THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN THE CARIBBEAN: MIGRATION,

NATIONALISM, AND EXODUS IN CONTEMPORARY INDO-GUYANESE

LITERATURE

by

Savena Budhu

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

December 2010

© Copyright by Savena Budhu 2010

ii THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN THE CARIBBEAN: MIGRATION, NATIONALISM, AND EXODUS IN CONTEMPORARY INDO-GUYANESE LITERATURE

by

Savena Budhu

This dissertation was prepared under the direction of the candidate's dissertation advisor, Dr. Wenying Xu, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofDoctor ofPhilosophy.

c~ Emily ~-ar-d-,P-h-.-D-.-=~----- Director, Comparative Studies Program ~.~a.P-db ~endakur, Ph.D. Dean, The Dorothy F. Schmidt College ofArts & Letters ~~Q:~.---

111 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the members of my committee Prof. Wenying Xu, Prof.

Eric Berlatsky, Prof. Douglas McGetchin, Prof. Raphael Dalleo, and Prof. Elena

Machado for your attentive readings of my work. Especial thanks to my Chair Prof.

Wenying Xu for her counsel in guiding me through this academic project.

I am indebted to my friends and family members who have always supported my efforts. In the last six years, almost daily someone cheered me on, read my chapters, provided ongoing feedback, and offered words of encouragement. This is all possible because I am blessed to have parents who hold me up and love me unconditionally. My father always believed in education and taught me that I can achieve the highest of goals with hard work and dedication. My mom gave me strength beyond words who worked tirelessly each day so that I could have time to pursue my dream. My supportive brother kept the sense of humor on days when I needed it the most. And, to my beautiful sister, Anjuleka, thank you for everything, above all, your unwavering belief in me. Special thanks to my dear friend Cathy for reading my chapters with the charm of a great friendship, and, to Laura, for your emotional support.

To feel so loved in life makes any and all dreams possible.

And finally, I want to honor all those who came before me and made the long journey over the Kali Pani to arrive in Guyana. I am able to accomplish this dream because they paved the way for me to do so. ~om shanti shanti om~

iv ABSTRACT

Author: Savena Budhu

Title: The South Asian Diaspora in the Caribbean: Migration, Nationalism, and Exodus in Contemporary Indo-Guyanese Literature

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Wenying Xu

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Year: 2010

This dissertation proposes a two-part thesis on the South Asian diaspora in the

Caribbean within contemporary Indo-Guyanese literature. First, Indo-Guyanese writers such as David Dabydeen, Oonya Kempadoo, and Narmala Shewcharan are using the genre of historical fiction to posit counter narratives that undermine dominant narratives of South Asian culture and gender roles. Second, even as these writers struggle against dominant narratives, their texts reinscribe the colonial discourse and rearticulate racial stereotypes. As argued in this dissertation, the dismal historical realities of ethnic tensions and failed anti-colonial tactics do not sufficiently address the flexible strategies often chosen by the characters and authors to navigate through racial and political convolution. By analyzing works by Indo-Guyanese, I attempt to open a conversation about race, place, and politics, offering some external viewpoints and revealing some important insights into the problems and contradictions in Guyana. The value of these

v works is the calling for a connection to history as both a positive example (texts that show gaps in which characters can negotiate social borders) and a negative model

(works that amplify racial tension and dismiss the divide and conquer strategy of the colonizer). This twofold thesis develops along three crucial historical periods—the dislocation from India and the heavy burden of indentured labor in British Guiana

(1838-1917), ethnic victimization during post-independence (1970), and the subsequent flight to the First World (1980-1990): migration, nationalism, and exodus. Chapter 1 reveals the challenges of indentured labor through East Indian and African characters that disrupts racial and gender borders in David Dabydeen‘s The Counting House.

Chapter 2 exposes the racial tensions following independence as the newly formed government creates an atmosphere of distrust in Oonya Kempadoo‘s and Narmala

Shewcharan‘s debut novels. Chapter 3 suggests the ramifications of exodus as

Guyanese reconfigure their identity in a new location in David Dabydeen‘s narratives.

This body of work by Indo-Guyanese plays upon the complex web of historical, political, and racial constructs that coexist simultaneously as authors acknowledge the limits and potential of their colonized history, of nationalist movements, and the rebuilding that is left in its wake.

vi DEDICATION

To Mom and Dad Always, with love

THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN THE CARIBBEAN: MIGRATION,

NATIONALISM, AND EXODUS IN CONTEMPORARY INDO-GUYANESE

LITERATURE

Introduction. ―They could tell a tale. They want a say, without doubt‖— Indo-Guyanese Literature ...... 1

Colonial Period ...... 13

Decolonization Period ...... 14

Exodus from Guyana ...... 15

Chapter 1. ―‗Coolies! Welcome to the Colony!‘‖ Gender, Race, and Rebellion within the Sugar Estates in David Dabydeen‘s The Counting House ...... 19

Introduction ...... 19

Section 1. Gender and Place—The Indian Woman in Colonial India and the British Caribbean Colony ...... 21

Section 2. Dual Reading of Masculinity in India and British Guiana ...... 36

Section 3. Two Ethnic Selves in One—The Black Man and the Indian Other ...... 43

Section 4. The Afro-Guyanese Woman Contention to Power ...... 53

Conclusion ...... 62

Chapter 2. Reverberations of the Colonial Script in Oonya Kempadoo‘s Buxton Spice and Narmala Shewcharan‘s Tomorrow is Another Day ...... 66

Introduction ...... 66

Section 1. Nationalist Beginnings, Ethnic Endings—Cooperative Socialism and Failed Literary Strategies ...... 69

vii Section 2. Writing Within the Panopticon ...... 75

Section 3. Failed Revolution of the Laboring Class ...... 81

Section 4. Reproducing Gendered Spaces ...... 88

Section 5. The Politics of Flight and the Descent into Madness ...... 93

Conclusion ...... 98

Chapter 3. Writing Back to the Empire from the Center of Whiteness: Colonial Legacy, Messy Identities, and Geographical Spaces in David Dabydeen‘s The Intended and Disappearance ...... 102

Introduction ...... 102

Section 1. The Question of an Everyman Journey—Indo- and Afro- Guyanese Experiences in England ...... 107

Section 2. Remembering the Homeland from the Colonial Motherland ...... 127

Section 3. A Divided England—the Cosmopolitan Metropolis and the Dying Empire ...... 139

Section 4. ―The Conquest of the Earth is not a Pretty Thing‖—the Intertextual Play on Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness ...... 152

Conclusion ...... 174

Conclusion. Emerging Voices, New Directions ...... 178

Notes ...... 183

Works Cited ...... 202

vii INTRODUCTION

―THEY COULD TELL A TALE. THEY WANT A SAY, WITHOUT DOUBT‖

INDO-GUYANESE LITERATURE

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. (Mahadai Das, ―Bones‖)

In this dissertation, I reveal a two-part thesis on the South Asian diaspora in the

Caribbean within contemporary Indo-Guyanese literature. First, Indo-Guyanese writers such as David Dabydeen, Oonya Kempadoo, and Narmala Shewcharan are using the genre of historical fiction to posit counter narratives that undermine dominant narratives of South Asian culture and gender roles. Second, even as these authors struggle against dominant narratives, their texts reinscribe the colonial discourse and rearticulate racial stereotypes set in place by the British. Indo-Caribbean literature has recently become an important site where authors are reflecting upon the diasporic journey of South

1 Asians living in the Caribbean and the ramification of this settlement on redefining their culture and selfhood. What is most revealing is the continued residue of racism and imperialist strategies that warrant attention by literary scholars, writers, and their audience. By analyzing works by Indo-Guyanese, I attempt to expand the conversation about race, place, and politics, offering some external viewpoints and revealing some important insights into the problems and contradictions in Guyana. The value of these works is the calling for a connection to history as both a positive example (texts that show gaps in which characters can negotiate social borders) and a negative model

(works that amplify racial tension and dismiss the divide and conquer strategy of the colonizer).

Through the genre of historical fiction, Indo-Guyanese authors tell stories that are set in the past in an attempt to capture the spirit and the social conditions of the time. Historical fiction often presents actual events from the point of view of fictional people living in that period; as such, these writers acknowledge the challenges of indentured labor during the colonial period (1838-1917), the difficult road to decolonization (1950-1970), and the subsequent flight from Guyana (1980-1990).

While Dabydeen, Kempadoo, and Shewcharan retain the historical value as written by

Guyanese and non-Guyanese, they restrain from depicting the multiple social and political factors that led to divisions within the country such as the United States clandestine operations during the 1950s, the geographical conflicts with its neighboring country, Venezuela, and the impact of Amerindian, Portuguese, and Chinese settlements.

2 The expectation that postcolonial studies sets up for literature is the investigation into power relations in various contexts. Borrowing from Michel

Foucault‘s and Edward Said‘s argument on discourse as the medium that constitutes power and through which power constructs the objects of its knowledge, I contend that

Indo-Guyanese works become ―idees recues.‖ What apparently matters is that colonial tropes of East Indians as industrious and Africans as indolent are repeated, echoed, and re-echoed uncritically. Discursive colonialism, in other words scholarship in its practices, reproduces unequal relations of power. On the other hand, these contemporary postcolonial writers are creating new spaces where marginalized peoples unsettle dominant discourses on gender and cultural productions in which freedom can be measured. This twofold play on power, be it historical (between the colonizer and the colonized), racial (between South Asians and Africans), or gender (between East

Indian men and women) reveals a necessary duality within Indo-Guyanese literature.

Moreover, Homi Bhabha, a leading postcolonial critic, suggests ―that national narrative is the site of an ambivalent identification; a margin of the uncertainty of cultural meaning that may become the space for an agonistic minority position‖ (Nation and

Narration 317). Instead of creating a site of ―the hybridity of histories and the displacement of narratives‖ (319), these works often place the narrative of the nation within a fixed horizontal space that do not blur the lines of history and literature. As such, these authors are following the European model of dividing the past into eras that dismisses the ambivalences and contradictions within the fissures of history. In addressing another viewpoint, Arif Dirlik argues that postcolonial critics have been silent on the relationship between postcolonialism and capitalism. Likewise, I suggest

3 that Indo-Guyanese have been relatively quiet in the recognition of their own newfound class position within the First World in contrast to their struggling economic conditions in Guyana. Dirlik contends that the question then is whether the global intelligentsia can ―generate a thoroughgoing criticism of its own ideology and formulate practices of resistance against the system of which it is a product‖ (321). Accordingly, it is equally important for Indo-Guyanese to look within their own practices in order to unravel racial stereotypes rather than echoing these tropes uncritically.

Another important issue posed by postcolonial studies centers on the experience of colonization on the colonized. In Guyana, the colonized groups are several marginal peoples that were brought to the British West Indies, first as slaves, and then as indentured servants, to fill the labor force within sugar plantations. When responding to historical transatlantic journeys, Guyanese writers often frame these experiences as volatile encounters between Africans and East Indians in the British colony that often overlook the presence of the colonizer, Portuguese workers, Chinese laborers, and the native Amerindian peoples. Another expectation is how to identify and deconstruct the traces that have been left by colonial education and the imperial strategy of divide and conquer. These residues continue in the form of comprador governments, the elite intelligentsia, that follow the script set in place by the Empire. Indo-Guyanese authors such as Oonya Kempadoo and Narmala Shewcharan find it difficult to create a literary resistance against such deep-seated political strongholds in their novels. The emerging forms of postcolonial identity after the colonizer‘s departure are reconstructions of the imperialist scheme and a return to the colonial past in British Guiana. To illustrate, in

Shewcharan‘s novel Tomorrow is Another Day, the Prime Minister‘s credo is that

4 citizens should learn to love physical labor and rekindle an attachment to their agricultural production. Nevertheless, the prospects of postcolonial works reveal how gender, race, and class function in these discourses in suggesting the new forms of imperialism as either a replacement or a revision of colonization, or a blurred copy of both. I suggest that the expectation of Indo-Guyanese writings is a twofold play on historical, political, and racial constructs that coexist simultaneously as authors acknowledge both the limits and potential of their colonized history, of nationalist movements, and the rebuilding that is left in its wake.

Until the 1960s, there were no fictional or autobiographical representations of

Indo-Guyanese lives written by Indo-Guyanese. Prior to this date, we have little that gives us any insight into their daily lives, their intimate social and culture constructions, and their struggles with other settled groups in British Guiana. The publication of

Edward Jenkins‘s Lutchmee and Dilloo in 1877 set a number of significant literary milestones. This was the first time in English literature that ―coolies,‖ or indentured

East Indian laborers, were made a subject for fiction. In the preface, Jenkins states, ―the field is a new one for fiction, but human nature still bears out the wisdom of the poet who declared that it does not change with clime‖ (xiii). With a strong background as a social reformer, Jenkins attempts to remedy the failures of colonialism and expose the racial and cultural prejudices of the time. However, he rearticulates European stereotypes of Blacks as ―lazy towards the place‖ (119) and coolies as ―liable at the whim of his master‖ (38). These tropes were part of the colonial discourse that justified indentureship as a benevolent system of free labor in which Indians were docile and industrious in contrast to the subtext that belabored Africans for their incompetence.

5 Moreover, malignant vestiges of caste thinking in relation to skin color and moral character are closely intertwined in this early novel. East Indians were already immersed in ancient thinking within the South Asian caste system in which they brought rigid notions of color when judging those of darker tones. In the novel, the villain Hunoomaun is not only referred to as extremely black, but also as a rascal, a coward, and a beast (51). Jenkins‘s portrayal of East Indian and African characters leads to contradictions within the novel that he is never able to resolve. Forty years elapsed before a similar novel, Those that be in Bondage (1917), was published by

A.R.F Webber, a Caribbean-born writer. Another quarter of a century goes by till

Edgar Mittelholzer, a Guyanese author, composed Corentyne Thunder (1941). Finally, in 1960, Guyanese writer of Indian decent, Peter Kempadoo,¹ wrote the first published

Indo-Guyanese novel, Guiana Boy.

One hundred and twenty-eight years after the publication of Lutchmee and

Dilloo, David Dabydeen publishes The Counting House (2005). He attempts to resolve the contradictions set up by Jenkins within the colonial period. On one hand, Dabydeen identifies the historical tensions of ethnic rivalry and colonial authority as ongoing problems that still warrant literary attention by opening them to interrogation. On the other hand, his novel reads in many ways as a blurred copy of Jenkins‘s seminal work in which Dabydeen portrays Blacks as ―lazy and ignorant people‖ (TCH 71) and Indians as the ―best coolie at counting‖ (113). Nonetheless, the diasporic transport of indentured servants from India to the Caribbean in the 1830s is a story relatively untold within the South Asian diaspora. Indo-Caribbean novelists are recreating the forgotten past by looking to history in revealing Guyana as they see it—starting with the

6 departure from the ancestral homeland and ending with the reconfiguration of South

Asian identity from East Indian to West Indian.

The reasons for this slow emergence of Indo-Guyanese literature are open for speculation–from the lack of access to formal education, to the small base of professional elites, and the fact that many Indians remained on sugar estates and in rural villages. There was no parallel emergence of prose by Indo-Caribbean writers in areas other than Trinidad between 1940 and 1985. While the literature of Trinidad provides a good pairing to the writings from Guyana, my work focuses solely on Guyana for several reasons. Many writers from Trinidad such as V.S. Naipaul, Earl Lovelace, and

Sam Selvon have made their mark in academia. Naipaul is seen as the East Indian writer with the most appeal. The collective accounts of his works are often associated with images of disorder, waste, and futility. His travel writings and novels often depict an unflattering view of his Trinidad homeland. In The Middle Passage, Naipaul proclaims, ―History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies‖ (29). While he addresses important postcolonial issues such as marginalization of ethnic groups, visible political corruption, and universal homelessness of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, his depictions overshadow the uniqueness and vitality of the West Indies. David Dabydeen and Oonya Kempadoo also illustrate the harsh realities of colonial indentured servitude and post-independent racial turmoil, yet their Guyana homeland and its people remain central in their narratives.

Chandra Mohanty, a postcolonial theorist, states that careful, politically focused, localized analysis can dismantle the sweeping generalizations that rob women [and others] of their historical and political agency (49). By concentrating on Indo-Guyanese

7 writings, I intend to debunk the concept of Indo-Caribbean as monolithic subjects with similar histories, cultures, and desires. There is a necessary gap in Indo-Guyanese literature that warrants scholarly attention in order to expand the discussion of the multifarious presence of South Asians in the Caribbean.

From the earliest writing of place, Guyanese writers have recorded the landscape from sugar plantations to industrial centers as in Roy Heath‘s From the Heat of the Day and A Man Come Home. From the perspective of Guyanese literature, the country is not divided into a cultivated center (Georgetown) and the countryside and coastlines, but rather into five distinct areas: the dense wilderness, the uninhabited interior, the coastal villages, the sugar estate communities, and the city. These areas portray a diverse sense of place in novels by Rooplall Monar, Peter Kempadoo, and Churaumanie

Bissundyal. Later works by Harischandra Khemraj and Sasenarine Persaud focus on political and racial divisions during the 1960s and 1970s in post-independent Guyana.

No other English speaking Caribbean country has gone so far down the road to political dictatorship and so close to social disintegration and economic collapse. The failure to unite as a collective voice of one nation and one people connects to the central narrative of Guyanese life: the myth of El Dorado, the narrative of fabled dreams that informs so much of Guyanese writing. Many current Indo-Guyanese authors now live in other parts of the world, in Canada, the United States, and England. As settlement in a new location reshapes their writings, Guyana is re-imagined and revisited as in Cyril

Dabydeen‘s Berbice Crossing and Marina Tamar Budhos‘s The Professor of Light.

With the launch of Peepal Tree Press in 1985, a publication company dedicated to

Caribbean works, new writers and established voices are more accessible.

8 While anthologies and literary works by Indo-Guyanese are emerging in the field of Caribbean studies, there has been little scholarly criticism on these writings. In

1998, Joel Benjamin published They Came in Ships: an Anthology of Indo-Guyanese

Writing that included excerpts from novels, short stories, essays, and poems that addressed experiences of plantation life, relationships with other ethnic groups, and issues of gender within Indo-Guyanese culture. This collective body of work only included brief introductory essays of the historical context of Indians living in the

Caribbean. Jeremy Poynting, the founder of Peepal Tree Press, has a strong connection with Caribbean writing. He began a thesis on ethnic diversity in Trinidad and Guyana in 1970, which he completed in 1985. Since then, he has published many articles and a few texts on aspects of Indo-Caribbean writings such as ―From Ancestral to Creole:

Humans and Animals in a West Indian Scale of Values‖ in Monsters Tricksters and

Sacred Cows and East Indians in the Caribbean: A Bibliography of Imaginative Writing

1894-1984.² His upcoming book titled The Second Shipwreck is an extensive study of

Indo-Caribbean imaginative writings that focus on how writers have dealt with the specific experience of being Indian in the Caribbean. More importantly, he argues that

Caribbean literature as a whole needs to take into account the works that have come out of the Indian experience. This notable study, however, is still in production till its publication date, December 2015. Thus, there is currently a gap in publishing secondary criticism on Indo-Caribbean writings. Other works by Peepal Tree Press offer a sociological and/or political study of the historical conditions and problems within Guyana, namely Dale Arlington Bisnauth‘s The Settlement of Indians in Guyana

1890-1930 (2000) and Judaman Seecoomar‘s Contributions Towards the Resolution of

9 Conflict in Guyana (2002). Small Axe and Calloloo, two premier journals on the

Anglo-Creole Caribbean and the African Diaspora, have published several articles on

West Indian literature and culture that include Brinda J. Mehta‘s ―Kali, Gangamai, and

Dougla Consciousness in Moses Nagamootoo‘s Hendree‟s Cure‖ (Callaloo) and Alissa

D. Trotz‘s ―Between Despair and Hope: Women and Violence in Contemporary

Guyana‖ (Small Axe).³ Nonetheless, David Dabydeen has emerged as one of the few

Indo-Guyanese writers whose works have been highly praised. In fact, Kevin Grant, an

English scholar, has published The Art of David Dabydeen, a volume of articles discussing Dabydeen‘s poetry and fiction in context to the politics and culture of Britain and the Caribbean. So far, scholarly criticisms have either linked Guyana with Trinidad or have framed these imaginative writings within British and Caribbean contexts.

While it is essential for these scholars to start by looking at the Caribbean as a whole or pairing national experience together, I assert that it is now necessary to focus on a careful localized analysis to contribute to the conversation taking place in which South

Asians in Guyana can have their own agency when speaking of their experiences.

