughout the novel, people speak Guayanese Creole, a colorful polygot tongue:

The narrator is a young man in flight from his caste and his job as a cricket journalist in India. As he travels around Guyana for a year, he hears conversations like this one:

• “You cyan see Guyana in one life, you know,” he continued. You could see all of it- but not in one life. Too beautiful and too big fuh see in one life.
• As one feared, there was an interjection.
• How much country you seen, buddeh?
• Don’t tell me stupidness, bai. You jus know, right? Some island and islet in Essequibo, right they as big as England.
• Guyana as big as England.
• Well, as big as UK. You ever hear of UK?
• I hear they as big like Barbados.
• Bai, me batty bigger than Barbados.
• And you fine.
• When they said fine in Guyana, they meant thin.”

I found the first half of the novel, like the narrator, exasperatingly aimless. If you’re not into cricket or jazz, you may find the meandering journeys “Gooroo” (Guru) takes with the scam artist/porknocker (diamond miner) Baby to be tedious. It’s like listening to a coworker describe his dream. There is no story arc, just random events.

I hung in there because the reported conversations and bits of Guyanese history, nature, and politics were fascinating–not because the writing was skilled.

Second Half — The Better Bit

The story picks up in the second half of the novel, when the narrator meets an Indo-Guyanese sexpot named Jan. (Jaan, it turns out, means “beloved” in Hindi.)

While Guru has been seduced by Georgetown’s brown waters and heavy, decaying wood structures, Jan can’t wait to leave. She talks Guru into taking her on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride to Venezuela by way of Trinidad. (He, of course, pays for everything.)

(Why are there are no direct flights from Guyana to its neighboring country of Venezuela?)

Although Jan and Guru should have much in common, by way of their shared ancestry, it somehow serves to divide them. I enjoyed how the novel explored the theme of identity and origins.

A Conversation Between the Went-There and the Stayed-Home

Kaieteur Falls in Guyana…the world’s largest single-drop waterfall. Three times the height of Niagara Falls.

“In the Guyanese country, a costal frill on either side of Georgetown–in the Guyanese country, the East Indian and the Indian national look at each other. It seems an innocuous exchange. In fact, it is loaded…”

Guru goes on to describe his conversation with the Indo-Guyanese husband of a Cuban he meets. The man says he is sad because he has a hole in his heart since his ancestors left India, a hole which nothing can fill.

“It was one of those wide-open, sentimental Guyanese country evenings: fry fish and rum and Lata across a night-time canefield on the Corentyne.

‘And yet brother,’ he added, ‘we find that Indians do not consider us to be Indians.’

It was an accurate observation. But I thought it might be patronizing to tell him what I felt, which was two, perhaps conflicting things. That, you know, you are out here where the Caribbean meets South America under these brilliant stars and you should be fucking delighted. The other was that you, brother, are more Indian than I…”

Danger

Unfortunately for Guru and his new lady-love, re-entry into Guyana without papers can be dangerous. Soon the couple’s adventure takes a terrifying and all-too-believable turn.

My recommendation on this one is to read as much of Part 1 as you can stomach, then skip immediately to part 2 and don’t feel guilty about it.

Mixed Rating: Five shots of Guyanese rum! (Best in the world, apparently.) And then five hangovers. 😉