Guyana provides many areas for study, from its geographic landscapes to early poetic pioneers, to superstitions and folklores imbued with a sense of Dutch, East

Indian, and African histories, to the unnoticed contributions of indigenous peoples such as the Amerindians, and so forth. My original contribution to this field of study centers on the racial conflicts between South Asians and Africans as reflected within Guyanese history and literature—from the arrival of Indians to British Guiana [struggles for settlement rights], the racial civil war during post-independence [conflict of national space], to the mass exodus of Guyanese Indians from Guyana [renegotiation within the

10 First World]. Africans often viewed Indians as penny-pinchers, immoral, jealous, and above all ―clannish.‖ Indians, not to be outdone, described Blacks as idle and morally corrupt, stereotypes that they learnt from the plantocracy. Moreover, East Indians often perceived Africans as socially inferior with very low ranking or no ranking at all. On the sugar estates, a geographical apartheid of sorts divided the races further as the

African space was known as the ―nigga yard‖ and the Indians quarters became the

―boun yaad.‖ By the 1920s, negative stereotypes were so ingrained that there was little scope for the development of cordial relationships between the two groups. The modus vivendi soon subsided into an acceptance that they should go their own way as each sought to create their own villages exclusively. Nonetheless, Guyanese got a brief glimpse of the possibility of racial unity as both groups worked together to secure a democratic road towards independence during the 1950s only to separate politically into two parties by 1957. This historical struggle of racial divides becomes an important subject matter for contemporary Indo-Guyanese authors as they attempt to heal these lacerations in order to lay the foundations for the growth of a co-operative nation.

Nonetheless, their writings often depict the difficulty in undoing this deep-seated history of racial tension.

The central question posed in this dissertation is who can maneuver through complex racial and cultural borders and rearticulate a civil discourse—is it the Afro-

Guyanese, the Indo-Guyanese, the male figures, or the female subjects? Afro-Guyanese are constantly placed in a binary position where they are either instigators of political/racial collusion (as depicted in Oonya Kempadoo‘s Buxton Spice) or unproductive figures (as depicted in David Dabydeen‘s Disappearance). By contrast,

11 in Dabydeen‘s The Counting House, Indo–Guyanese are renegotiators of social and cultural limitations. I contend through a two part thesis that these authors often rearticulate racial differences while negotiating other limitations. Within the Indo-

Guyanese construct, East Indian men conform to both colonial script (as effeminate subjects) and Vedic traditions (as warriors) whereas the Indian female internalizes, reproduces, and challenges these strategies of social control. To illustrate, Dabydeen creates a flexible gendered space where East Indian female labels, and, indeed, social respectability are contested. He temporarily untangles racial boundaries by giving the

Black female the strongest voice in his novel The Counting House, but ultimately

Miriam cries out in defeat as she succumbs to the realization that Indians will one day inherit everything. Kempadoo and Shewcharan follow a familiar script where women are kept within their fossilized roles during post-independence in which the social dictates of Forbes Burnham, an Afro-Guyanese, creates an atmosphere of distrust for all

Indians. Lost in the middle is the colonial figure who continues to prosper as a ubiquitous presence as shown in Narmala Shewcharan‘s Tomorrow Is Another Day. As argued in this dissertation, the dismal historical realities of ethnic tensions and failed anti-colonial tactics do not sufficiently address the flexible strategies often chosen by the characters and authors to navigate through racial, gender, and political convolution.

It is therefore necessary to connect to the past in order to reveal the historical inheritance of a deeply divided social structure. The communal antagonism between

East Indians and Africans were carefully embedded by the colonial authorities for their own preservation and profit that continues to flourish on the new road to self- government from the 1950s onwards.

12 Colonial Period

Guyana was known during the 18th and 19th century as British Guiana, developed by the British as an exploitation colony through the production of sugar. The specialized nature of the economy meant that it was dependent on a large labor force.

This labor was first provided by slaves from Africa until their legal emancipation in the

1830s; planters, then, sought importation of indentured laborers to offset their economic loss. Between 1835 and 1917, 314,491 immigrants came to British Guiana from

Germany, Malta, Brazil, China, Madeira, Mauritius, Europe, Africa, and India, of which

236,205 were East Indians with an agreed contract to work on the sugar estates for five years (Thomas 21). John Gladstone, father of England‘s future Prime Minister, William

Ewart Gladstone, wrote to the Calcutta recruiting firm of Gillanders, Arbutnot, and

Company asking for workers for his sugar estates. In 1837, he persuaded Lord Glenelg to issue an order to allow the trade of Indian laborers to the West Indies. It was not long before Gladstone‘s ―experiment‖ came under severe scrutiny. Before a formal report could be filed to the commission, the British Government suspended emigration, and

India under Act XIV of 1839 made it an offense to recruit Indian laborers. After amendments and further provisions, a large scale importation of Indian labor resumed in

1851, and lasted until 1917 (Checkland 321-23). Once East Indians arrived to work within the plantation estates, Africans moved out toward the cities. Despite the ex- slaves‘ attempts to purchase land and build their own villages, they were still tied to the plantocracy for further income. The contact between East Indians and Africans were immediately fueled by racial prejudices, as Africans viewed Indians as hording their

13 money, and Indians depicted Africans as unproductive workers, which created an early racially constructed dialectic by one oppressed group against the other.

Decolonization Period

On May 26, 1966, British Guiana achieved political independence as newly elected officials renamed the country the Co-operative Republic of Guyana. Post- independent Guyana was no longer under British colonial rule; however, the long history of ethnic divisions continued to disrupt political unity. Both East Indians and

Africans had been temporarily united through the formation of the People‘s Progressive

Party (PPP) in 1950, led by Cheddi Jagan, U.S.-educated Indo-Guyanese, and Forbes

Burnham, British-educated Afro-Guyanese. Elections were held under a new constitution in 1953, but their victory was short-lived. Fearing a Communist threat and alarmed by Jagan‘s supposed radicalism, Great Britain suspended the constitution, sent troops into Guyana, and installed an interim government. The ruling party in Great

Britain then embarked on a racist strategy to pit Blacks against Indians. The ethnic unity of the PPP dissolved in 1957 when the party split along racial lines, the People‘s

Progressive Party (PPP) led by Jagan (predominantly East Indians) and the People‘s

National Congress (PNC) led by Burnham (predominantly Africans). The brief anti- colonial alliance between East Indians and Africans was replaced with an anti- communist agenda consumed by racial rivalries and international politics. The familiar imperialist rhetoric of divide and conquer came into play. U.S. officials actively began to develop ties to Forbes Burnham as a strategy to polarize political fractions. From

1962-63, the CIA ran a series of covert operations in Guyana in an attempt to destabilize Jagan‘s campaign by citing that once free of colonial rule the country would

14 embrace communism of the Soviet Union under Jagan‘s leadership. By the end of

1962, the Kennedy administration created a political climate of fear and tension between Indians and Blacks (Rabe 103). The U.S. achieved its goal and the PPP lost the general elections in 1964. Forbes Burnham emerged as political leader, and remained in power as Prime Minister, and later President for nineteen years, in which

Indo- and Afro-Guyanese failed to deal with growing racial antagonism. Under

Burnham‘s leadership, Indians felt more restricted than under colonial rule that caused a mass exodus of the Guyanese Indian from Guyana.

Exodus from Guyana

With decades of corrupt leadership and failed policies, Indo-Guyanese sought any means necessary to escape their social and political conditions. This led to a mass flight from Guyana in the 1980s and 1990s to other countries, such as England, the

United States, Canada, and other areas of the Caribbean. In these new locations, David

Dabydeen, Oonya Kempadoo, and Narmala Shewcharan are reflecting on their creolized past by drawing from their own personal experiences and historical accounts to recreate the narration of the racial complexities and the national struggles of Guyana.

This dissertation is divided chronologically into three chapters: colonial British

Guiana, post-independence, and flight to a foreign location, in other words, migration, nationalism, exodus. Chapter 1 reveals the impact of gender, race, and rebellion within the sugar estates in David Dabydeen‘s The Counting House. The narrative constructs two Indo-Guyanese voices that compete with a single Afro-Guyanese viewpoint.

Dabydeen disturbs racial boundaries by making Miriam, the Black woman, the strongest character who arguably embodies the visage of a rebel whose actions eclipse

15 those of the Indo-Guyanese characters. Whereas the Indian men, Vidia and Kampta, attempt to challenge patriarchal codes and the colonial system through workmanship or rebellion, the women, both Indian and Black, bond in their oppressed state, but compete along racial lines for power and place in the plantation Great House. I propose that within The Counting House, the ripple effect by the characters unfastens fixed readings of East Indians and Africans. Dabydeen‘s novel reveals a two-part thesis in disrupting and rearticulating cultural and racial expectations during the colonial period.

Chapter 2 exposes on the failures of the governing policies and surveillance rule during the 1970s in post-independent Guyana as represented in Oonya Kempadoo‘s

Buxton Spice and Narmala Shewcharan‘s Tomorrow is Another Day. Both novels, written at later dates, twenty years after the Forbes Burnham regime, offer a reflective commentary to this volatile period in Guyanese history. Borrowing from Michel

Foucault‘s concept of the Panopticon in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, I contend that Kempadoo recreates a panoptic society where her characters are afraid to say much, causing a disconnection between those within the fictional village and among the text and the reader. Moreover, Shewcharan‘s debut novel, Tomorrow is Another

Day, shifts the focus from a small village to an entire political system as the protagonist,

Jagru Persaud, questions whether he can change the ruling party by working within the system. Kempadoo and Shewcharan propose a literary perspective to the social and historical realities during the Burnham era. Instead of disturbing political boundaries, or creating characters who attempt to contest the dominant authority, I assert that they recreate historical conditions without much strategic maneuvering in which borderlines, be it in race, gender, or class, can be negotiated. These literary works reveal the

16 restrictive policies of the new elite intelligentsia that continue to prosper from the divide and conquer strategy set in place by the British colonizer.

Chapter 3 suggests the ramifications of exodus from Guyana to the First World, in particular, England. David Dabydeen‘s novels, The Intended and Disappearance, offer an intersecting reading of the Caribbean experience in England. Both unnamed narrators, one Indo-Guyanese, the other Afro-Guyanese, engage in an intertextual dialogue with Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness as each seeks, consciously and unconsciously, to reply to the colonial legacy of conquest and power. Within the colonial landscape, the narratives are punctured with stories and memories of Guyana as a cultural cross-fertilization of both places: the colonized homeland (Guyana) and the colonial motherland (England). As both narrators journey from the center to the margin of the Empire, the Afro-Guyanese narrator postulates a void of the past, while the other narrator resists the urge towards historical and cultural amnesia. I suggest when read together, The Intended and Disappearance constitute a critique of British colonialism and the recreation of an imagined Guyana that repositions the homeland as the focal point in Indo-and Afro-Guyanese consciousness. Nonetheless, I argue that the intersection of Englishness and Caribbean history reflects two separate paths for the

Indo- and Afro-Guyanese narrators as Dabydeen privileges one reading over the other.

These works by Indo-Guyanese suggest the importance of connecting to the past in order to progress socially and politically in the future, yet still illustrate the necessity of doing so through familiar dominant discourses can lead to negative results.

Nonetheless, outside of Guyana, there is a wave of new immigrants remembering their ancestors who traveled through the Kali Pani, or ―dark waters,‖ to land in the British

17 West Indies whose struggles and stories cannot be forgotten or ignored. While these fictional texts do not offer practical solutions to Guyana‘s racial, social, and political problems they can be helpful in moving Guyana towards those solutions by identifying these issues and by doing so open them to critique. Dabydeen, Kempadoo, and

Shewcharan address both the limits and transgressive possibilities that produce a necessary space for scholars to engage in the conversation of the South Asian presence within Guyana.

18 CHAPTER 1

―‗COOLIES! WELCOME TO THE COLONY!‘‖ GENDER, RACE, AND

REBELLION WITHIN THE SUGAR ESTATES IN DAVID DABYDEEN‘S THE

COUNTING HOUSE

The first boat chugged to the muddy port

Of King George‘s Town. Coolies come to rest

In El Dorado,

Their faces and best saris black with soot.

The men smelt of saltwater mixed with rum.

The odyssey was plank between river and land,

Mere yards but months of plotting

In the packed bowel of a white man‘s boat

The years of promise, years of expanse. (David Dabydeen, ―Coolie

Odyssey‖)

Introduction

In this chapter, I investigate the ramifications of race, gender, and rebellion within British Guiana in David Dabydeen‘s The Counting House (2005). I am specifically concerned with the ways in which stereotypes of East Indians as industrious and Africans as incompetent are rearticulated while other limitations are renegotiated within the narrative. I trace these representations back to India where East Indians

19 unsettle the dominant discourse when addressing the issues of skin tones and gender roles. However, upon arriving in British Guiana, East Indians recreate a race caste system in which they place themselves above Blacks by being wage laborers rather than slaves, by virtue of their lighter skin color, and by their assiduous aspirations to work alongside the colonizer as possible business apprentices. While his novel offers a twofold construct of colonial dynamics (as characters adhere to imperialist tropes while revising these own cultural codes), what is most revealing is the ways in which women strategically open a gendered space where their voices are heard and where freedom can be measured. Rather than simply unfixing identifications, I argue that it is more of a matter of Dabydeen disturbing boundaries that changes the cultural and racial flow within this novel.

In the Counting House, Dabydeen reflects on the historical conditions of poor villagers who left India during the early 19th century to work on the sugar plantations1 in

British Guiana. The Indian caste system, British oppression, and famine are several factors that added to the plight of poor Indian villagers and induced them to succumb to the luring tales of a fabled land of plenty.2 Within the novel, Plantation Albion3 represents a smaller microcosm of colonial power as ―a single factory with only so many thousands acres of cane, but whole continents were drawn into its creation— slaves from Africa, coolies from India, managers from England, tools from America‖

(Dabydeen, TCH 102). In British Guiana, East Indians are labeled, ―indentured servants‖ with the pejorative name, ―bound coolies;‖ 4 nonetheless, in this foreign land, they reconstruct as a group regardless of gender, caste, or religion in order to combat the brutalities of plantation life and resistance from the Afro-Guyanese population.

20 Dabydeen seemingly does not limit his readership to an impartial interpretation of race relations during this historical period, but constructs both Indian and Black perspectives of the colonial dynamics at play without placing blame or burden on one particular race.

However, the narrative constructs two Indo-Guyanese voices that compete with a single

Afro-Guyanese viewpoint. This is complicated further at the end of the novel where the surviving stories of coolies are told through Miriam, the Black female character. In

Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock argues that to understand colonialism and postcolonialism, one must first recognize that race, gender, and class are not ―distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other‖ (5); rather, they come into existence in relation to each other, albeit in conflicting ways. As such, these overlapping experiences interrupt the flow of the novel as the Indian men, Vidia and

Kampta, attempt to challenge patriarchal codes through workmanship and rebellion, while the women, both Indian and Black, bond in their oppressed state, but compete along racial lines for power and place in the plantation Great House.

Section 1. Gender and Place—The Indian Woman in Colonial India and the

British Caribbean Colony

David Dabydeen portrays the Indian female, Rohini, as weak in the British colony and strong in her native land. The ideal of diaspora as a place of new beginnings, a utopia of the El Dorado fable, is questioned as Rohini finds confinement rather than golden opportunities in British Guiana. This causes a ripple effect that disrupts her female subject formation within the text. Because of her caste restrictions in India, she should be weak, and in British Guiana, she would be strong. By being one of the few women in a new colony, she asserts control over the men. The literary

21 depictions of women in India are often images of the self-sacrificing woman. Rohini‘s dismissal of social norms in her village creates a space where women‘s voices can be heard, yet, this voice is silenced in the Caribbean colony by the author. Without enforced social stigmas, Rohini appears to adhere to a submissive role without revolt.

In her article, ―Under Western Eyes: Feminism Scholarship and Colonial Practices,‖

Chandra Mohanty, a feminist postcolonial theorist, states that there ―is no easy generalization in the direction of ‗women‘ in India, or ‗women in the third world‘‖ (61).

Instead of bridging wide gaps between women from the West and from the East,

Mohanty finds specific, localized studies appealing and productive. In India, and later,

British Guiana, Rohini‘s actions undo the homogeneity of third world women as oppressed and exploited victims. Rohini wields sexual and physical power over her husband, Vidia, throughout much of their relationship in India. She constantly instigates small acts of rebellion against the strict gender and social systems at play that eventually leads to their exodus from India to British Guiana in search of what she hopes to be a better life. However, in a new land, away from social conventions, she changes from a defiant woman to a submissive wife who endures constant beatings by her husband. Her acts of rebellion result in a series of successful social triumphs in

India; however, in British Guiana, she returns to a submissive state as a traditional figure whose revolts become questionable. Dabydeen is interrupting these sites where gender identities, and, indeed, social respectability are contested.

Vidia and Rohini‘s lives in India defy social conventions that change after they cross the Kali Pani.5 The first image of Rohini is within a familiar domestic space as she sweeps the hut that contains her meager material possessions. She is the

22 recognizable image of a lower caste Indian woman; however, this domestic place is not in India, but in British Guiana. Then, the reader learns of the circumstances that cause

Rohini to leave the land that confines her in abject poverty by caste status. She states:

Goats wandered through the litter of excrement, rags, balls of straw,

eating everything, even sniffing at the children put out to play in the dirt.

[She] was born in such circumstances, and her mother and grandmother

before her. Her inheritance was secure until the day the recruiter came

and filled her head with fable. ‗Guiana is the very land of Ramayana.‘

(Dabydeen, TCH 14)

By comparing British Guiana to the Ramayana6 legend, the land becomes a mystical place that offers salvation to these abject conditions, but this legend has ramifications for women. When Rama is banished to the woods, his dutiful wife, Sita, follows him into exile. Sita is later forced into exile a second time when those in Rama‘s kingdom perceive her as baseless because of her previous abduction by the devil, Ravana.

Despite proving her virtue, she is compelled to flee, alone and pregnant, into the forest.

However, it is Rohini who kills a cow secretly, sacred to Hindus, so that she and Vidia can avoid social stigma by ―banishing‖ themselves to a far away land. Even though

Rohini willingly cast herself out of the homeland, with Vidia reluctantly in tow, she does not find salvation as suggested by the British trader, but a hermitage of sorts where she is left feeling lonely. If we read Rohini as a stronger reincarnation of Sita who expels herself from the limitations within her community and caste status, then she should be able to conceive new ideas for herself in a foreign land. Even in banishment,

Sita finds ways to pass on her legacy with the birth of her sons who eventually inherit

23 their father‘s kingdom and restore her good name. This goddess is often associated with fertility, but, ironically, Rohini cannot reproduce in Guiana and is left barren. This may be a critique of those who left their homeland, who like Sita, cannot find refuge in their new environment. Later, I propose that this assessment is a result of Rohini‘s abortion of both the homeland and the ideas she conceives for herself. It is in India, that

Rohini, despite her caste status, is able to circumvent her role as a submissive female and the emblem of being a virtuous goddess.

Rohini moves away from the image of a self-sacrificing Indian woman whose duty is to her husband; in doing so, she introduces modern discourses when describing her experiences as a low caste woman. The Indian literary tradition is filled with religious images of the goddess Sita as the suffering ideal of womanhood. Susan S.

Wadley explains:

Rama‘s wife Sita exemplifies the behaviour of the proper Hindu wife,

devotedly following her husband into forest exile for twelve years, and

eventually, after being kidnapped for a time by the evil Ravana whom

Rama finally destroys, proving her wifely virtue by placing herself on a

lighted pyre. . . The good wife saves her husband from death, follows

him anywhere, proves her virtue, remains under his control and gives

him her power. (122-123)

In her article, ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ Gayatri Spivak states that the act of immolating one‘s self on a funeral pyre, or Sati, is generally understood by the British as, ―White men saving brown women from brown men‖ (93). The Indian nativist argument is that women actually want to die as a duty to their husbands. In both

24 testimonies, the Indian woman‘s voice is lost (93). However, Rohini constantly destabilizes the ideal of being a wife/goddess by aspiring for more than her domestic position of ―salt and flour and cooking oil‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 32). She publicly flaunts her sexual appeal, which challenges the taboo of the ―good‖ Indian woman who quietly submits to her husband‘s will. It is Rohini who initiates the first sexual contact between her and Vidia. Kneeling down in front of him, she moves her face towards his, and when she attempts to put her mouth upon his and clamps more firmly, he gurgles and screams, ―You are hurting me!‖ (22). Rohini takes his beckoning words as pleasure until he pushes her violently away. In this scene, there is a surprising reversal of gender roles as Rohini assumes an aggressive male role while Vidia reluctantly submits to her will. In another scene, she demands that he kisses her, and without warning she ―ran her tongue along the side‖ (24) of his face leaving him feeling ―small and shameful‖

(24). Rohini orders and Vidia obeys, which destabilizes the social convention of the passive female as she emerges as the one who has control in the relationship. Jyoti Puri states that ―middle-and upper-class [Indian] women are expected to embody national cultural identity. If their bodies and identities are used to articulate discourses of modernity and development in post-colonial India, then these are also the sites where fears of loss of national tradition are expressed‖ (2-3). Puri‘s focus is on middle and upper class women, yet, in colonial India, Dabydeen depicts a low caste woman who strongly articulates discourses of modernity in her actions through the use of her body.

She takes pride in her prowess by stating that she could please all men: ―she could give and give and still remain dutifully fresh for Vidia‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 54). By secretly pleasing her father-in-law by means of massaging his coarse flesh, she learns how to

25 arouse his body without giving him hers. This revelation is rather disturbing, but,

Rohini does so to overstep her demanding mother-in-law to prove she has power over all men. Her behaviors untangle the relation between sexuality and power that implicitly challenge the notion of sexual repression as the primary discourse of sexuality in India. To that end, Rohini‘s actions disrupt the ways by which sexual conduct is regulated through normalization in which she takes pleasure in exploring how far she can go in unraveling these taboos.

It is not Rohini‘s sexual exploits that worries Vidia‘s mother, Droopatie, but her dark skin color. Even though Rohini is able to transgress social restrictions, she is still confined within a system that places value on the color of one‘s skin. When Vidia marries Rohini, Droopatie states that Rohini‘s dark skin will serve the family forever, thus, she fixes her to a servant position. The documentary A Darker Side of Fair reveals the extent to which ―fairness fetish‖ permeates various levels of Indian society.

Fair skin is the ideal that exists in Indian life in which being fair equates to ―lucky,‖ while dark means ―ugly.‖ Vidia‘s fair skin is valued so much so that his mother proudly displays him to the village advertising his worth. Finee, Rohini‘s mother, imagines breaking his arms knowing that deformity would decrease his value. In fact, her husband‘s ―ugliness‖ creates a mixed sense of liberation for Finee because his defects make him compliant. He works without complaint in the fields, never beats her, and makes shy advances in bed (Dabydeen, TCH 16). Finee negotiates the meager lot she has been given in life by transforming ugliness and deformity into attractive attributes. When Rohini is selected by the village to play Radha in the village production of Radha-Krishna,7 her dark skin shows that the ―gods cared for the

26 wretchedness of humanity‖ (28). Nonetheless, Finee knows this is make-believe and rationalizes that her daughter‘s caste and dark skin will not attract any master. She negotiates the stigma of caste limitation by planning to marry Rohini to an old man; in doing so, Rohini would gain a matriarch status with his money after he dies. Moreover, she advises Rohini to remain barren: ―‗Best to be barren‘ she states. ‗He‘ll want you always then and not betray you. Once you have a baby you will grow fat like me…‘‖

(26). Despite her mother‘s practicality, Rohini demands Vidia (29). Showing little to no concern for the small amount of opportunities available to her, she rejects the stigma placed on her dark skin by taking what and who she wants. Her mother, she states, was

―so stupid as to believe that Vidia [or anyone] was strong enough to enslave her‖ (25).

Instead of submitting to the quiet role of a dutiful Indian woman whose skin color limits her even further, Rohini transgresses these labels. This is not an easy task; the origins of the fair skin ideal as shown in The Darker Side of Fair can be traced back to the ancient epics from the Ramayana to the Mahabharata. By affirming her sense of self with such confidence unfixes the taboo that dark skin is an unlucky lot in life and reinscribes her worth as a woman.

Rohini understands the social dynamics at play and strategically plays along to her benefit. Her form of rebellion is neither vocal nor visible, but small and subtle.

When Rohini enters the domestic space of married life, she performs her role as the good wife and daughter-in-law, but secretly she plans for more. As she rolls roti, she conspicuously spits in the dough as a form of protest. Even in marriage, Vidia remains timid about his sexual advances, paralyzed by the fear that his parents are close by in the hut they share with them. As a continued form of control, Rohini would tease him

27 to arousal with her touch, and then turn away from him. She employs her body to force her husband to think of ways to have their own home, thus, using her sexual appeal as an economic advantage. Her power is in her sexuality that challenges the notion of sexual repression as a central discourse when discussing Indian women. This creates a ripple effect in which her actions cause Vidia to respond as a man who takes control of their lives by desiring more. She slyly appeals to his manhood when she first suggests they leave for British Guiana: ―‗Vidia, you can‘t be a man in this place. No money here‘‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 52). During this confrontation, Vidia finally rebukes her commands by telling her to ―shut [her] mouth‖ (52). Instead of regressing into a meager state, Rohini is pleased that he attempts to raise his hand to hit her. Vidia‘s power is in his strength, but he falls short of acting out his masculine role as an assertive male. By disturbing gender boundaries, Dabydeen portrays Vidia as a compliant male who does not realize that Rohini is orchestrating his actions. She enjoys his assertiveness, which negates the image of a helpless, victimized woman. Knowing that he can be forceful gives her power because she can manipulate this aggression to get him to stand up for their needs. What is defined as normal markers for knowing and experiencing the body is subverted. Rohini willingly places her body in the line of danger, but, she does so strategically to avoid any repercussions. As Michel Foucault suggest, power produces knowledge (Discipline and Punish 27), in which no bodily experience is exempt from the strategies of power. Whether her prevailing strategies of control are entirely successful are to be determined, but Rohini exercises a large degree of power in shaping the direction of her future. When a broader escalation of violence takes place between Muslims and Hindus, Rohini sees an opportunity to plot her escape.

28 Into a bucket, she mixes the kumari seeds Finee had given her to abort a child, along with other substances, to create a poison to kill the family‘s cow. Symbolically, she uses the kumari seeds to abort her past with India and to create a new life in British

Guiana. With the cow dead, she hopes that Vidia‘s family will see the death as a curse, and probably have to leave their village and settle elsewhere. When this transpires,

Rohini insists to Vidia that they should go to British Guiana to earn money to support his parents. By playing to conventional duties and feared superstitions, she convinces

Vidia to leave his ancestral homeland. Rohini frees herself temporarily from repressive conventions by marrying who she wants, by placing value on her dark skin, and by forgoing the duty to produce a child for better opportunities. As a result, she eludes fixed readings of being a victimized woman by strategically emerging as a ―modern woman‖ within a traditional world.

While Dabydeen offers a symbolic reading of Rohini ―aborting‖ her past with

India, I see her decision to terminate her connection to the homeland as an abortion of her initial vision. In British Guiana, a place supposedly free from long-standing gender and social practices, Rohini is more accepting of her subjected lot. Even though she lives in the same abject conditions as in India, in a single room8 so thin they can hear every grunt being made, she feels distant from the past with ―no one to shackle her‖

(Dabydeen, TCH 66). By distancing herself from the past, she moves away from her initial vision of desiring more in life in which she ironically shackles herself by placing the social conventions of being a mother and a dutiful wife as imminent markers of her subject formation. When she arrives in this new environment, she cloaks herself in these traditional robes, when this was not her sense of self in India. With a shortage of

29 women on the plantation, she maintains control over Vidia with the fear that she might betray him for someone better. However, she quickly dismisses this ploy by proclaiming that she will save her body for Vidia by striving to have a boy with him.

Foregoing her mother‘s advice that a child is not a woman‘s duty, Rohini becomes obsessed by her desire to conceive. Her body becomes barren, empty after two years, a symbol of her inability to produce in this new land. When she ―aborts‖ her vision of the modern woman, it leaves emotional scars that taint her sense of self in the new world.

In India, she has a clear goal of desiring more for herself without succumbing to the mores of cultural limitations. In British Guiana, she adheres to the traditional role of a woman who simply does not want a child, but is obsessed with this desire. Motherhood confers upon her a purpose and identity that nothing else can. She returns to old superstitions, calls a pundit, a Hindu holy man, to pray, and takes ―bush potions‖ from

Miriam, all in hopes of bearing a child.

On one hand, Rohini affirms her worth as a wage worker, her control over men by being one of the few females on the estate, and her desire to acquire more through education by learning how to spell. On the other hand, she forgoes these social triumphs by returning to the self-sacrificing woman ideal who desires no more than to be a mother and a dutiful wife. As Mohanty proclaims, there is no easy generalization in the direction of women within India in ―understanding the contradictions inherent in women‘s location within various structures‖ (62). Mohanty is correct that there is no simple depiction of Indian women; Dabydeen, however, makes it difficult to read

Rohini‘s actions in British Guiana as undoing the homogeneity of the third world woman status as a subjugated victim. In India, her localized actions unravel her role as

30 a kept woman, but, in Guiana, her behaviors are questionable. The author cannot completely depict Rohini as a fluid subject open for change. In fact, it appears as if he is criticizing those who leave their native land, forewarning them of what happens when one departs one‘s homeland for luring tales of fable and plenty: they are left barren.

Dabydeen is playing on the ideal of diaspora where it appears that historical travels can be more conservative because it relies on an idealized and unreal vision of tradition as connection to the homeland. Rohini not only loses her power, which she wields in

India, but also her vision of desiring more outside of cultural restrictions. Perhaps if she had not ―aborted‖ her past, she could have been stronger, carrying her vision with her, which is why Dabydeen does not allow her to come to her full power in Guiana. My reading of her aborted past is multifold, creating a ripple effect: the disconnection to her past/motherland leads to emotional scars that then sully the vision she has for herself in the new land.

Arguably, Rohini‘s narrative expresses the changing space of female respectability and social duties that results in a profound and questionable notion of what constitutes womanhood, empowerment, and modernity in India and British

Guiana. Her subversive actions call for a deeper reading of ―male dominance‖ and the implicit strategies that shape the experiences placed upon the female body. In British

Guiana, Rohini is pleased when Vidia attempts to beat her. When she confesses to

Vidia, in Guiana, that she killed the cow in India, she receives her first beating from him. She is elated that he beats her ―because it proved he had his own will‖ (Dabydeen,

TCH 70), but no rebellion on her part ensued. She wakes up the next morning and ―fed him as if nothing had happened‖ (72). Vidia rationalizes his violence as homage to his

31 parents who would have doused her with oil and lit her on fire had they known of her insurrection. Soon, beatings become commonplace as Rohini accepts regular hits from him. Her scars, both emotional and physical, are visible, but no objection is made by anyone. Miriam states, ―Because I live among coolie all my life and I see that if new wife don‘t bear within two-three years, is regular licks she getting from a man‖ (99). In fact, the earlier village performance of the ceremonial love between Radha/Krishna becomes a violent nightmare. In a dream, Lord Rama leads Rohini through worshippers to their throne. At first, she is ashamed of her ―simplicity and peasant‘s clothing‖ (68) where in the village performance she glows even in scraps of clothes. As Rama kneels before her and offers his benediction, his hands slap her across the face:

She reeled back and fell to the ground. When she recovered and looked

out, the worshippers had vanished. Only Lord Rama remained, radiant

and ordinary. He reached down gently, as if to comfort her, but when

she raised her face He slapped her again, drawing blood. (68-9)

The wife/goddess image changes from devotion to degradation. Without moral conflict, it becomes easy for Vidia to ―raise his feet and stun her with a kick, and when she bucked and fell, mash her head into the ground with his heel as if mashing out the life of a centipede‖ (89). When she demands more of him sexually, he no longer responds like a timid boy, but accuses her of learning ―animal‖ ways from ―niggers‖ and attacks her even more. He returns to old Indian conventions and states that once a boy is born,

―he would stop the madness and pain and greed of sleeping with her‖ (93). In India,

Rohini triggers an attempt at violence by orchestrating Vidia‘s actions in order for him to assert his will. This ripple effect continues in Guiana; however, her forward thinking

32 is replaced by traditional desires that perhaps cause Vidia to react in such a dominant way. He has little understanding as to why he is acting out under duress, but her

―backward ideas‖ initiates a series of reactions that cause him to put her in her place.

Again, Dabydeen undermines the model of diaspora by portraying Rohini‘s actions in

British Guiana as more conservative in relation to her behaviors in India.

One of the outcomes of migration is transnationalism, the process by which immigrants built social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement. However, Rohini wants to construct and maintain a community as a new beginning detached from India in which her desire for home and family conflicts with her individual needs to want more from her life. Rohini‘s mother warns her about not bearing children, but Rohini suddenly becomes obsessed with this idea. From this cultural standpoint, motherhood is considered the primary role for women across social classes. While this is seen as an essential aspect of Indian womanhood, it also limits and regulates women‘s lives, as Finee‘s advice to Rohini implies. It appears that Rohini has internalized the burdens of womanhood in Guiana, but this makes her vulnerable.

In India, there is a limit as to how far Rohini would venture in using her sexual appeal in order to get what she wants. However, when she cannot conceive with Vidia, she willingly gives her body to her oppressor, Gladstone,9 to escape the stigma of not bearing children. Puri suggests that marriage and motherhood give the Indian woman the ―good girl‖ (136) status in society, but Rohini dismisses all social respectability in which her action becomes a site where the lost of modernity rather than national tradition is expressed. This unspoken union between the colonial overseer and a native woman dismisses any infringements against her body. She knowingly permits the affair

33 to happen as a personal sacrifice to fulfill her longing to produce a child as her inheritance to the world. It is not only the conception of a child, but also an inception of the idea that by creating a mixed child of White and Indian blood she would have more privileges as an indentured laborer. Both motives are misguided. By severing the link to India, she does not carry over the modern ideas in her homeland in which she strategizes her ploys rather than position her body as a site of gratification for white desires.

While it is unclear whether sex between Gladstone and Rohini is a consensual act or a sexual violation, I would argue that the action is ―rape-like‖ in that the power differential and overall social difference place Gladstone above this indentured laborer.

This ―rape‖ is twofold—a desecration of Rohini‘s body and an infringement of her vision. In India, Rohini is able to circumvent traditional roles without submitting to male violence and other cultural mores. British Guiana presents a space for her to desire more without a caste system, without the constant surveillance of in-laws, yet her method towards upward mobility is achieved through a degrading manner that taints her earlier actions. This polluted vision prevents her from clearly seeing the dire consequences of allowing her body be taken at will by Gladstone. Moreover, the liaison between Rohini and Gladstone is surprising absent from the narrative. Both Dabydeen and Rohini‘s dismissal of this union is problematic. Within the British colony, women are repeatedly raped by their colonizers. Dabydeen shies away from depicting the brutality of such heinous crimes against the female body. What we are left with is a naïve woman who apparently thinks an affair with her colonizer is a sound decision.

This interrupts Rohini‘s subject formation as a progressive female whose past actions

34 depict a strong woman who did not violate her own moral conduct. By drugging Rohini and aborting the child, Miriam terminates these misguided notions. Once her body becomes barren again, Rohini proclaims that ―Vidia [is] not enough‖ (Dabydeen, TCH

145), and returns to her initial yearning to want more for her life. She releases herself from traditional roles and regains the upper hand in her relationship with Vidia as she chases him from her yard. Despite being unprotected in British Guiana without a husband, Rohini remains, while Vidia attempts to return to India defeated and broken.

Her desire to stay, rather than return, temporarily redeems her. By rebelling against the subordination within traditional Indian confines, she ultimately pays for it through her descent into madness. This madness is only referenced briefly in the epilogue. While she redeems herself by refusing to follow the male figure back to India, the narrative does not redeem her by alluding to her madness. Whereas Miriam sees Rohini‘s child as competition to Blacks, Dabydeen suggests that any offspring is at a disadvantage, especially when you look at characters like Kampta, a fellow coolie born on the estate.

And any woman left alone without a husband will either pass from hand to hand or become mad in the British colony. By ending with such dismal realities, Dabydeen disrupts the multiple visions that Rohini conceives for a better life as her letters to her mother confirm only the madness of her existence.

Rohini is neither a West Indian woman gone mad in the Caribbean colony nor can she be placed into a fixed binary of a rebellious woman or the domestic wife/laborer; rather, in both places, India and British Guiana, Rohini plays along with the social norms while strategizing ways to destabilize fixed labels to her benefit.

Sometimes, Spivak argues, there is a political and social need for what she calls

35 ―strategic essentialism‖ (―In a Word‖ Interview 358). It quite literally involves a performance, the adaptation of a specific identity role for a particular political and discursive purpose. By playing to positivist essentialism, Rohini briefly interrupts the hegemony of patriarchal colonial discourse by having some say so in the direction of her life. As Carol Boyce Davies articulates, the female migratory subject‘s enterprise is one in which ―at each arrival at a definition, we begin a new analysis, a new departure, a new interrogation of meaning, new contradictions‖ (5), as is Rohini who is poised for change and transformation, not in an absolute sense, but as part of the fluid remaking of self. In India, her behavior as a modern woman is in contradiction to cultural mores while in Guiana she problematically redefines herself as a traditional woman. What redeems her in both places is that she is on a quest of something better for herself even though as times her actions are questionable. She is neither complacent nor static in her role as a woman in which she positions herself as a subject who is constantly searching for new meanings. Her narrative demonstrates the normalizing discourses placed on

Indian women and reveals the ways in which the Indian female internalizes, reproduces, and challenges these strategies of social control.

Section 2. Dual Reading of Masculinity in India and British Guiana

Patriarchy is often read as the subordination of women and the empowerment of men. Women are confined within the domestic space resulting in their marginalization; whereas, men are thought to be rational in their prominent role in the public sphere.

Traditional forms of masculinity valorize unemotional, active, competitive behaviors.

However, the pluralization of masculinity highlights that there is no single masculinity, but multiple definitions that varies within time, space, and cultures. To illustrate, the

36 figures of the ―manly Englishman‖ and the ―effeminate Indian‖ must be examined in relation to specific practices of ruling rather than as products of a generalized colonial condition. Ashis Nandy argues that the impact of British rule restructured Indian masculinity as he states that hyper-masculinist British imperial ideology distorted the fluid gender identities, resulting in the inflation of the Kshatriya10 model of masculinity

(52). Not all Indians were the same to the British. As Heather Street states, Sikhs and

Gurkhas were warrior races (135). Moreover, Mrinalini Sinha challenges Nandy‘s argument by stating that British manliness and Indian effeminacy were constructed within the imperial social formation (2). While South Asian masculinity is defined and challenged by Vedic traditions and British rule, the Indian male‘s control over women remains in tact. Dabydeen, however, disturbs these conceptions of masculinity by portraying the female as the one orchestrating the male‘s behavior.

Within the novel, in India, a place of strict patriarchal conventions, men are portrayed as weak and ineffective in their relations to women. Even though Vidia is

―groomed‖ to perfection by his mother, he still yields under Rohini‘s commands. He dreams about making money as a necessity to a better life, but his plan is rather childish and naïve. By seeing himself as worthless, ―‗I is nothing, I own nothing and I grow up to be… nothing‘‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 43), he places no value on his manhood. He resorts to digging up Kumar‘s yard, after the beggar passes away, believing that Kumar has buried money for him to find. When he tells Rohini about this plan, she laughs at the frivolity of his action. Rohini‘s misguided vision to conceive a child with Gladstone as her inheritance to the world in British Guiana has dire consequences; whereas, Vidia‘s exploit in accumulating wealth in India is laughable. Rohini is reprimand while Vidia is

37 excused for his foolish options. Nonetheless, he is resigned to his position, and unlike

Rohini, simply accepts his place as a goat herder. He once asks her out of desperation,

―can‘t you be happy without money?‖ (52). Edward Said argues in Orientalism that the

Oriental man is often perceived as weak, feminine, and a threat to White, Western women. However, Dabydeen plays on this essentializing image of the prototypical

Oriental, who is biologically inferior to the West, by portraying Vidia as a culturally backward and unchanging character towards the brown woman—his wife Rohini. This gives the ―dark‖ woman power and superiority to facilitate the mission of escaping her plight while her counterpart, Vidia, remains defenseless and silent.

It is only when he separates himself from India that Vidia claims to be a man.

He is no longer a compliant husband, but a ―confident‖ man who feels no moral remorse at hitting Rohini.11 When Kumar suggests once as to why he ―don‘t slap and cuff her like a man till she bow down in sufferation‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 43), he meekly looks away unable to answer. However, in a distant land, he emerges as a man who looks around their room, noticing how all the ―humble implements they used to keep their marriage together—bellna, puckni, tawa, cutlass—could easily become the means of a dozen brutal ways of harming her‖ (89). These beatings simply re-enact the patriarchal violence inscribed on the female body and maintain the traditional cultural superiority of the Indian man. Satish Kumar states in the summary report of ―Men,

Masculinity, and Domestic Violence in India‖ that ―for all castes and religions, domestic violence frequently is linked to men‘s failure, either real or perceived, to fulfilled masculine roles‖ (13). Such failure is compounded by the wife‘s challenge to his misconduct that undermines his masculinity and results in his humiliation. Rohini

38 challenges and humiliates Vidia in India, but there Vidia resists violence as a way to reassert his masculine authority. Like Rohini, who appears to perform conventional roles dictated by social norms in British Guiana, Vidia also returns to a traditional form of masculinity by confining the female to her duties and by seeking economic advantages. Even though Vidia is placed in a feminized role in India, he is ironically stronger by resisting violence as a way to assert his power. When he ―acts‖ out his masculinity, his actions come across as cowardly and challenge his proclamation of being a ―man‖ in the new world. Similar to sex with Gladstone, the beatings placed upon Rohini by Vidia are equally dismissive within the novel.

When Rohini is unable to bear a child, Vidia transfers the worth of a son to economic status through the slow accumulation of money. By degrading the values of

Blacks as lazy, who took no pride in their work or appearance, Vidia uplifts his status as a hard working coolie whose devotion to money keeps his sanity and morality. Without it, he contends, he would go mad, and beat and abuse Rohini even more. For Vidia, money gives him economic worth, and reasserts his power as a man. In India, money attracted him, but he did not succumb to it; whereas, in Guiana, he shows no strength in resisting this desire. He values saving in jars, counting and recounting his claim to upward mobility. Similar to Rohini‘s obsession to bear a child, Vidia is equally obsessed with saving money, which reinscribes gender and cultural identifications. The desire for money, for power, and for reproduction is connected to whiteness. Vidia remarks that ―To be something you had to be like Gladstone‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 126).

As Dabydeen shows, the cornerstone of plantation culture is white desires for money and privilege in which the longings of Rohini and Vidia demonstrate the ―the sickness

39 of greed‖ (67). By dedicating himself to be the ―best coolie at counting‖ (113), Vidia subscribes to the illusion that his loyalty and workmanship will provide a secure life.

Instead of rebelling against his captor, Vidia aspires to work for him. Ironically, he rejects the empty Huntley‘s biscuit tin12 that Rohini brings him from the Great House to store his money, a sign of colonial rejection; nonetheless, he desires no other position than to count money for Gladstone. He subconsciously dismisses the ―cheap, mass- marketed edibles‖ (Sen 188) of British industrialization. Still, he operates within this profitable market unlike Miriam and Rohini who sees the tin as merely ―desirable luxuries‖ (189). When Vidia looks out at the estate, he sees an entrepreneurship:

―Money was everywhere, even in fowl-belly and fowl-battie, he only had to get it. And if you lent it out, money could breed money‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 63). Kampta is quick to point out that his value still amounts to nothing: ―A coolie can multiply and minus quicker than whiteman can tally but a coolie is still 0‖ (74). He readily accepts indentured labor, the ersatz-system of slavery, without question, revolt, or resentment.

He aligns with his colonizer, Gladstone, which once more demonstrates the ―sickness of greed‖ (67) that characterized plantation culture. Homi Bhabha argues that mimicry is an elusive strategy of colonial power and knowledge (The Location of Culture 129). In order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage. However, Vidia‘s mimicry of Gladstone‘s colonial enterprise does not pose any threat to both the normalized knowledge of the Oriental and disciplinary powers. Vidia‘s actions contradict Bhabha‘s theory of mimicry as mockery in which imitation can easily slip into menace against the colonizer. In fact, Vidia reconfirms the essentializing image of the South Asian who seeks capital through assimilation rather than revolt. Dabydeen,

40 however, disrupts the label of the industrious laborer who profits from his hard work as

Vidia loses his money and is left with nothing. Like Rohini, he is left barren, unable to produce economically in the new land.

When his money is stolen by Miriam, Vidia returns to a feeble state that makes his return to India understandable. He can no longer face the harsh reality of being a laborer who has lost not only his money, but also his hopes of owning property.

Temporarily, he elicits pity from those in the village as a laborer who transforms into a

Mulki. Seen as a ―holy man,‖ villagers come to offer gifts for his advice. Instead of taking their money, and counting again, Vidia refuses to collect any monetary offerings.

Incidentally, people take his refusal to eat as a holy sign of an ancient sage; whereas,

―Rohini claim[s] it is madness‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 147). Vidia‘s madness is again laughable; whereas, Rohini‘s madness is characteristic of her existence. Who gets the last laugh—Vidia or Rohini? Vidia becomes trapped in his spiritual proclamations, which makes Rohini laugh at the ―mad-rass Mulki [she] marry!‖ (148). He constantly fails to please her, and without any realistic goals, his self worth becomes quickly depleted. It is Rohini who constantly challenges him, and without her, he eventually perishes. He fails to rebel against his parents by simply accepting his ancestral lot as a goat herder; he fails to criticize the colonial structures that he is forced into; he even fails to redeem his manhood through courageous actions. Even though he becomes a caricature of a money hoarding coolie, Vidia does resist other labels. By opposing the rum shops,13 he is not the everyday wife-beating, drunk coolie. He wonders, at one point, what ―made men allow themselves to be disfigured by rum‖ (73). While Vidia is disrobing fixed readings of a coolie, nothing is made of this transgressive behavior.

41 Vidia crosses some boundaries in both locations that undermine as well as reconfirm the expectation of conventional patriarchal roles. However, it is Rohini who gets the last laugh. The only decision Vidia makes without the orchestration of Rohini ends with him perishing at sea.

When he is unsuccessful in his aspirations to more than a waged laborer, Vidia attempts to return to back to his homeland. He never makes it back to India as his fate leads to his death at sea. His death has possible implications from the lost connection back to the ancestral homeland, to the failures of acquiring status as a wage laborer, and finally to the demise of asserting his own masculinity. Moreover, he is the only main character who does not have a narrative section in the novel. The text is broken into three parts: Rohini, Kampta, and Miriam. His successes and shortcomings are told through Rohini who maintains control of their stories. Dabydeen is transgressive in directing the actions of the Indian male through the female voice as well as undoing the stereotype of a money hording coolie who falls short in acquiring wealth despite placing himself above Blacks. These interruptions of gender and racial identifications come with the termination of the Indian man. Miriam steals his money, bankrupting him, while Rohini chases him away from their home. Moreover, his demise at sea has dire ramifications that predicate that West Indians no longer have a home to return to— either they become mad like Rohini or perish at sea like Vidia. Dabydeen proposes that the emerging communities start not by those who left the homeland, but by Indians born on the colony, like Kampta.

42 Section 3. Two Ethnic Selves in One—The Black Man and the Indian Other

Vidia appears to represent the prototypical feminized Oriental who succumbs to the female character or the entrepreneurial coolie who works alongside the colonizer, while Kampta, a dark skin coolie from suspected Madrasi14 ancestry, is orientalized into an ―irrational‖ (Said 40), uncivilized Other, who belongs neither to the Indian nor the

Black community. Although his violent outbursts and strangeness present a real threat, he is persecuted by his own, the Black community, and colonial authority. His dark complexion opens the wound of old color prejudices as Indians place themselves above his darker complexion. Rohini is able to transgress her dark skin color unlike Kampta whose dark tone causes immediate panic of those around him. Cultural anxiety regarding miscegenation is an unspoken taboo that eventually voids any relationship between an East Indian man and a Black woman.15 The concept of hybridity, in a sense creolization or cultural crossovers, is neither celebrated nor viewed as transgressive in this British colony. Without a place in the Indian commune, Kampta seeks refuge within the Black community. His arrival to Miriam‘s front yard causes anxiety for her brothers who view him as a threat to their family unit. His rebellious acts are punished by Gladstone, who uses him as a model to demonstrate the consequences of what happens to those who resist colonial power. Despite these multiple threats, Kampta mimics the stereotypical behaviors of the ethnic communities rather than imitate the capitalist actions of the imperial authority like Vidia. This slippage in and out of each community produces, what Bhabha would state, ―almost the same, but not quite‖ in which the colonial subject only has a ‗partial‘ presence (The Location of Culture 123) in each world.

43 Born in Guiana, Kampta is disconnected immediately from India. He unfolds the papers of his birth from a pouch that he wears around his neck as if it ―contained precious dust‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 73):

Here is say, ‗Name‘, beside which whiteman write ‗Kampta‘. ‗Father‘s

name: Unknown, deceased.‘ ‗Mother‘s name: Un-known, deceased.‘

‗Grandmother‘s name: Unknown, deceased.‘ ‗Date of Birth:

Unknown.‘ ‗Distinguishing marks: None.‘ Everything is none or

unknown or deceased, except my name in big-big writing, K-A-M-P-T-

A. (73)

With no written past, Kampta is ―free‖ to create his own history and reconfigure social conventions, but without a community or a known past, he is equated to nothing.

Unlike Vidia, who prides himself on the will that he can acquire visibility through upward mobility and workmanship, Kampta understands his value: ―You gotta learn fast that you can only count what belong to you, and here you is nothing‖ (74). It is problematic that he readily accepts nothingness. Like Rohini who aborts her past with

India, Kampta is also unable to place value on his ancestry. This foreshadows later on the South Asian view of West Indians as nothing16 who apparently considered themselves as nothing prior to having this stigma placed upon them.

While neither man has worth in a colonial system other than as wage laborer, the intra/inter prejudices of Indians and Blacks separates Kampta into two ethnic selves,

Black and Indian, a mongrel of sorts. By taking on ―nigger‖ manners, he sharpens his

―Madrasi‖ instincts for insolence. His darker skin and uncivilized ways position him within a ―nigger bacchanal‖ rather than inside the ―pure‖ Indian community. However,

44 when his parents died, coolies were the ones who beat him constantly as they resented the need to feed an unproductive child. Dabydeen is unfixing stereotypes as Blacks show compassion for Kampta while Indians reject him; at the same time, the Kampta reinforces the view that a dark figure is corruptible. By taking on ―nigger‖ values,

Kampta quickly becomes an outcast to Indians who turn his punishment of being whipped each Sunday into an outing with their families as they watch his suffering.

Because he is ―insolent, thievish and cunning, and seeks the company of lewd and faithless Creole women in preference to the sobriety of a settled relationship‖

(Dabydeen, TCH 75), he has lost his value to his fellow coolies. In fact, he takes pride in his reputation for badness, and often threatens to burn down Gladstone‘s house.

These threats reconfirm to both white authority and Indians his ―incorrigible and unrepentant‖ nature associated with the Black community (74). His membership in each community is predicated upon him performing racial codes set by both groups rather than disrupting these conventions.

On one hand, Kampta‘s rebellion against being fixed within one ethnic community and his plans to kill Gladstone reflect a revolutionary effort. Frantz Fanon explains in The Wretched of the Earth that ―national identity‖ is a struggle of oppressed people aiming at collective liberation (168). On the other hand, Kampta claims no national identity and his revolutionary actions fail because the Indian community falls short in supporting him against his outcries toward the colonial oppressor. I perceive

Kampta as more of a rebel than a revolutionary. A revolutionary figure has a cause whereas Kampta has no substance as he often claims nothingness. His struggles and subsequent punishments are spectacles on display for Indians and Blacks rather than a

45 libratory of the oppressed people. On Sundays, Kampta‘s rebelliousness is punished in the compound of Gladstone‘s estate. The coolies are summoned to witness his beatings; however, this public display of punishment becomes an occasion of festivity. The

Blacks see Kampta‘s punishment as an extension to all Indians who came to British

Guiana and ―steal we work and wages‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 76). Furthermore, Indians see his beating as entertainment as they squat on the grass ―unwrapping rotis and potato curry whilst their children ran with home-made kites‖ (76). Sharmila Sen argues that this ―grotesque lunch party‖ is a definitive marker for Blacks and Indians racialized selves: ―While the Black workers are tempted to try the potato curry cooked by women…they are also scornful of the new tastes imported by these usurpers…Miriam tries a palouri (fritter) and spits it out in disgust…‖ (192). This occasion of festivity offers no collective resistance towards the colonial authority. In fact, after the beating ends and Kampta slips to the ground into unconsciousness, Indians pack their belongings and depart the compound fearful that they may jeopardize their welfare by offering to help. He is left on his own, and it is a ―nigger gang‖ who cuts him loose and takes him to their village in a makeshift stretcher. Miriam leads the way as if she is carrying home the ―spoils of some tribal war‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 77). Along the way, she mocks him loudly to assert her authority; however, Indian men threaten back and hurl degrading epithets toward Kampta: ―‗I hear black pussy taste like when you suck on a piece of raw liver, not so Kampta? Kampta, is true nigger pokey-hair hard like wire broom and scratch up your face when you go down to suck‘‖ (78)? Despite these remarks, Miriam continues to put on a show claiming Kampta as the man who is not about talk, but one who can rise up and rebel against Gladstone as a Fanon warrior.

46 Stuart Hall argues that Blacks are trapped within the binary structure of stereotypes and are obliged to ―shuttle endlessly between them, sometimes being represented as both of them at the same time‖ (Representation Cultural Representations…263). Like Blacks, who are both ―oversexed‖ and ―childlike‖ (263), Kampta is trapped as a wanton figure in his relations with a Black woman and an insolent figure to Indians. In either case,

Kampta has no claim to his subject formation, and, like Vidia, he allows others to orchestrate his actions.

When one of Miriam‘s younger brothers calls Kampta a coolie, he dismisses any claim to being a coolie by stating, ―‗Me no Madrasi, me is nigger‘‖ (Dabydeen, TCH

78). By calling Kampta her ―special nigger,‖ Miriam nurses his wounds with fierce determination to turn the Indian castaway into a rebel who will ―bring calamity to

Albion and burn down the canefields and turn Gladstone into a pillar of salt‖ (79).

While Kampta resists the submissive Indian label, he is coached into the ―savage‖ Black stereotype by Miriam. Like Rohini, Miriam is orchestrating Kampta‘s actions in order to avenge the wrongs against her by Gladstone and coolies. When he owes her money, she calls him a coolie who worships only money; when he rebels against Gladstone, and is punished for his actions, he becomes her ―nigger.‖ By alternating between a coolie and a ―nigger,‖ Kampta is a chameleon rather than a transgressive figure who does not resist the Indian or Black‘s will over him. Arguably, he is an opportunist who readily accepts labels placed upon him in order to benefit from each community. When he shows up as a boy in her backyard, Miriam ―passes‖ him off as a coolie from another village; nevertheless, his dark skin is taken as half-caste, and thus causes Indians to protect their future daughters from his Negroid appearance. Incidentally, in order for an

47 East Indian man to assimilate into Afro-Creole society, he has to ―pass‖ as a Black man to be recognized by either group. By doing so, he rejects his Indian self without conflict or protest. Homi Bhabha argues that the site of ambivalent identification is a ―margin of the uncertainty of cultural meaning that may become the space for an agonistic minority position‖ (Nation and Narration 317). This margin does not provide Kampta with progressive possibilities; rather, it locks him within a liminal space of nonexistence in which his ―rebelliousness stems to a considerable degree from this void, this nothingness‖ (Binder, ―Finding the Right Words‖ 139).

By understanding his value, and lack of place, Kampta mimics the conventions of all communities—Indian, Black, and White—for his benefit. Bhabha states that

―mimicry marks those moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance‖ (The Location of Culture 121). Kampta is lacking in his

―spectacular resistance‖ against Gladstone, whose house he could not enter, knowing

Miriam belongs to Gladstone. Rather, he mimics the colonial strategy of ownership by enjoying his colonial privilege in Miriam‘s yard where he ―lazed like an overseer under the shade of a coconut tree‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 84). He organizes her brothers into a gang of petty thieves who are devoted out of fear to fulfill his common wishes. In fact, he instructs them to rebel again the colonial system: ―he had forbidden her brothers to plant, for planting was slavery‖ (116). He preaches to them about the rebellions of earlier slaves who burn down cane fields, yet, he sits idly in the yard and hurls lectures and insults as he enjoys his petty power. Despite beatings, Kampta comes and goes as he pleases, which includes going beyond the confined spaces of the estate. Unlike the new generation, who moves in the same familiar direction for the same purpose of

48 acquiring money and securing work, Kampta trespasses into forbidden spaces as ―He cast off his clothes and joined the Amerindian tribes, living savagely on their diet of raw meat…and when he tired of the degradation of their lives he abandoned the bush-people and returned to the haven of the estate‖ (97). By stepping in and out of boundaries,

Kampta resists residing in one place too long and temporarily benefits from his position of being an Indian man within inferior communities.

Kampta makes a conscious decision to murder Gladstone by temporarily morphing into a Fanonian warrior who sees his peasant class as a vanguard position for revolution to avenge the oppression of both Blacks and Indians. He imagines the chaos afterwards and factors in the ―dozen or so coolies‖ who would be killed as an example to the colony. It is the coolies‘ huts that would be charred by British soldiers, and not

Blacks, relocating him back to the Black community. Kampta is aware of the history of slave uprisings and concludes that the commission will find ways to minimize loss to the economy. Dismissing the ideology that a coolie ―must work harder, he must sacrifice, he must endure, he must wait‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 120), Kampta plots to kill the white man as a symbol to coolies to form their own rebellion: 17

A handful of coolie would die, but it is time coolie learn what nigger

gone through. Coolie come here thinking the bush clear by itself and

nobody plant the fields and miracle dig the canals, but miracle is nigger,

and all the canal-water pool together in one drop compared to all the

nigger sweat. When English kill a few, then coolie will know the truth

that each penny Gladstone pay them make them the same metal as the

bullet that bore into nigger backside long-time. (121)

49 However, he turns this manifesto for a coolie rebellion into a personal matter when he states that he will kill Gladstone for Miriam‘s sake.18 His presupposed ―badness‖ fades as he begins to internalize his own inferiority complex, which results with him identifying with his colonizer. At the precipice of rebellion, he sympathizes with his oppressor stating that Gladstone did not choose to be White. Thus, he fails to recognize the inherent power that comes with whiteness that is denied to both Blacks and Indians.

It raises the question of whether Miriam‘s Black body is worth defending by an Indian man or whether the vileness of slavery can be understood by indentured laborers. When

Gladstone appears in the bush to hunt, Kampta‘s instant reaction is to duck and fall on his belly. His cowardly reaction negates his rebel spirit of murdering Gladstone even in broad daylight. He submerges his body in the mud, and with millipedes and worms around him, he becomes an abject figure—a pitiful spectacle. When he rises from the mud, he is instantly emasculated with ―his hair matted, his penis exposed to the shrieking laughter of sakiwinki monkeys‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 125). He is exposed as so less of a man that even the monkeys mock him. His failed attempt to kill Gladstone strips him of any power that he wields in both Indian and Black communities. His voice becomes hollow, and even Vidia is no longer alarmed by his threats. From this point on, Kampta stays within boundaries following the rules like a ―cornered animal‖

(125). Gail Low states that Kampta‘s rebellious acts are ―essentially spectacles rather than effective actions, and if spectacular it is not because of their grandeur but because of their theatrical quality‖ (212). However, a theatrical performance requires an exaggerative level of confidence, and while there is a crowd to watch his previous beatings, no one but monkeys witnesses his failed attempt at mutiny. Moreover, it

50 indicates that Kampta cannot right the wrongs of both communities as his actions are rather laughable than emblematic of a crusader who avenge the physical, mental, and social harms of the colonizer.

Kampta‘s solution is that ―coolie and nigger and whiteman got to stay clear of each other‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 123) that foreshadow the racial division to come in post- independent Guyana. Kampta rejects his own earlier crossovers, at last accepting the space for Blacks, Indians, and Whites. Earlier, Gladstone‘s violation of Miriam‘s body is Kampta‘s motivation to kill him; however, he comes to rationalize this violation by stating that a ―little secret fucking in the dark‖ (123) and her subsequent abortions prevent the colony of the dangers of half-caste breeds. Miriam sees Rohini‘s baby by

Gladstone as an economic threat to Black workers, while Kampta perpetuates the stereotype that a Creolized child would adhere to the savage dangers within the Black race. Instead of avenging the wrongs of both communities, he places them at odds where Indians and Blacks are vying to keep the inheritance of the world through subsequent generations within their own race. In order to escape his shame, Kampta returns to the bush convinced that he is not running away in defeat. He wishes to escape the racialized identifications and relationships of colonial history, a history of arrivals and volatile mixings that produce a property-less, indentured coolie of suspected mixed race. Within this colonial period, there is no space for him to reconcile this splitting or find a place of belonging. If he stays, he reasons, he will become a

Gladstone-coolie, a mimicry and a mockery of power. In the bush, he will be free from his own people calling him a ―nigger whore‖ and his own failings as a man. By rejecting the white compound, the coolie identity, and the nigger label, he disappears

51 into nothingness. What is Dabydeen suggesting about those born in the colony?

Without a past, they are abandoned children, lost to wander aimlessly into neighboring compounds seeking some sort of acceptance. Dabydeen‘s depiction of Kampta rearticulates the discord between East Indians and Africans as Kampta, a character of alleged mixed race, fails in uniting both communities. Rather, he perpetuates the racial stereotypes of each. Kampta is the sole Indian male voice who has his own narrative within the novel, yet his voice is just as hollow as Vidia‘s. While it appears that

Dabydeen is criticizing Rohini for aborting her past with India, he perhaps is also critiquing those born in the colony by consigning them to nothingness, or at best, a subject who profits from inferior communities. By depicting the infertility of Indians to reproduce in their new land unravels the racial conception that Indians prosper by being wage laborers who can easily create new imagined communities at the demise of

Africans.

Kampta seems like a model of Guyanese resistance at the onset, but by the end of the novel, it is clear that his motives were hardly pure and his chances of rebellion nearly zero. Instead of donning a white mask like Vidia who seeks to work alongside the colonizer in the counting house, Kampta wears several masks as an Indian outcast, a

Black other, and a possible rebel. Fanon insists that the category of White is the negation of Black; neither exists without the other (Black Skin White Masks 45). This psychological formation is divided further as Kampta is split into an Indian man by ancestry and a Black male by association. Both ethnic selves cannot coexist as illustrated throughout the novel. Under the camouflage of subscribing to both identities,

Kampta becomes a part-object that reinscribes instead of re-evaluates the normative

52 knowledge of each race. The result of this splitting are two distinct attitudes toward the

Indian and Black communities. Such racist stereotyping of Blacks as aggressive and

Indians as money hording coolies disavows ―the assumptions of civil discourse‖

(Bhabha, The Location of Culture 130). Kampta‘s ability to shift from nothing to menace can be read as revolutionary; nonetheless, his mimicry of various cultural and racial norms are self indulgent rather than healing to the racial rift between Indians and

Africans. Rohini also plays along with social and cultural norms for her benefit, but she strategizes her own actions; whereas, Kampta allows others, mainly the Black woman, to dictate his direction. In fact, each Indian character is had by Miriam, who eclipses their actions and changes the racial flow of the narrative.

Section 4. The Afro-Guyanese Woman Contention to Power

Often times Afro-Caribbean characters in Indo-Caribbean novels, in particular

Black female figures, are relegated to the periphery, marginalizing and silencing their presence. However, Dabydeen subverts this pattern by making Miriam, the Black female worker, the strongest figure in the novel. Her exploits and voice overshadow the actions of the newly arrived Indians. The rebellious acts, either forceful or subversive, by Indians, seemingly fail to elicit any visible change in their oppression. Miriam, on the other hand, disobeys both colonial and coolie authorities. However, she is still trapped within multiple subjectivities through racial and gender lines. Her sense of self is erased so much so that when she opens her mouth to cry, tears do not come, ―she don‘t come‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 86). She is not only Gladstone‘s maid, but her body is his to repeatedly violate. This degradation continues within the Indian community where she is viewed as a wonton woman whose black skin and ―animal ways‖ place her

53 beneath them. They constantly mock her with derogatory comments. Even Rohini, who is comforted by Miriam after a beating from Vidia, instinctively has to close ―her eyes to stop her imaginings nasty things about Miriam…Vidia‘s judgment on niggers stayed with her—they were lazy and ignorant people, living only for their bellies and the day; their huts stank of unwashed children‖ (71). Without any support from her own community and lack of parental guidance, she is forced to endure abuses by

Gladstone and Indians in order to provide food and protection for her younger brothers.

Instead of submitting to her abject conditions, Miriam adopts a masculine persona, where she is feared by those around her19 from her brothers, to Kampta, to even

Gladstone. At one point, she states that she knocked Gladstone to the ground when he went too far and left him there to regain his authority while considering the nature of her services. Alissa D. Trotz argues, in her article, ―Behind the Banner of Culture?

Gender, ‗Race,‘ and the Family in Guyana,‖ that the ―apparent prominence of Afro-

Caribbean women in the home produced stereotypes in the literature of the strong, independent female and her obverse, the marginal Afro-Caribbean male…Indo-

Caribbean…image…was of the submissive Indian housewife‖ (8). However, Miriam substitutes Kampta for the Afro-Caribbean male, thus, maintaining power over the male figure. In either case, both Miriam and Rohini contest these conceptual models as

Miriam challenges the image of the inferior and silent Black woman.

When taking Kampta back to her hut after his Sunday beatings, Miriam endures countless taunting by Indian men lingering in the street or shouting from rumshops:

―Gwan, you black-rass bitch…go wash yourself of stinkiness‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 78).

Instead of maintaining silence, she puts on a performance as a display of her power.

54 She recognizes that coolies can only talk, but once Gladstone raises his whip, they run without action. By cursing at Kampta as he lay in the stretcher, she uses his abject position of groaning on his back to criticize the passive coolie position: ―That is coolie condition, God be witness to the truth. Flat on your coolie back with your two-inch cock impossible to raise howsoever I gallivant before it‖ (78). Later, when alone, she chastises Kampta for dropping to his knees after his beating. By adopting the outcast from the Indian village, she is able to train him to rise up against her oppressor, but, is she creating a rebel or a scapegoat? By committing this rebellious charge to someone outside her race, she is able to cause calamity upon Indians while at the same time manipulating his actions to free her from the oppressor. Kampta‘s involvement in a rebellion against Gladstone is orchestrated by the Black woman who shifts the power clash between Africans and Indians into the hands of a woman.

Like Rohini‘s actions in India, Miriam finds small, localized ways to profess her opposition to social and gender limitations. Despite her vocal outbursts against the

Indian community, Miriam knows her subjected position. Her black body is not immune to the vileness of colonial oppression:

She belonged to Gladstone, together with his punts, his fields, his work

gangs, his mules, his books, his pictures and the collection of furniture,

china and cutlery she knew intimately, having grown up in the midst of

such finery, having cleaned and polished them as it they were her own.

(Dabydeen, TCH 81)

Kevin Davey proclaims that Miriam adopts a ―strategy of collusion, granting the white planter erotic pleasures of the black sublime and then living on the proceeds of his

55 penitence‖ (165). I disagree with Davey‘s remarks. Like Rohini, Miriam strategizes ploys to escape her restricted conditions and her attempts to do so are subversive rather than a fraudulent or treacherous agreement as Davey implies. Miriam is knowledgeable of colonial violence and history and the only contract she enters into is the one she makes with herself. She is a part of Gladstone‘s possessions, but chooses not to be degraded in value. Instead of accepting the domestic role as a caretaker as oppressive, she lays claim to its privilege. In a safe that contains Gladstone‘s documents, Miriam opens it with a key, and then fans herself with an old will. By sneezing on the documents, she resists being owned by the estate, which further displays her distaste of his valuables. Rohini is timid in these moments, afraid of both Miriam and the abuse to

Gladstone‘s ancestry. Miriam simply ignores her and takes out her anger on a history that forces her to ―wash clothes, cook, take cock‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 108). Until freedom comes, she will ―play nigger, I breed fear‖ (108). Judith Butler argues that ―as in other ritual dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated‖ (178).

Miriam‘s repeated performance becomes codified knowledge that reconfirms the stereotypes placed upon her race as being fearful and evil. By reenacting and re- experiencing these socially established set of meanings, her abjection in both White and

Indian communities become ritualized and understood as part of the cultural body wherein she appears to close the opening for subversive action. However, she readily

―plays‖ to their labels as an uncivilized Black woman in which her actions are revolutionary. For example, in Gladstone‘s family cemetery, she lashes out curses at the dead and visibly violates this sacred place. She tells Rohini ―You know how many days I stand here and spit? And I hit 1834 every time‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 101). By

56 spitting on the date in which slaves were ―freed‖ by the Englishman, she desecrates this historical moment. Their ―freedom‖ simply creates another oppressed cycle as Indians are brought to replace their labor. Moreover, Miriam forces Kampta to defile these graves by having sex on these sites in which she desecrates White history further with both Black and Indian bodies. She strategically plays upon the dominant discourse that fortifies her identity as a lewd Black woman that is codified further by the Indian community. By performing to their expectations of her, Miriam temporarily unfastens the dominant discourse by despoiling prestigious white history as well as orchestrating the actions of Indians around her.

Despite Rohini and Miriam‘s attempts at subversion, no unified female force can be formed to overtake the colonial/patriarchal authority. They both struggle against common oppression: the colonial system (oppressed laborer) and their claim for the colonizer, Gladstone (as sexual property). The racialized Black/coolie division prevents each woman from bonding with the other for the common cause of female liberation.

This is an example of the efficacy of British ―divide and conquer‖ strategy. Miriam makes it clear that ―She is Gladstone‘s maid. Rohini was only a minor servant‖

(Dabydeen, TCH 108-109), who maintains a strict hierarchal status in the house.

Although Miriam shows compassion when Vidia beats Rohini, she is firm that Rohini maintains her place. There are moments where she breaks these barriers by voicing the brutalities done to a woman‘s body, be it coolie or Black:

57 Because when Gladstone stroke your front sweetly and when he turn you

round and put thing in your back, is two different kind of crying you got

to do. You already cry before Gladstone when Vidia beat you, so you

done make a good start. (109)

However, Rohini sees the White man as her liberation from her presumed infertility in which her subsequent pregnancy causes a shift in the power structure. Miriam views

Rohini‘s pregnancy as a threat, a victory over her in both the domestic space and within the racialized structure. A mixed raced child of Coolie and White blood would become a convenient excuse for a coolie to ask for more wages without earning his/her right to the land: ―Coolie can‘t just come and inherit we kingdom. They got to punish like we punish‖ (140). To prevent this potential shift in power, Miriam drugs Rohini and uses the money she steals from Vidia to terminate the child who she views as another form of oppression: ―slave days come back when coolie land in Albion, for they rob we of work and wage and one day will rule we‖ (141). Like Rohini who uses the kumari seeds to kill the cow in order to escape her conditions in India, Miriam uses the same seeds to terminate Rohini‘s attempt to create an alliance with White power. Rohini aborts her past whereas Miriam terminates her future. Wolfgang Binder argues that while Miriam is convinced that East Indians will one day rule the country, she

―demonstrates love and solidarity both with Kampta and with a Rohini gone mad. Her bossiness is a result of outrage, rape and despair, which she finds also in the condition of this East Indian woman‖ (―Finding the Right Words‖ 141). However, Miriam controls the actions of both Rohini and Kampta so that they know their place, and when they step outside her hierarchical conception, she aborts their actions or let them go.

58 Despite some shared oppression, no love or solidarity is demonstrated by Miriam when it comes to retaining power for her own.

Sharmila Sen notes that the novel creates two rival female narratives (186);

Rohini‘s East Indian tale reconstructs the forgotten coolie woman‘s story at the expense of the Black woman. When given the opportunity to form a female bond of camaraderie as colonized female subjects with Rohini, Miriam chooses to abort this mission by placing her Black self above gender solidarity in order to preserve her Afro-

Guyanese history. This is not regrettable but commonsensical, since both women, despite their shared experience of being colonized women, operate within their own cultural boundaries. Miriam bellows her religious persecution stating Miriam is not her name: ―I ain‘t no Virgin Bride no more and I don‘t belong to Your blasted holy book and manacle. If You want call my name, call it Jaka, Abulli, Rebili…‖ (Dabydeen,

TCH 142). By rebelling against God, she eases her conscience as she is ―no slave,‖ and justifies her action of aborting a child so that coolies can earn their rights through similar struggles to tell their stories: ―What right you have to make story? What right you have to make baby for Gladstone? Albion is a nigger, we slave and slaughter here,

Albion is we story, and you coolie who only land this morning best keep quiet till you can deserve to claim a piece‖ (146). Ien Ang, in her essay, ―‗I‘m A Feminist but…‗Other‘ Women and Postnational Feminism,‖ states that sameness in experience is

―not shared gender enough to guarantee a commonality in social positioning‖ (191).

Differences produced by the intersections of race, class, ethnicity take into account that not ―all women are white, Western and middle class and take into consideration the experiences of ‗other‘ women as well‖ (191). Within the colonial structure, Blacks and

59 Indians are fighting for settlement rights and power appropriation. In these spaces, ―no common ground exists whatsoever, and when any communicative event would be nothing more than a speaking past one another‖ (193). This is not a regrettable reality, but a necessary one that acknowledges the limits of sisterhood. Sen and Ang make valid points, but I assert that Rohini and Miriam as more linked than oppositional. Both female characters are active participators in the creation of their subject formation who orchestrate the actions of those around them. They create a gendered space where freedom and renegotiation from fixed identification can be measured; more so, their actions often led to a ripple effect that change the racial and cultural flow of the novel.

Rohini begins the narrative, and Miriam ends with her story. In the telling of their tales, they are united through the orchestration of their own voices. Dabydeen is seemingly renegotiating a space for females as he depicts both Rohini and Miriam as women with stronger voices than the men around them, but, does he go far enough? Miriam‘s final utterance of calling out to Gladstone indicates where Dabydeen‘s true alliance stands

[with the men]. He cannot allow Miriam to have that final strong voice the same way he cannot allow Rohini to end with her sanity intact. He skirts toward the edge of something new for women, but depicts the negative results in their final actions.

In the end, it is Miriam who ends the stories, answering the questions posed by her brother on what will happen to the coolies. This sets up a series of negations. With

Vidia, 20 she states he fails to make it back to India, as his body is rolled overboard with no explainable reason for his death, severing a coolie connection with India for good.

For Rohini, without the protection of a husband, her body will pass from hand to hand, and her mind will grow into madness. Kampta, she answers, meets his death by the

60 Amerindians, who avenge her for his betrayal. These stories are endings of Indians, who have a story, be it tragic. Miriam is left without any ending, resigning to the realization that ―coolie will inherit everything in time, through one turn mad today, one perish at sea, one float murdered‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 151). Even though she temporarily aborts the success of these coolies, the power structure remains firmly in place, as she returns to a familiar form of authority by calling out to Gladstone, ―for he will always be there, and true, he come, and then I start to cry‖ (152). Miriam‘s refusal to validate her own story and her calling to Gladstone at the end of the novel is quite troubling.

She has a strong speaking voice in the text, yet, the omission of her own story negates her earlier subversive actions. Recasting her role from ―silent woman‖ to ―speaking person‖ to ―teller of tales‖ implies the multiple sites of female subjectivities that are negotiated and renegotiated—sites where gender and race intersect across the terrain of migration and resettlement. However, as stated in the Prologue, all that remains in the ruined counting house are three parcels as the only ―evidence of the nineteenth-century

Indian presence‖ (emphasis added, 9).

Alissa D. Trotz argues that Dabydeen resists the tendency to ―repackage the

Black matriarch as the symbol of resilience and survival spirit of African women‖ (9).

By doing so, he marginalizes and erases the revolutionary presence of Miriam, who resists the fossilized roles of a woman as sexual property, housewife, and breadwinner.

Trotz continues that in the midst of daily struggles ―shouldered by women and the fact that in the face of harsh realities, many simply and literally do not survive‖ (9). The elevation of coolie men and women requires the ―simultaneous denigration of the black segment of colonial society‖ (Wahab 299), namely, in this case, the Black woman. I

61 contend that Dabydeen still portrays a strong Black matriarch whose actions eclipse those of the Indo-Guyanese characters. While oppressed as a Black female by Indians and colonial authorities, she finds ways to circumvent her role as an invisible, marginalized female who often manipulate their control over her. Indians may have literary presence with their stories, but Miriam is the one telling their endings, and she chooses to imagine that they all perished, removing their ―Indian presence‖ from her history.

Conclusion

In the Epilogue, the narrator objectively states the whereabouts of the characters that contradicts Miriam‘s accounts of their lives. Miriam‘s memory is erased as her grave cannot be found. Despite her attempts to leave an imprint, she is another Black woman whose life fails to make a larger impact within the telling of history. It is

Gladstone whose memory continues to live in letters, as two biographies of his life are written in the early 20th century. That, too, the narrator states, becomes lost, both are out of print, and an engrave portrait can no longer be traced. Incidentally, Rohini lives through letters she wrote to her mother. Even though her words validate her being, the content reconfirms the madness of her existence. Kampta simply never existed

(Dabydeen, TCH 153). This is either a commentary on the nonexistence of a rebel force within the Indian community or a negation of any cooperation or love between coolies and Blacks. The novels ends: ―Today, in Guyana, the macaw, toucan, ibis and jumbie- bird exist on the brink of extinction. They will soon be figments of imagination, like

Kampta‖ (153). Ultimately, what is created fails to exist or grow in the land. Power is insulated within each world—White, Black, and Coolie. India becomes a distant land

62 that coolies cannot return to while Africa ceases to exist in Blacks‘ imaginations, only in superstitions. And the Englishman‘s violation of the land and the workers who labor on it is negated by the hostility created by the two oppressed groups vying for power among themselves. If each group had recognized their shared oppression, ―a colonial administration might not be strong enough to buffer a collective subaltern resistance‖

(Wahab 303). In the Prologue, Mr. Fielding‘s writes:

When I enquired of them the nature of their grievances, a hundred Negro

and India voices arose, vying against each other to tell a story, like crabs

in a sack seeking escape by clambering over each other. I called upon

them to speak in turn, assuring them that I would give each story equal

weight and benign consideration, but my words fell on deft ears. I

mounted my horse and departed, leaving the loudest to bully the rest into

silence. (Dabydeen, TCH 9)

Nonetheless, I assert that within the novel, in the early days of plantation labor,

Dabydeen creates a ripple effect that changes the cultural and racial dynamics that allow each character to overstep and even recreate social boundaries. While he is disturbing identifications rather than fixing differences, the ripple effects at times do not go far enough to potentially subvert all systems at play. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn states

―One major aspect of The Counting House, is certainly the focusing of attention on the failure of revolt within the exploitative structure of the master-slave situation not only on a racial, but also gendered level‖ (176). Furthermore, Sen argues that while the East

Indian population has been largely ignored in Caribbean discourses, the East Indian woman is even more marginalized (186). However, I question Schellhorn and Sen‘s

63 analysis of such failures when in fact I see that Dabydeen does attempt to strengthen marginal positions within the novel. Certainly, women are negotiating their limitations through smaller, potentially subversive acts. These spaces warrant attention and indicate that borders and boundaries are not as fixed as they appear to be. Even though women are relegated to the role of caretaker, they orchestrate the actions of both colonial and cultural authorities. Women who arrived in British Guiana from Africa and India as indentured slaves and laborers are valued for their productivity, and this creates a space for them to earn a place in the labor system.

In her article, ―‗To Make Bountiful Our Minds in an England Starved of Gold‘:

Reading The Counting House,‖ Gail Low contends:

At best, what the novel offers us is the tragedy of individual lives, the

pathos, contradictions and complexities of the various acts of ambition

and survival that move all the figures in the text. None are made into

heroic figures; there are no altruistic grand acts of rebellion;

contradictory forces of self-denial and self-interest motivate all the

characters. Yet if they are victims—these people ruthlessly exploited in

the production of sugar—one cannot also deny them the messiness of

their lives. (213-14)

Nonetheless, these stories and series of negations are reified and transfigured into a recovered meaning. As Stephanides and Singh states the ―experience of abjection points allegorically to new life after passing through death‖ (181). Even though their entire journeys are not told, both coolies and Blacks each speak one segment at a time, one act at a time, and these specialized moments of speaking in segments, and not

64 globally, strategically give voice to the colonial experience in British Guiana. Rohini,

Kampta, and Miriam have their own sections in which they collectively tell the complete tale of the struggles of their uprooted conditions. Even though Vidia is without a narrative, his story is still intertwined with the others. In fact, each narrative encompasses the lives of all characters, which implies that their histories cannot be separated. Mr. Gladstone proclaims in the prologue that ―No account of coolie experience can ever be complete for they are the scraps of history‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 9), even worst, are the lives of Africans. These characters may not be heroic figures as

Low contends, but, rather than scraps of history, they scrape the edges that open fissures where freedom can be measured and emerging Guyanese voices can he heard.

65 CHAPTER 2

REVERBERATIONS OF THE COLONIAL SCRIPT IN OONYA KEMPADOO‘S

BUXTON SPICE AND NARMALA SHEWCHARAN‘S TOMORROW IS ANOTHER

DAY

―A new era had dawned for British Guiana and we shall walk the road together to peace, progress and prosperity….‖ (Forbes Burnham, Victory Speech in 1953).

Introduction

This chapter reveals the unstable shift from a British colony to an agricultural state within the Forbes Burnham¹ era in the debut novels of Oonya Kempadoo‘s Buxton

Spice (1998) and Narmala Shewcharan‘s Tomorrow is Another Day (1994). These two works, written at later dates, offer a reflective commentary into this volatile period in

Guyana‘s history in which the overall theme is nothingness in terms of political programs and racial healing. I argue that these authors can only offer a literary perspective of surveillance rule as they see it. Instead of disturbing political boundaries, they recreate historical conditions of the 1970s without any strategic maneuvering in which borderlines, be it in race, gender, or class, can be negotiated. It appears that they cannot offer an ―optimistic‖ solution to Guyana problems because one is not easily accessible. By reconstructing an agricultural society in ruin, a panoptic structure of watchful observers, failing anti-colonial campaigns, and rigid gendered spaces, their literary depictions lead to two debilitating outcomes: exodus or madness. Perhaps there

66 is not enough time and distance between these authors and this period to untangle such harsh political realities. Instead of creating a ripple effect, I contend that their works cause a reverberation of the script set in place by the colonizer in which they are still echoing the sense of fear and suspicion that was born during this time. In replacing

British‘s rule with a greedy and policing comprador bourgeoisie government simply reaffirms the power structures that those in power are the only ones who benefited from economic and political changes.

Kempadoo‘s first novel, Buxton Spice, is set in the fictional village, Tamarind

Grove, during the early years of the 1970s, where Lula and her family find themselves in the middle of racial conflicts and political fears. Through loosely weaved vignettes, the reader gets glimpses, through the keen observation of a young girl, of the social ills and government corruption during this explosive period. Kempadoo recreates a watchful society similar to Michel Foucault‘s Panopticon where her characters are afraid to say much, causing a disconnection between those within the fictional village and among the text and the reader. Moreover, Shewcharan‘s debut novel, Tomorrow is

Another Day, shifts the focus from a small village to an entire political system as Jagru

Persaud questions whether he can change the ruling party by working within the system.

The Official Party is depicted as a corrupt and seedy dictatorship as citizens feel like prisoners where the option to escape is not open to all. The author constructs a novel that portrays the human cost of social fragmentation as death, exodus, or madness from political convulsion. These literary works reveal the restrictive policies of the new elite intelligentsia who continue to prosper from the divide and conquer strategy set in place by the British.

67 Despite East Indian/African borders, exchanges between these two competing groups within the colonial period disturb fixed readings of ethnic and cultural identifications as depicted in David Dabydeen‘s The Counting House. However, these interactions become obsolete when the British leave this colony and Forbes Burnham, a prominent Afro-Guyanese, come to power. Earlier disturbances by both groups became silenced by a comprador government whose reign appeared more dictatorial towards

East Indians than the decrees from colonial authority. Miriam, the Afro-Guyanese character, at the end of The Counting House, proclaimed that ―coolie[s] will inherit everything in time‖ (Dabydeen 151). However, Burnham‘s ascent to power during the

1970s atoned for enslavement by placing an Afro-Guyanese as head of state. What should have been an atmosphere of cooperation by the Guyanese population in building their new nation through economic developments reverted back into another form of oppression, where the central authority was no longer a colonial figurehead, but one of its own. With Forbes Burnham in power, the government embarked on fostering an establishment of agricultural enterprises by renaming the country the Co-operative

Republic of Guyana. This economic tactic of reducing dependency on foreign goods and capital produced widespread unemployment and severe poverty. In conjunction with declining economic conditions, racial strife between Africans and East Indians continued to disrupt a union among the Guyanese population to challenge Burnham‘s government. By failing to fuse a collective effort, these two groups compartmentalized the country into racial units by building their own communities through exclusion. I assert that Kempadoo and Shewcharan solidify this view in depicting the difficulties of the nation in constructing and maintaining economic and social growth.

68 Section 1. Nationalist Beginnings, Ethnic Endings—Cooperative Socialism and

Failed Literary Strategies

The central figure of British imperialism disappeared on May 26, 1966 when

British Guiana achieved political independence from Great Britain. In 1970, four years after achieving independence, the People‘s National Congress (PNC) government2 declared Guyana a Cooperative Socialist Republic. By freeing the country from capitalistic dependency, the government nationalized natural resources to allow the population a greater role in the development of an agricultural economy. According to

Euclid Rose, state ownership and control contributed to a ―serious deterioration of the country‘s economy to the point where it was incapable of meeting food, health, education, and the welfare needs of the population‖ (201). Instead of economic isolation and strangulation by outside forces, such as the U.S. led initiatives against communist Cuba, the seclusion came from those within the PNC governing body. By proposing a Cooperative Socialist State, Burnham committed to eradicating the legacies of colonialism; nonetheless, his socialist regime simply continued to make money from the backs of the laborers. Cooperative socialism is called into question within both novels, Buxton Spice and Tomorrow is Another Day, as a failed ideology rather than an economic development strategy. While these novels are useful as to document the realistic conditions of Guyana during the 1970s, it says little on how to solve the problems it depicts. We hear whisperings of the dire ramification of Burnham‘s policies, but no loud shouts are made against his actions.

When Lula, the young protagonist of Buxton Spice, enters Mahaica Secondary

School at thirteen, her early childhood rebelliousness is replaced by her desire to ―be

69 just like every other child in the school‖ (Kempadoo 152). The school reflects the uniformity of the country to conform to the preset ideals of the state. Guyana, she argues, has everything—land, water, equipment, seeds—but fails to produce anything

(153). Despite the proclamation of Mr. Brown, who echoes the credo of Forbes

Burnham, to create a ―glorious future of self-sufficiency‖ (153), the school ground, like the nation, becomes a wasteland. Kempadoo is depicting the schoolyard as representative of the social agenda where nothing gets done, and the value of labor is one of nothingness. Lula flatly comments that her school, like so many, promotes only vocational and agricultural skills. Out in the schoolyard, she remarks: ―The school garden never produced. Battalions of students in white socks, white shirts, well armed with spades, cutlasses and forks, turned dry soil eternally in the day‘s hottest sun…even the teacher didn‘t want to produce…‖ (153). This image of children working in the school yard is similar to indentured laborers working in the field during the colonial period. It is not only the teachers who do not want to produce, but also the literary body who are unable to create anything new. This lack of productivity is no different from the government appointees as implied by Jagru, the protagonist in Narmala

Shewcharan‘s Tomorrow is Another Day, who shakes his head impatiently when he sees people starving while political leaders are playing politics (Shewcharan 8). His gesture is a silent criticism of the nation where productivity has declined and only corruption and inefficiency have grown. He connects the nothingness to the lack of resources for the people, yet, he fails to say anything. Lula and Jagru‘s inability to respond to nationalist policies perpetuate the theme of nothingness within both novels.

In other works, such as The Counting House,3 nothingness is a personal infliction;

70 whereas, in these novels, it is the lack of resources for the people and the overall atmosphere of the country. Dabydeen may have claimed nothingness on an individual level, as men doubt their self worth, but he is not imposing this nothingness as the general tone in his novel. Instead of interacting with other characters or engaging the readers to stir up emotions on the damaging shift from a British colony to an agricultural society, Lula nonchalantly walks us through the social demarcation that reflects the uneven economic conditions of a co-op society.

The social hierarchy that is mapped throughout Tamarind Grove mirrors a geographical apartheid of sorts. During the Burnham era, racial and political divisions between East Indians and Africans are prevalent throughout country. What results is a compartmentalized society in which one, Black or Indian, maintains a firm place within a socio-economic hierarchical structure. Lula observes Boila‘s rumshop as the only concrete building; Miss Isaac‘s bottom house is enclosed with her best cows; Clinton and the prostitute Cockroach, the Black residents of Tamarind Grove, have no outside bathroom, while Lula‘s family has the biggest bottom house with an extra enclosure for the live-in help (Scott 109). These spatial arrangements reinforce the social system that fixes economic position and race into hierarchal geographical units. For instance, Lula states:

Black people lived in one village, Indians the next. Blacks, Indians. So

it went, all along the coast of Guyana to Mahaica. Even if you didn‘t see

people, you could tell which village was black, which was coolie. Black

villages had co-op shops; Indians hardware and dry goods. Blacks had

un-painted houses and clap-hand churches; Indians paint, front gardens,

71 mosques and temples. Was always people liming on the road in a black

village. Mothers and children out till ten at night. Not so in an Indian

village. (Kempadoo 44)

This enclosed space creates a spatial separation between Indo-and Afro-Guyanese; moreover, this observation by Lula reconfirms the stereotype of Indians as industrious laborers with ―hardware‖ stores and Blacks as lazy workers with ―un-painted houses.‖

The earlier tension between Indians and Blacks intensifies during the Burnham years that fuel suspicion between the races, which is inculcated from generation to generation.4 Kempadoo is writing in the 1990s; however, she is not immune to such inculcation. This fear is still fostered through Lula‘s remarks on racial division and government policies. In fact, Lula is told by her mother the reason for the race riots within the country:

Mums tell me dat he [Forbes Burnham] cause de Race Riots. He make

black people hate Indians. He take everyt‘ing de Indians had an say is

government own. He put big fat black people to run de sugar and rice

factories….we is part coolie and we living in Tamarind Grove? And

DeAbros is Putagee, and dey living here too? (53)…Now Tamarind

Grove was black race people, strong PNC party people. Dads, Bunty

family and Aunty Babe was the only East Indians. (43)

These statements echo the deep distrust between Blacks and Indians passed on from mother to child. In Burnham‘s socialist regime, the immediate concerns of everyday life are no longer the welfare of the people, but a comprador government that divides the world ―first and foremost [to] what race one belongs to‖ (Fanon, The Wretched of

72 the Earth 5). Burnham, however, is following the script of the colonizer, who, during the colonial days, prospers because Indians and Blacks fail to form a collective union.

The comprador government continues to abide by the divide and conquer strategy that makes it difficult for these authors to offer any revision to colonial and political rhetoric. Dietmar Rothermund concludes that Burnham ―pretended to represent the working class, but actually his ‗transition to socialism‘ only benefited a black elite of lawyers, teachers and professionals‖ (205). This ―transition to socialism‖ causes suffering for both Indians and poor Blacks. Had Kempadoo offered an Afro-Guyanese character who suffers along with fellow Indo-Guyanese, she could have taken Burnham to task by creating a disturbance within the political/racial structure. What the reader is left with is a dismal view as reflected in Tamarind Grove, a place filled with ―mosquito worms,‖ ―ringworm,‖ and ―cock-a-dung fish‖ (Kempadoo 18).

On the other hand, Shewcharan creates ―fictional‖ political parties in order to open a space where this can be any country in the middle of political warfare.

Shewcharan worked as a journalist for the Guyana Chronicle and despite her efforts to mask her journalistic experience, it is clear that the United Party is based on the

People‘s Progressive Party (PPP),5 and the Official Party reflects the social programs of the PNC-ruled government. The Official Party is similar to the school ground in

Kempadoo‘s Buxton Spice as Shewcharan creates a mini world that replicates the political world where nothingness prevails. For example, Jagru comments that he left the United Party because of its leaders‘ passive actions in defending the rights of the worker. When he switches to the Official Party, he is told by Persaud, ―This country needs young men like you. Together we can build a self-sufficient land‖ (Shewcharan

73 14). This rhetoric reflects the policies of Burnham‘s socialist agenda that sanction activities that only help the privileged few, while burdening the load of the general public through unproductive agricultural projects. Jagru joins the opposing party believing that his idealism in a time of stagnant politics would bring change. He soon forgets his original justification for switching parties and starts to walk around like the others conforming to the uniformity of those in power. A disconnection between the people and the government, as in Buxton Spice, is evident. When the people in the street who work tirelessly and see no reward in their labor see his new suit and shiny briefcase, the symbols of bureaucracy, they break into grumbling references indicating their disenchantment with political leaders. Jagru has the potential of disturbing the political structure as an Indo-Guyanese working within the Official Party who can foster change by disrupting the discourse. He does nothing in his prominent role other than quickly adopt the rhetoric of the ruling party. Jagru is told by the Official Party to slow down and enjoy the privileges of having royalties such as a car and access to good schools for his children. When he inquires about his new duties in the Official Party, he is told to ―Relax, enjoy life. When they want you to do something, they‘ll tell you‖

(54). While waiting for ―official orders,‖ he is encouraged to take pleasure in the perks of being a public official. Whilst the masses are risking their lives on the black markets or begging in the open markets, bureaucrats are walking around in an aimless fashion, and after a few days, Jagru, ―got used to doing nothing…to behaving as expansively as the rest of the men…‖ (59). He is acting no different than any other government official which causes me to question how much these authors are pushing boundaries in their portrayal of a co-op society during Burnham‘s rule. What they are depicting is a

74 familiar rhetoric that produces the same nonchalance from these characters that strengthens the PNC hold on power.

John Gafar states that the political environment under co-op socialism produces

―fear, repression, the proliferation of ‗bloated and bleeding‘ state owned enterprises, nepotism, policy uncertainty, loose fiscal and monetary policies, accumulation of foreign debt, human rights abuses and a low level of political rights‖ (41). Lula simply observes that nothing is produced in Guyana and Jagru easily goes along with the doctrine of the ruling party. Burnham‘s socialist credo of ―MAKING THE SMALL

MAN A REAL MAN‖6 does not translate into an economically flourishing nation, but neither do these small characters in transforming into real characters. Lula‘s remarks of the racial division within an agricultural state and Jagru‘s nonchalance regarding government policies do not stir up emotions within or outside the text. All we have are political and social units; what we need are feelings—the frustration, the loss, the pain, and hopelessness—which appears to be lacking within these novels. The result is further displacement, not only among the characters, but also between the readers as to the immediate concerns of the people. What is reproduced are historical realities of failed agricultural policies in which it is difficult for characters to take a critical stand on these issues within this turbulent period.

Section 2. Writing Within the Panopticon

Buxton Spice and Tomorrow is Another Day portray Guyana structured around the Foucauldian Panopticon similar to the self-disciplining system of Burnham‘s government. The strong gaze of government watchdogs keep citizens in order and silence any oppositional movements. Michel Foucault in Discipline & Punish: The

75 Birth of the Prison argues for a historical shift in power from ceremony to surveillance.

After the 18th century, contends Foucault, disciplinary power moves from a centralized location of sovereignty to a self-monitoring system of surveillance (8). The effect of this shift is constant self-surveillance that keeps docile bodies in order. For Foucault, structures in society, from prisons to businesses, are panoptic configurations that make

―it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly…a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a center towards which all gazes would be turned‖ (173). Though

Foucault‘s model is based on capitalist rationality where the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital cannot be separated (221), and not on an agricultural society like Guyana, the disciplinary mechanism of watching ourselves so much so that we are no longer concerned with others watching is similar to the self-monitoring that Foucault espouses. What we have here is an attempt to impose discipline even in public displays of torture as first seen when Foucault introduces the violent execution of Damiens the regicide whose body is drawn and quartered by four horses (3). When witnessing public spectacles such as domestic abuse, rape, and murder, the Guyanese population still maintains order in fear that the centralized location of power will imprison them for speaking up. During this period, there is a perfect apparatus of power that sees everything, and a population that self-regulates to avoid being ostracized, or worst, imprisonment or face death. By writing within the panopticon, Kempadoo and

Shewcharan reinforce the disciplinary scheme, which is why they cannot disrupt this pattern. In order to do so, they have to step outside of this structure.

This model of disciplinary observation has a strong presence in Guyana as witnessed in Kempadoo‘s young protagonist of Buxton Spice. Lula states that ―the

76 power of the PNC was everywhere and Burnham‘s face was everywhere…you felt that someone was watching and waiting to report you‖ (Kempadoo 151). Kempadoo reconstructs a powerful political gaze that makes it possible for a single look of

Burnham to observe everything constantly. The subjects are continually seen; consequently, they become perpetual ―object[s] of information, never… subject[s] in communication‖ (Foucault, Discipline… 200). They act according, like the characters in Buxton Spice, by doing nothing out of the ordinary for the fear that they might be observed. Emelda DeAbro, the mother of a Portuguese family, states that ―I don‘t understand it nuh! People can‘t even say boo in dey house—dey hearing it all de way in Parliament‖ (Kempadoo 63). Nonetheless, in this post-independent society, subjects do see the automatic working of the power constructs around them that open a space for resistance. Foucault argues that the exercise of power resides in a system and not through an individual. However, in the novel, the controlling mechanism is no longer faceless, but that of Comrade Linden Forbes Burnham. Kempadoo personalizes and politicizes this locus of power as the face of Burnham. Since this centralized location is known, it is possible to organize a direct resistance. The novel, however, masks oppositional tactics by narrating a space where Burnham exists everywhere as a ubiquitous presence. However, I would contend that the true ubiquitous presence is the colonizers who produced an unstrained presence of power that guarantees the obedience of individuals within this civil society prior to Burnham‘s reign. While the panopticon is no longer faceless, it still produces docile bodies who act accordingly by considering the possibility of observation and subsequent punishment of their actions. It presents the question of whether Kempadoo is perhaps fearful of being ostracized by the Indo-

77 Guyanese community by narrating a space for Burnham other than a ―villain‖ in her novel. She perpetuates the suspicion running through several generations that Burnham broke the country, and no one, even the Portuguese living in the fictional Tamarind

Grove, contest this prevailing knowledge.

In Buxton Spice, constant surveillance and a sense of fear pervade the small village. Self-monitoring becomes the normalized judgment in which the standards of government policies are an immanent law that ensures observed regularity and proposed regulation. Within the narrative, it is stated that, ―People start turning on each other more…all them uniforms didn‘t seem to bring no good, everybody in them was

Burnham‘s men—they could go around terrorizing [their] own neighbour with guns‖

(Kempadoo 139). Curfews are implemented and venturing outside of patrolled areas is quickly punishable, from public spectacles of torture to a control means of discipline, where people are quietly taken away to prison. There is an immediate and increasing fear that causes everyone in Tamarind Grove to stay within the boundaries and act accordingly. Emelda states: ―T‘ings not like long-time no more. People can‘t even watch out for each other no more yuh know. Cause by de time you turn round…is dem same ones juking you in yuh back‖ (63). Moreover, police forces and the People‘s

Militia or National Service7 create a military atmosphere that makes everyone feel that

―someone was watching and waiting to report you‖ (151). In Domination and Power in

Guyana: A Study of the Police in a Third World Context, George K. Danns states:

―militia members who are also PNC party members or supporters are expected to act as a sort of ‗spying agency‘ on opposition groups and to report any clandestine acts by groups opposed to the governing regime‖ (153). Similar to the symbol of the

78 schoolyard as the failure of a co-op society, Tamarind Grove becomes a ―compact model‖ of disciplinary power where each individual is constantly ―located, examined, and distributed‖ (Foucault, Discipline… 197) within a controllable space. Even though

Kempadoo is writing in retrospect, she merely rewrites the fear that ―People can‘t even watch out for each other no more yuh know. Cause by de time you turn round…is dem same ones juking you in yuh back‖ (Kempadoo 63). By working within this system of surveillance, her characters are skittish rather than daring when making any comments against the PNC government.

Similarly, Tomorrow is Another Day portrays a corrupt political system located within the Official Party that resonates with the material realities of Guyana: food rations, contraband goods, business and political bribes, government distrust, and social fear. Jagru suspends blame on the Prime Minister by stating that ―he did not believe that one man alone was responsible for everything as the opposition claimed. There was, in reality, a complex power structure in which quite a number of people and groups had a share of authority and responsibility‖ (Shewcharan 15). For Jagru, power is located in the ―position,‖ and thus it is systemic. These organizing cells, whether functional or hierarchical, remain fixed in maintaining the obedience of individuals.

For example, after Prime Minister Rouche dies, he is quickly replaced by A.D. James, appointed through a secret council, and when the announcement is made to the Official

Party, ―no dissenting voice was raised‖ (212). To voice concerns would mean instant removal, disgrace, and imprisonment. This depicts the silencing that is taken place within the literary world. No characters stand up and speak loudly again the system in place. One can argue that these flat characters reflect Foucault‘s model as it is not the

79 person, but the system that maintains power. However, the system is kept in check as the author continues to mirror this panoptic structure. Shewcharan narrates a space where no one is safe from fear and intimidation. When Lal Panday, a poor Indian worker, leaves his family to devote his time to the Worker‘s Party, his family is watched by the government officials. Even though his wife Chandi is unconcerned with politics, she and her children are photographed. She is intimidated into believing that if her husband carries on with his political action, harm can come to her children.

However, this visibility changes when the gaze move from an individual to the ruling party. In this disciplinary structure, power is transferred to an invisible gaze where no one knows who is watching whom. This unseen look causes all political appointees to act within the rules of the party. In fact, when the ministerial gaze is upon Jagru, he becomes conscious of saying the ―right‖ things in order to put on a ―good performance‖

(52). Like Jagru, Shewcharan acts accordingly in her portrayal of the system and the individual discourses in which she too is perhaps saying the right thing to please her

Guyanese readers. Whether one is a civilian or a political appointee, [or a writer] the same worries are part of their lives: ―too many stories of people …[being] locked up or killed for opposing the Government‖ (42).

Both fictional works create an environment where the abyss of human experiences is caught in a web of political control and surveillance. The young protagonist of Buxton Spice narrates the visible abuses within a policing state and the internalized order of the villagers to act accordingly in order to avoid being imprisoned.

Similarly, Shewcharan emphasizes the growing sense of isolation within political campaigns where individuals‘ actions are watched and recorded. What gets produced

80 and recycled is the knowledge of a repressive government that failed to progress past fear tactics. This knowledge, in both texts, gets reinforced through policing and government strategies that train and shape its working force. Shewcharan confirms

Foucault‘s notion that when power is anonymous, it is more functional, but, she cannot be anonymous. I assert that power is functional in perpetuating the division among these two groups because it has been able to stay anonymous the moment Burnham came to power, that is the colonizer, who has remained unidentified. The familiar rhetoric of divide and conquer becomes more efficient within this period. At times, the face of power is visible, but overall, at any given time, no one knows who is watching or when they can be ostracize for any simple acts. Both authors remain firmly within the panopticon disciplining themselves as docile intellectual bodies that rely of individual self-surveillance by keeping the power [and the plot] in check.

Section 3. Failed Revolution of the Laboring Class

In both Kempadoo and Shewcharan‘s novels, there is an attempt by the laboring class to destabilize power structures. It appears that the laboring class can form a collective consciousness by their shared poverty; however, this unity is fragile when

Blacks and Indians are vying for their own national identity. The external fight against the comprador government, or the internal strife between political parties yield the same result: a familiar brand of power that exploits the helplessness of the poor by those in power. Since Kempadoo and Shewcharan are writing during the 1990s, after the

Burnham rule, they are reflecting on the anti-colonial struggles in retrospect. In hindsight, the democratic ideas for leadership developed by the colonized intelligentsia are widely professed by the former colonial authority. Burnham‘s national programs

81 continue to exploit the poor, divide the nation along racial lines, and bankrupt the country through economic embargos. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon argues that while national identity is vital to the emergence of a third world revolution, the combined revolutionary efforts of the colonized people often reinscribe the essentialist understanding of the nation (81). The anti-colonial movement is not based on collective cultural traditions or ancestor worship, but through the revolutionary effort to dismantle the economic foundation of colonial rule. However, these efforts are often sullied by elite bourgeoisie practices that derail the nation towards a new direction of self-rule through constant threat and repression. This comprador leadership, as witnessed in the native born elites in Guyana, becomes another form of oppression that continues to victimize the population who opposed Burnham‘s rule. Fanon calls on the peasantry to organize a national revolution to take back the nation. Within both novels, there is an effort by several male characters to fight for the rights of the oppressed that result in activism leading to nothingness, or at best, limited results.

In Buxton Spice, Lula and her family, of Indian descent, are living in an economically stricken Black village by choice as Dads resolves to improve the conditions of the laboring poor. Lula and her family are still privileged by their class as the townspeople refer to Lula‘s parents as Mums and Dads implying a colonizer status over the villagers. Her mother is educated from town, and her features are soft and gentle with an emphasis on her ―strong European nose‖ (Kempadoo 24). Her father is an intellectual Indian, ―a cool Madrasi‖ (24), who often travels abroad and who always speaks properly. Pictures of a young Dads connect him early with the West as he smiles with ―white people‖ (25). His work for the United Nations involves setting up a

82 co-op scheme as a way to provide the community with a source of income. Dads makes it clear that the only reason they live in Tamarind Grove is ―to improve the village‖

(27). The family‘s refined nature and bourgeois status separate them from everyone in the village. Nonetheless, Dads represents the elite intelligentsia who is charting a course with the poor instead of joining the comprador bourgeois. His political agitation is lacking; hence, he cannot reconcile activism and intellectual queries to produce any substantial change. Despite their economic privilege, their sympathies to the PPP party, and maybe even The Working People‘s Alliance (WPA),8 Lula and her family still cannot openly rebel against existing power structures. Their resistance tactics, mainly silenced in the village, is unsuccessful in creating political change. Even the villagers are unaware of the extent of any oppositional strategies. Emelda knows that

―opposition people‖ visit Lula‘s house, but she removes herself from any political activities: ―You see me? I sees nuttin. I hears nuttin. When dey ask me—I don‘t know what does go on by youall. I don‘t know nuttin nuh. I knows nuttin‖ (64). Knowing nothing could be a form of resistance if she is covering for them, assuring them she is not going to turn them into the authorities. However, her comment is more of a skittish reaction in order to shelter herself from possible dangers. When Lula‘s parents remembered the PNC people running down the streets, shouting during the Race Riots, it creates a ―strange silence in the black night…that made [her] parents say nothing‖

(emphasis added, 44). In the end, Lula‘s home is raided as old newspapers from Cuba and WPA bulletins make cold war politics visible. This literature indicates that Dads is cognizant of other discourses. The result is Mums is publicly arrested under the charge that the family failed to change foreign currency. This political invasion ends with the

83 family moving away and is one of the many high level exoduses from Guyana. Instead of going to another village, Dads leaves for the West, thus, any attempts to form an oppositional discourse with the working mass and enact change in Guyana‘s policies cannot be implemented.

Moreover, Tomorrow is Another Day promises that a new day is within the horizon for this turbulent country on the brink of political dissolution. This new day provides no easy choices. In order for Lal Panday to fight against a system that makes workers feel like slaves, he must abandon his responsibilities to his family to join a nationalist cause. He leaves his wife to beg for work to provide for their children. He becomes a stranger who does not seem to care ―whether his [wife] or her children lived or died‖ (Shewcharan 37). Furthermore, he turns their impoverished living conditions into a political space where his papers and speeches are scattered everywhere. Unlike

Dads, Lal is exploring his intellectual queries in order to openly initiate political activism. The consequence of his action results in a familiar exodus as his family is forced away from their home to find another private living space. Lal is constantly placed in a moral conflict between his duty to his family and fighting against government corruption. His inability to reconcile both dilemmas provides a bleak reality in which domestic and public responsibilities cannot coexist.

In contrast, Jagru, an upper class Indian elite, abandons the loyalties of his political party to join the Official Party in hopes that he can make things happen. He does not act out of fear or coercion, but he finds himself being used as a tool to lend a multicultural look to Burnham‘s administration. He wants to speak on the rights of the workers and naively feels that working within the power structure can produce change.

84 Unlike Lal, who makes the grave sacrifice of abandoning his family for political change, Jagru allows his ideals to falter as he benefits from the spoils of a corrupt government. Now situated within the political center, he enjoys the ease at which all things came to him, like attaining admissions to the best schools for his children. In

Decolonization Agonistics in Postcolonial Fiction, Chidi Okonkwo argues that a major problem in the role of leadership in many postcolonial countries can be described as:

―the meretricious path to power: the emergence of a leadership of political prostitutes, adventurers and opportunists who are bereft of nationalist consciousness or vision, and see themselves not as nation-builders but as heirs to the powers and privileges of the colonial regime‖ (emphasis added, 171). By assimilating into a colonialist bourgeoisie mindset, Jagru behaves, as Fanon would term, a ―vulgar opportunist‖ (The Wretched of the Earth 13). When he accidentally approaches a rally for the workers, he consciously makes the choice not to cross that line and maintains his place as political lackey instead of an agitator. At his own Party‘s rally, he criticizes the crowd who gather to listen to political speeches stating that these ―people were suffering. Many could not afford proper food. He wanted to shout at them, to urge them not to glory in their suffering‖ (Shewcharan 48). When given the platform to excite the crowd to their bleak conditions, he overlooks his principles to help the poor and without conflict reads the

―script‖ given to him by the Official Party. His political sensibilities are lost as he turns into a mimic man who follows orders and ―nods his assent to every word‖ (13). Homi

Bhabha argues that ―discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference‖ (The Location of Culture 122). Instead of reconstructing his identity, his

85 history, and his country through double articulation, Jagru imitates rather than dislocate the rhetoric of those in power. Shewcharan characterizes Jagru as a simple man who is too weak to live up to his beliefs. However, it shows that Indians are also benefiting from this regime. They are just as complicit within the system as their Afro-Guyanese peers. When Jagru has the opportunity to do something, he remains silent in which he illustrates how easily politics can taint both Blacks and Indians. On the contrary, Lal‘s political rhetoric is one of fiery revolt in which he makes it clear that the poor cannot take it anymore. He echoes the credo of Fanon in which the colonized subjects must not say ―Work yourself to death, but let the country get rich!‖ (Shewcharan 135). Both

Jagru and Lal rely on public speeches to politicize the masses; without activism, the revolutionary aims of the laboring class are unsuccessful. Fanon strongly argues that a man must take responsibility in his own hands—action over words. Lal‘s involvement in the labor cause shows a glimmering hope of a peasant revolutionary when he is labeled, at one point, as a ―militant.‖ In the end, the results are the same for the intellectual elite and the peasant rebel. Jagru‘s idealism to work within the leading party as a motivator for change results in his failure to enact any sort of political consciousness for the poor. Lal‘s attempts to agitate the working mass toward revolt lead to isolation from his family and eventually to his untimely death. The elite and the activist are unproductive on both fronts and the nation remains insulated within the normalized rhetoric of fear and suspicion.

In the foreword of The Wretched of the Earth, Homi Bhabha asks ―What hope does Fanon‘s anger hold for us today?‖ (x). Certainly there is a difference between the political setting in the 1970s and the composition of these two novels in the 1990s.

86 Fanon is writing at the height of the anti-colonial struggle in Africa, while Kempadoo and Shewcharan are writing from a reflective place of the turbulent times during the

1970s in Guyana. Despite this gap, the literary contact zone between the masses and the hegemonic system can be a volatile encounter. It can produce what Fanon deems as an ―explosive mixture of unexpected power‖ by the masses against the government (The

Wretched of the Earth 79). However, this clash is relatively unexplored in both novels.

The working class is not eager to join in any rebellious cause. They fear the consequences that come with being part of the oppositional voice. In Buxton Spice, men, teenagers, boys and girls are joining the People‘s Militia and National Service to be a part of the power structure instead of fighting against the corruption of the government. They refuse the calling for revolt, and what results is the poor biding among themselves for the scarce resources available in the nation. The reality is that a collective national liberation cannot promise a new history for the nation when everyone is vying for his/her own survival. Fanon‘s impassioned hope for revolutionary action and absolute resistance are ignored as people are surviving by any means necessary to avoid political persecution. What is revealed is a rigid comprador class who plunders the resources of the land. Whether Dads, the intellectual, works with the villagers, or Jagru, the elite, fights within the system, the result is the same— the status quo is kept in place. If people cannot work in the system or outside of it, why work at all? Like the school ground, this leads to wasteland where nothing is produced.9 The rebel, Lal, is visible, but his actions lead to his death. By remaining invisible, the Indian elite easily subscribes to the political script. Dads has the potential to question things as an elite within the system who chooses to work for those on the

87 outside. He is the combination of both the intellectual and the rebel, yet, he takes an ambivalent position. He has the knowledge of other models as shown in the literature found in his home, but remains nonchalant to the atrocities going on around him. These novels offer three possible crusaders who can disturb political boundaries, but as such the immediate solutions to these political and social woes are difficult to articulate much less implement during the Burnham era.

Section 4. Reproducing Gendered Spaces

Because of social, cultural, and political limitations, few Indo-Guyanese women have emerged in the Caribbean literary field. Kempadoo and Shewcharan can infuse strong female characters in their debut novels who could rattle the various systems that often lead to the subjugation of women. As observed, writing a realistic depiction of this unstable period makes it difficult to offer counter narratives. Nonetheless, these works continue to reinforce the patriarchal codes without much revision to the dominant script. While lacking in their activism, the male characters are still potential crusaders for change whereas women remain unyielding in their fossilized roles as housewives and providers. There are glimpses where female figures try to break gender codes, but their actions are unrecognized by others within the narratives.

In Buxton Spice, Lula attempts to reinterpret her sexuality and break gender norms. The alternative texts she creates are temporary possibilities in the formulation of her identity. For example, Lula and her companions, the DeAbros girls, alter their gender roles by playing the game Wife-Husband. In this game, the girls ―pretend‖ to be married to each other and perform the traditional expectations of gender roles. The

―husbands‖ view their business occupations as important, while the ―wives‖ take pride

88 in doing housework. The game ends in bed, where Lula creates the sensation of a penis by placing a battery in her underwear. The cold battery on her ―bunge‖ gives her a satisfying sense of male control. By reinterpreting her role as a man, and mimicking conventional patriarchy, Lula is able to negotiate her femininity. Her preferred male role, however, resists crossing non-normative heterosexual boundaries. She likes being a man solely because of its power. She is unsuccessful, ultimately, to subvert conventional gender roles in her preformative stage. Lula simply steps out of being a domestic female to a patriarchal male figure without any real revision to the traditional script. The ―wives‖ continue to take pride in their housework, while the ―husbands‖ maintain control over other matters. Even when Lula is in the role of a wife, she makes no changes; rather, she mimics what exists in reality by stating that she ―didn‘t pretend—[I] got down on my knees and buffed the whole floor of the houseroom‖

(Kempadoo 86). Tired of the stereotypical gossip from females, she states: ―If that was what she-self was all about, I go keep my man-self till I old‖ (124). She wants to escape traditional female positions and her efforts to do so are acts of subversion. By imitating male behaviors, she challenges the exclusive space of patriarchal power, but she does so in private. No one heeds or even comments on her negotiation of gender identities. Her subversion is kept silent, removing any visible locus of agency. Lula‘s attempts to destabilize conventional gender roles offer little changes for women. If fact, she is learning as a young girl how to perform traditional roles that have been indoctrinated from generation to generation.

However, in a one scene, Kempadoo offers a strong voice in Aunt Ruth, the obeah woman, who speaks directly to Burnham when he visits the co-op food local.

89 The Prime Minister defends his co-op plans stating that it is paying for education and securing a future for the country. Aunt Ruth is not afraid to sidle right next to him and announce loudly: ―‗Burn‘am…‘ Aunt Ruth rasped slowly, not moving, looking at him sideways,‘…you full‘a shit. You know what you can do? You can kiss my black stinking arse‘‖ (Kempadoo 82). Frustrated with the lack of basic essentials and annoyed by Burnham‘s answer to use salt to wash clothes instead of soap, Aunt Ruth unsettles his power to make those around him ―shuffl[e] around‖ (81) like children.

This section of the novel ends with her utterance against Burnham, but nothing more is made of her fiery remark. Aunt Ruth has the potential to upset boundaries through class and gender lines as the ―Well-off African [Burnham]‖ (80) square off against the downtrodden Black woman that shows small signs of subversion, but the results is that no change is made in her social and economic standings.

In Tomorrow is Another Day, women are viewed as traditional caregivers regardless of their social and economic situations. Lal‘s wife, Chandi, remembers her own scattered dreams that ―even though her father was a schoolteacher, she had to live in a village where they did not believe in women wasting time on books‖ (Shewcharan

38). However, the deteriorating state of the nation and Lal‘s abandonment forces her to take on both male and female roles. She works tirelessly to provide for her children, while taking care of their emotional needs. Moreover, Asha, the shopkeeper‘s sister, privately runs the risk of jail time by traveling to neighboring countries to purchase banned products so that her brothers can sell blacklisted items. When in public, she is labeled as the ―nice girl‖ who is once asked ―Can you cook?‖ She responds, ―I never cook‖ (176). Frustrated with her marriage to Jagru, Radika breaks the vows of their

90 marriage by having an affair. She is unapologetic for her actions, and when caught, she leaves with her children. It appears that women are negotiating several roles for themselves that defy a universal label that offer them some agency against traditional roles. Their fixed position in this patriarchal society is the domestic sphere, but national politics surprisingly place them in a new position. It is not a place of power, but one of necessity. These gaps become another set of traps in which their choices are limited resulting in women having to care for their family while working multiple jobs.

Ameena Gafoor argues that female characters in this novel ―stand out for the great strength of purpose which they exhibit, their vision and resolve to keep the family unit intact at all costs, and for their communion and solidarity with each other in the disintegrating society‖ (―‗Celebrating the feminine principle‘: Tomorrow is Another

Day‖). While women stand out for their strength, their grievances are merely hollow whisperings that is compounded by their multiple duties. Asha‘s radical action of risking her life to leave the homeland is negated, and, ultimately one‘s death, as with

Chandi, goes recognized within the deteriorating state.

This is not a new space that these authors are charting; in fact, Linda Peake and

D. Alissa Trotz state that historically, under slavery, ―women worked alongside men in the fields for equally long hours and were equally subjected to the routine physical torture that accompanied any resistance‖ (41). Over time, men and women return back to unchanging hierarchical roles within male and female responsibilities. Likewise,

Kempadoo and Shewcharan are following the same course for women as set in place during the colonial period. For example, Dads works on the Guyana Marketing Co- op—the GMC—proposals, while Mums, an educated girl, looks on ―rosy and warm

91 from cooking‖ (Kempadoo 25). Lal joins the Worker‘s Party while Chandi ―thought of bills awaiting her at home‖ (Shewcharan 16). When she returns to the shack and sees him sleeping, she reasons that she is a ―good woman‖ and a ―good wife‖ (168), rather than a strong woman who has to fight daily to protect her family. Later, Lal finds out that she has been living in a house provided for her by Jagru; he accuses her wrongly of being a whore, and then he forces himself upon her. She ignores this base violation to her body by questioning whether she could forgive him. Returning to the role of the

―good wife,‖ she is unable to voice her concerns. Even though Dads, Jagru, and Lal fail to change the political course within the country, Kempadoo and Shewcharan still give them a space to contest the system whereas women remain codified within traditional roles. By eclipsing the actions of women, little is done in terms of creating a dynamic gendered space for Caribbean women.10

Chandra Mohanty, a postcolonial feminist critic, argues that Western feminist discourse produces a singular monolithic subject of the ―Third World Woman‖ (49).

This discursive colonialism constructs third world women as a powerless and ahistorical group who are defined as victims. In contrast to this master narrative that is particular to Western culture, third world feminists, like Mohanty, present small, local, contextual analysis. However, in both novels, Shewcharan and Kempadoo offer only a slight challenge to the sight of women as helpless victims. While Lula‘s childhood games destabilize gender roles, she still follows the conventional script. We see this indoctrination as Lula‘s mother adheres faithfully to her domestic duties of disciplining her children and assisting Dads as a secretary rather than an equal in his oppositional endeavors. Shewcharan pushes lightly against patriarchal codes, yet, her characters,

92 such as Chandi, are constantly depicted as poor women who are pitied rather than revered for their strength. Despite Asha and Radika‘s rebellious actions, they remain flat characters whose acts are dismissed by others. They may attempt to exert some agency by risking their life to buy contraband items or leave an unhappy marriage, but they are placed back to a familiar point of reference: the kept woman, the hopeless female, the exotic object, and so forth. Ramabai Espinet, a well known Indo-Caribbean female writer, states, ―the silence of the Indo-Caribbean woman needs much fuller investigation‖ (Naidu, ―Indian Women of Guyana‖). By following gender roles imposed by European colonial influences and traditional Indian mores we have little insights into the silencing of these Indo-Guyanese female experiences.

Section 5. The Politics of Flight and the Descent into Madness

The dictatorial rule of the PNC government perpetuates the familiar colonizer‘s script of divide and conquer, which leads to a high rate of exodus of the middle class from Guyana to escape the atmosphere of fear and hopelessness. We witness this flight as Dads, the middle class intellectual, flees Guyana after his project within the village fails. In both novels, those who remain within the country succumb to the varying degrees of madness. No other alternatives are offered. This insanity is not depicted as an intense excitement or a frenzy state, but a normalized reaction to political convulsion. The entire society is depicted as a prison where everyone feels trapped.

In Tomorrow is Another Day, Asha observes that each day at least two hundred people wait outside the American Embassy in hopes of securing a Visa. She deems that we are ―all beggars at the gate‖ (Shewcharan 177) as she awaits a ticket to leave the confinement of everyday life. The country becomes a barren wasteland as people see

93 no future in Guyana. Waiting in line, a middle-aged woman comments: ―what is there to do in this place. Nothing. My children, they‘re all very clever. They need a place where they can grow‖ (emphasis added, 175). The future is not invested in a land that feels increasingly claustrophobic. People cannot breathe freely without inhaling the daily chaos and oppression from corrupt and inefficient bureaucrats. Asha questions what will happen when all the skilled people leave, but offers no arguments that can be made to ask them to stay: ―she felt a tremendous pity for the masses who had no choice but to remain and live and die in their deprived state, working to eat and sleep and getting up to face another day. What else was there to do, but leave if you could?‖

(175). Those who remain behind become enslaved in a society that feels more and more like a prison. Jagru comments, while in jail, that ―they were like animals in a cage‖ (222). Both elites and the working class are saying that Guyana is a figurative and literal prison. When Lal makes the decision to join the Worker‘s Party, Chandi instantly sees her husband locked up, her children taking flight, and ―she, perhaps, walking the streets, one of those people who had gone mad‖ (42). In the street, naked men walk around like a ―growing band of deranged people‖ (44). This spectacle becomes a comfortable norm in society. A cigarette vendor yells ―they have more mad people outside than inside. Is time they stop holding meetings and start building more mad houses‖ (44). Asha once felt her family‘s illegal business was doing a real service to those who depended on contraband goods to feed themselves and their families.

However, the constant exposure to the poor and hungry create immunity to social ills.

Asha views those who attempt to battle the political leaders as ―fools‖ and feels that tomorrow is a life that is not a ―constant battle of wits in a world gone mad‖ (88). As

94 Chandi goes from one low paying job to another to feed her family, she finds herself

―laughing foolishly‖ (191). Moreover, Aunt Adee, an old Black woman who lives in the marketplace, lets out a wild laugh to hide the pain of losing her son. When the incident happened, she is carried to a mental hospital, where they treat her for a nervous breakdown. After Jagru‘s marriage fails, he felt like laughing out loud, ―almost crazy in a delirium of joy‖ (178). In prison, he refuses to give in to trumped up changes of espionage; he felt if he yielded, ―there would be nothing left between him and madness‖

(229). All characters within Shewcharan‘s novel succumb to madness or imposed madness on those who agitate political and social boundaries. What the author appears to be proposing is that it is mad to even attempt to change the rhetoric set in place from this period.

In Buxton Spice, within the village of Tamarind Gove, eccentric families and inhabitants are the norm. Lula states immediately that her village had four mad people.

Uncle Joe is instantaneously identified as the ―safe one, the soft madman‖ (Kempadoo

5). Unlike old socialist newspapers from Cuba, mad people are rarely hidden from sight. Dads‘s political activities are concealed, but public talk of madness is an everyday occurrence. It is easy to turn madness into gossip because it presents no threat to the system in place. For example, when Emelda suspects her husband, Ricardo, of sleeping with the prostitute Sugar Baby, she changes from a ―decent, very Catholic, respectable woman‖ (66) into a mad woman who grabs a mortar pestle and goes cussing into the night for her husband to open the door of their business. Mums calls Emelda‘s cussing a ―nervous breakdown‖ in order to maintain social propriety. These acts are comical spectacles rather than volatile sights that unsettle the political dictates of the

95 state. In other works, such as David Dabydeen‘s The Counting House,11 the author inflicts madness upon Rohini as a critique of her revolutionary actions, but Shewcharan and Kempadoo impose madness on an entire population in which we are left to view madness as a causality of living in a politically hostile environment.

Both novels end with either imposed silence by the government or deafening madness of the population. At the crook of Lula‘s house is the Buxton Spice Mango

Tree, which is anthropomorphized throughout the novel. Lula is constantly in dialogue with this tree; often times, she is frustrated that the tree knows too much. And, if it does, the tree reveals nothing, keeping its secrets. Like the fruit in the Garden of Eden,

Lula is appealing to a forbidden fruit whose knowledge cannot be obtained. She eventually perceives the tree as almost God-like—all knowing, all seeing. Kempadoo implies that this tree, like the government, functions permanently and largely in secret.

Nonetheless, any subversive strategies within the narrative are also masked and inaccessible to the readers. Prior to leaving Tamarind Grove, Lula watches the Buxton

Spice Mango Tree scratched and grumbled (Kempadoo 169). Now that her family has been banished from the village, she states that the tree can now drop its ―stinking mangoes‖ (170) all over. The tree continues to sway and rumble a deep laugh. This laugh mocks Lula, who no longer has to gaze at the volatile sights of Guyana: domestic violence, police corruption, and racial prejudices. The novel begins with Lula‘s desire to ―know all the secrets of the house—like I knew all the trees in the yard,‖ (3) and ends leaving ―square ghosts in their places‖ (170). Kempadoo gives the strongest presence of the novel to the Buxton Spice Mango Tree. The tree can only serve as a symbol with no voice to answer the questions posed by a young girl about ills of Guyana similar to

96 Shewcharan‘s characters who cannot offer any solutions to these sociopolitical problems. Moreover, in Tomorrow is Another Day, out in the free world, after a year of suffering abuse in prison, Jagru questions how his release from prison can make any difference to the poor. Seen by the crowd as two mad people, he runs home with Aunt

Adee as he ―laugh himself, almost without pause, strengthening the impression of his wild appearance‖ (Shewcharan 238). The novel ends with a deafening laugh of madness as Aunt Adee mistakenly takes his laughter as a happy sound; however, the reader knows that for Jagru, like the others, his tomorrow will never come. Shewcharan offers no redemption for Jagru‘s struggles in prison, only that if one goes against the system they are left with no other choice than to return to society as a madman.

Shoshana Felman argues that ―the problem then is how, while analyzing

History‘s essential structure of muffling madness, to give it voice, restore to madness both its language and its right to speak…‖ (42). Felman concludes that at the point of silence, it is no ―longer we who speak, but where, in our absence, we are spoken‖ (55).

In Guyana, the location of utterance is a carefully contrived political discourse that both authors continue to follow. Since power is so well insulated, the madman is neither a threat to this institution nor a fearful presence in society. At any point, they can be removed from sight. However, the most menacing form is the unspoken madness of the entire country: the rash decisions of politicians, the unstable transformation from an independent state to an agricultural regime, the nothingness of life as part of the daily norm. As Felman rightly points out, madness can be informative if we can restore its language and its rights to speak. What are the implications behind the foolery of the people, of government officials, and of Burnham? In Elizabethan literature, the fool is

97 often a commoner who outwits those in higher social standings. Within these postcolonial texts, there are no voices that break through the silence, and, in this scenario, it is the colonizer who apparently gets the final laugh.

In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault states that the confinement of madness is related to social and economic procedures (48). Those who are idle are persecuted and punished according to the law and placed in correctional houses. By doing so, unemployment is contained, thus, there is a social purpose for classifying insanity. Drawing from this economic confinement, Guyana is an agricultural enclosure of idle leaders, forced unemployment, and pitiful beggars. It presents the question— what is valued work? An enclosed atmosphere of nothingness pervades in rhetoric, labor, and policies. Foucault continues that ―madness fascinates because it is knowledge. It is knowledge, first because all these absurd figures are in reality elements of a difficult, hermetic, esoteric learning‖ (21). Given so, what can we learn from these characters? Lula‘s appeal to the Buxton Spice Mango Tree shows that this knowledge cannot be ascertained easily. It is silenced and when left with no answers, citizens feel that it is a prison outside too. Foucault states that psychiatrists are ultimately more cruel and invasive than the torturers because they are meddling with one‘s inner being (252); however, the authors seemingly offer no comfort from deprivation, as they ultimately recreate the historical reality of the desperate flight to leave the homeland in a state of hopelessness.

Conclusion

Both authors depict the difficult sociopolitical problems during the 1970s as they see it in Guyana. Historically, the possibility of resistance against the misuse of

98 power by the government in Guyana is a complicated question. In a country besieged with polarizing politics and racial divisions, solutions do not come easy. Fanon argues that colonial exploitation, poverty, and endemic famine drive the native to an open and organized revolt (The Wretch of the Earth 172). With these conditions preexisting in

Guyana, why did citizens remain complicit instead of rebelling against political and economic inequalities? Open rebellion is extremely difficult, but not impossible. In

1974, Walter Rodney, a prominent Pan-Africanist, returned to his homeland of Guyana and became active in the fight against the PNC government. He assisted in the formation of the Working People‘s Alliance (WPA), a pressure group that became an oppositional party in 1979. This group provided a place for Afro-Guyanese and Indo-

Guyanese workers to unite in an attempt to bring a new political consciousness to

Guyana. Trevor A. Campbell, in his essay, ―The Making of an Organic Individual:

Walter Rodney (1942-1980),‖ states that Rodney might be called a revolutionary democrat who, along with others in the WPA, proclaims through convincing reports that the PNC is not a government for workers and peasants but a dictatorship of petty bourgeois (59). Furthermore, Linden Lewis states Rodney articulated an unrelenting critique of Burnham‘s policies and political abuses. In a public lecture in Barbados,

Rodney explained:

You can not preside over a constantly deteriorating material condition

without the masses becoming restless. You cannot preside over a system

of constantly increasing inequality and injustice without strengthening

the state apparatus to deal with the population. (Lewis 111)

99 In the foreword of Rodney‘s A History of the Guyanese Working People, George

Lamming wrote that Rodney worked on the assumption that the people ―deserved to be liberated [from] hostile forms of ownership that are based exclusively on the principle of material self-interest‖ (xxv). By galvanizing the masses who were undoubtedly tired of poor wages and a lack of essential commodities, Rodney and the WPA provided a serious challenge to the PNC government. The PNC did not tolerate Rodney‘s agitation, and in 1980, at the age of 38, Rodney was killed in a bomb explosion in the middle of the capital city of Georgetown. It is speculated that the bomb was planted by agents of Burnham, but no one was held officially accountable for Rodney‘s death:

―the untimely death of Walter Rodney …resulted in a marked lull in the tide of opposition against the PNC regime‖ (Danns 182).

Buxton Spice and Tomorrow of Another Day touch on these anti-colonial tactics, but neither novel fully explore the strategies of the WPA. Dads works for the laboring poor, but his actions are limited. Moreover, Shewcharan introduces the operation of the

Worker‘s Party through Lal‘s involvement with the movement. Like Rodney, Lal is killed, which results in a lull in activities. Instead of engaging forthrightly in oppositional campaigns existing within this time, these authors find it difficult to reconcile racial and political conflicts in this emerging nation. Without direct queries by the people and of the government to question its own programs, political infractions and social woes continue unchecked. Opposition movements are hidden away or unspoken by the people rather than absolute resistance of the masses that Fanon espouses. Although Burnham is regarded as the ―villain‖ in these pieces, his unscrupulous motives are no different from the deep-seated colonial legacy. He profits

100 from his socialist programs while he denies his subjects, both Indo-and Afro-Guyanese, many civil liberties. What we have here is a reverberation of the colonizer pattern of power: Burnham continues to create divisions and perpetuate fear between Africans and Indians. Years later, in retrospect, Kempadoo and Shewcharan are deploring his presidency by echoing the fear without offering much disruption to the system. Given the nature of this tumultuous period, they cannot offer an ―optimistic‖ solution because one is not immediately available. Perhaps enough time has not passed to heal these sociopolitical wounds. While these texts have limited political value, it acknowledges the stronghold of power that nineteen or more years after Burnham stepped into power these writers are still hoping for a better day.

101 CHAPTER 3

WRITING BACK TO THE EMPIRE FROM THE CENTER OF WHITENESS:

COLONIAL LEGACY, MESSY IDENTITIES, AND GEOGRAPHICAL SPACES IN

DAVID DABYDEEN‘S THE INTENDED AND DISAPPEARANCE

―I‘ll carry my ideas out yet—I will return. I‘ll show you what can be done. You with your little peddling notions—you are interfering with me. I will return. I….‖

(Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness).

Introduction

In previous chapters, it appears that Guyanese subjectivity is based on a sense of ethnicity more powerful than the nation, leading to racial tensions and cultural divisions between East Indians and Africans. This strife creates a paralysis on multiple levels— political, racial, cultural, and so forth as depicted in the literary works of Oonya

Kempadoo‘s Buxton Spice and Narmala Shewcharan‘s Tomorrow is Another Day. In this final chapter, I argue that in another location, such as England, the ongoing questions of identity and power are repositioned through multiple perspectives that are no longer caught up in the binary of Indian/Black tensions. Instead of standing on opposite sides, East Indians and Africans from the Caribbean forge a union to combat the prejudice and violence in their new environment. The chapter investigates several important questions. First, what happens to the Guyanese identity when the colonial subject has situated him or herself within the belly of the beast,1 in particular, the

102 implications of their identification with canonical texts as Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of

Darkness? Second, what are the ramifications of exile when it is no longer through historical transatlantic journeys of Africans as slaves, and Indians as indentured servants, but rather one of voluntary exodus to the very power structures that separate these groups from their ancestral homeland? Third, in this new location, how do

Indians and Blacks reconfigure their relationships to each other in order to combat the latent racism that exists in these spaces? Lastly, how is Guyana re-imagined and remembered from another location of power and politics? England seemingly emerges as a central location, while Guyana fades into the background. However, through memories of the homeland and the ―messiness‖ of history,2 these questions of Guyanese and West Indian identity remain important inquires for contemporary authors such as

David Dabydeen. When read together, I contend that his novels, The Intended (1991) and Disappearance (1993) constitute a critique of British colonialism, the mess that is left in its wake, and the recreation of an imagined Guyana that repositions the homeland as the focal point in both narrators‘ consciousness. However, I assert that the intersection of Englishness and Caribbean experiences reflects two separate paths for the Indo-and Afro-Guyanese as the former exemplifies a changing transnational world while the latter depicts the dying ideals of the British Empire.

In The Intended, Dabydeen‘s first novel, the unnamed Indo-Guyanese narrator leaves his village for England at twelve only to be abandoned by his father to the British welfare system. Dabydeen rewrites, semi-autobiographically, his own personal history in South London, where he grew up in the care of local authorities without parental protection or financial resources. Similar to Dabydeen, the narrator capitalizes on the

103 slim opportunities afforded to him to attain a scholarship to a prestigious university.

Driven by the advice of an old Black woman from his rural village in Guyana that he

―must tek education‖ (Dabydeen, TI 31),3 the narrator explores the cosmopolitan metropolis around him through book knowledge and in doing so gains a textual understanding of his environment. However, his quest for stability within the British establishment is threatened by the intermittent flow of the narrative structure, his changing identity, and the shifting collision of immigrants within this metropolitan center. In this space, he is not identified as simply a ―coolie‖ in opposition to Blacks as in Guyana; however, through the interactions with other Indians, Pakistanis, Hindus, and Muslims, he remaps the South Indian diasporic community. By interrogating and questioning the actions of those around him as well as British canonical works, the narrator creates a civil discourse between Western aesthetics and racial norms that is absent in earlier works by Guyanese authors. In doing so, he redefines his colonized position and destabilizes the dominant discourse. As Mario Relich explains, The

Intended offers three perspectives: the experiences of the narrator as a child in Guyana, as a teenager living in the Balham district of London, and as a University student on a scholarship in Oxford (128). Each perspective moves in and out of the past and the present, from Guyana to England, from Belham to Oxford—each is broken into memories as the narrator wanders through the fragments of his life and the supposed truths of his postcolonial condition. His journey from the chaos of the metropole to the pristine walls of Oxford University presents a few questions: Are these counter- discourses that he engages in a deliberate or an unconscious feature of the text? Who is the intended in the novel—is it the narrator‘s white girlfriend, Janet, the narrator

104 himself, or even the novel itself? What are the intentions of each? Finally, what dialogue does the text/narrator re-open—is it the consequences of colonial rule, the ramifications of ancestral memories, or the implications of cultural artifacts? If so, how are history, memories, and relics marked by racism, exploitation, and violence?

In Dabydeen‘s second novel, Disappearance, another unnamed narrator journeys from Guyana to England. The narrator is a young Afro-Guyanese whose profession as an engineer affords him the opportunity to travel to a coastal Kentish village in England to board with an old English lady, Mrs. Rutherford, as he seeks to build a sea wall to save the village from its crumbling sea-defenses.4 Like the Indo-

Guyanese narrator in The Intended who relocates after post-independence, living in

England triggers memories of Guyana that correspond to the messiness of history in which his contemplation of the colonial past goes further back from Guyana to Africa.

These memories are ones he seeks to resist stating emphatically that he is simply an engineer who is not chained to the recollections of his past. Away from the metropolis of London, the isolated village is evocative of the racism in old British Empire. Caught within this dormant history, the narrator cannot escape from the memories of the past both as a colonial subject and as a participant in rebuilding the Empire. The narrator organizes and rationalizes his own colonial roots through science unlike the Indo-

Guyanese narrator who contemplates the question of colonialism and its consequences through literature. What the Afro-Guyanese is left with is nothingness,5 a void of darkness,6 while the other sees endless possibilities in his future. Reverberations of the past continually haunt the Afro-Guyanese in this lonely village forcing him to reconsider his actions as a native Guyanese and to question his engineer‘s empirical

105 logic as sound defenses against the uncertainties of a primal past. The imperial idea7 of

England and the concept of Englishness become counter images to the wilderness of

Africa. The Afro-Guyanese narrator is shocked by the display of African artifacts mounted on Mrs. Rutherford‘s wall as symbols of her ―spiteful children‖ from her travel to the Dark Continent. The sight of these relics forces him to reconsider his identity as an African, a West Indian, an Afro-Guyanese, and an engineer. The ghosts of the past are more visible within this coastal village than in London. In the metropolis, memories are messy, often clashing with the emerging cultures of the bustling center. In the village, old England lays dying quietly, as the Empire crumbles literally and metaphorically into the sea. In the end, we are left wondering, who disappears? Is it the narrator (who returns back to Guyana), the colonial past, or the imperial figureheads who sought to bring the torch of ―civilization‖ to ―primitive‖ countries only to be left with ―The horror! The horror!‖ (Conrad 68)?

David Dabydeen‘s novels, The Intended and Disappearance, offer an intersecting reading of the Caribbean experience in England. The former is a semi- autobiographical narrative, while the latter no longer features a biographical double of

Dabydeen, yet, both narrators attempt to reflect on their identity as a Caribbean immigrant within the moral and chaotic center of the Empire. Both unnamed narrators travel metaphorically through various interiors of darkness in England and within themselves as they challenge and reflect on canonical works such as Joseph Conrad‘s

Heart of Darkness. By negotiating through these ―stations,‖8 they create a revision and rewriting of both canonical texts and Guyanese history. The question I propose is which novel, if any, is subversive? Are these novels allegories of the postcolonial

106 immigrants‘ rejections of imperial norms or are they informed by the Empire‘s central institutions? Are the narrators mimic men who are simply the product instead of the producer of their own stories? Is it the Afro-Guyanese immersed in the heart of

Englishness or the Indo-Guyanese situated in the Ivory Tower of Oxford who can reconfigure the hands of history to his advantage? Within the colonial landscape, the narratives are punctured with stories and memories of Guyana as a cultural cross- fertilization of both places: the colonized homeland (Guyana) and the colonial motherland (England). As both narrators journey from the center to the margin of the

Empire, the Afro-Guyanese narrator postulates a void of the past while the other narrator resists the urge towards historical and cultural amnesia. In these novels, I argue that Dabydeen is causing more ripple effects by interrupting the flow of colonial legacy as a familiar, static script, but at the same time, his characters, both Indian and Black, are still struggling with social impulses that privileges one narrative over the other.

Section 1. The Question of an Everyman Journey—Indo- and Afro-Guyanese

Experiences in England

Both narrators in The Intended and Disappearance are unnamed which is symbolic of an everyman journey. This is not a typical passage to uncover his identity as a representative of the Guyanese people. Both narrators are already marked by their racial history prior to venturing to England. One is a coolie,9 and the other Black, both leaving Guyana to seek better opportunities abroad. Each novel takes as its everyman a member of the two competing groups. In Guyana, their relationship with each other is one of strife. For example, the Afro-Guyanese narrator in Disappearance while working as an engineer in the jungle of Guyana on his first sea defense project enjoys

107 his petty rule over the coolie workers. When a coolie, nicknamed Swami, questions his rule, he becomes shaken and visibly upset at the change in dynamics. Likewise, the

Indo-Guyanese narrator in The Intended is hushed by his mother when he questions why Black people practice Hindu magic. She replies with terror in her eyes: ―Don‘t ever say that black people and we hate each other or your throat will cut and your sisters rape up like they do in Wismar‖ (Dabydeen, TI 93).10 However, in England, Black and

East Indian identities are more linked than oppositional—they are both labeled inferior by the colonial whites sharing a common British ―blackness.‖ No longer are they vying for power appropriation and settlement rights, but must work together with the other brown and Black people to combat the latent and explicit racism that exists in the

Empire. Dabydeen appears to be bridging the gap between these two groups: East

Indian and African. Nonetheless, the narrator in Disappearance has to confront his

African past alone, while the narrator in The Intended remaps the present condition of his South Asian identity in the company of others within this Anglo-British society.

When the Indo-Guyanese of The Intended arrives in England, he soon realizes that he is part of a new remaking of the South Asian diaspora. In the school playground during lunch break, the white boys are playing football, while the Indians, Patel, Shaz,

Nasim, and the narrator stand against the wall watching. In Guyana, these Indian boys would have simply been labeled ―coolies‖ without much afterthought of their religious and cultural loyalties. Their identity would have been marked against the other ethnic group—the Afro-Guyanese—but in England, as the narrator notes:

108 it was the regrouping of the Asian diaspora in a South London

schoolground. Shaz, of Pakistani parents, was born in Britain, had never

traveled to the subcontinent, could barely speak a word of Urdu and had

never seen the interior of a mosque. Nasim was more authentically

Muslim, a believer by upbringing, fluent in his ancestral language and

devoted to family. Patel was of Hindu stock, could speak Gudjerati; his

mother, who once visited the school to bring her other son, wore a sari

and a dot on her forehead. I was Indian West-Indian Guyanese, the most

mixed-up of the lot. (Dabydeen, TI 8)

By stating that as a West Indian, he is the ―most mixed-up of the lot,‖ (8) Dabydeen suggests that the Indo-Caribbean experience is more problematic than other South

Asian groups in England. Their ―indianness‖ is not marked as the same. The detailed description of these young Indian boys sets them apart from each other. The only similarity is the brownness of their skin; however, this is quickly dismissed by the narrator who states, ―even that was not uniform‖ (8). Since Patel is fair skin, he felt superior to the other boys, while Shaz is described as ―extremely black‖ (8). Even though these differences exist, the boys seek the company of each other to form a formable group who can combat the racism of the whites around them. The conflicts among these friends are minor in contrast to the larger social anxiety within the South

Asian community in other locations such as India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

The shame of being Indians and distancing themselves from traditional ―desi‖11 behaviors is still part of these boys‘ consciousness. When riding the subway, Whites hide behind their newspapers avoiding all contact, while Indians exchange glances with

109 each other as a way to connect with someone who could be part of their subcontinent.

In this cold underground tunnel, these silent glances of familiarity become another regrouping as the barrier of language, ―whether Urdu, Hindi or Creole,‖ is transformed into a ―new mode of communication‖ (Dabydeen, TI 16). The London Underground becomes a ―transnational transhistorical space where randomly encountered Indians can become an imagined community …. [these] awkward, anxious glances…form an ephemeral communal consciousness‖ (Ball 168). However, the recognition of their own people causes a feeling of shame for the narrator and his friends.12 The markers of

Indianness—a sari or a turban—intensify their self consciousness among South Asians so much so that they would ―squirm with embarrassment [in front of fellow South

Asians] frozen in silence until the doors opened to release us at our destination‖

(Dabydeen, TI 15). The shame, however, is more deeply embedded in those with an intimate connection to India. The narrator stands apart from his group of friends with links to the Caribbean rather than to India: ―I had no knowledge whatsoever of India, no inkling of which part my ancestors came from, nor when they left, nor even their names‖ (17). Guyanese are removed from the immediate shame of turbans and saris, yet, they are still marked by other non-Indians as South Asians. Similar to Dabydeen‘s personal experiences in London, there is an immense pressure among the younger generation to become invisible to avoid the shame imposed upon them by these cultural markers.

The narrator‘s shifting alliances back and forth between different communities mirror the ―messiness‖ of his West Indian identity. He feels embarrassed at the sight of his own people, whether Caribbean or South Asian. On a bus ride with Shaz, he

110 identifies with his Indian heritage, distancing himself from the Black West Indians wishing ―they would behave, act respectfully, keep quiet, read a book, anything, instead of displaying such vulgar rowdiness‖ (Dabydeen, TI 127). In this scene, the narrator is acutely conscious of the racial hierarchy within Guyana as Indians place themselves above Blacks. When his own Caribbean roots become a source of embarrassment, he identifies with his South Asian and civil counterparts: ―I‘m an Indian really…I‘m like the white, we both have civilisation‖ (127). He feels ―deeply ashamed‖ when the Black

West Indian makes a kind gesture by offering him a cigarette; suddenly, he realizes that

―everything was so complicated, all this sudden hate and sudden companionship‖ (128).

Margery Fee remarks:

When he feels his Indian heritage held in contempt, he wants to be

invisible; when he feels his West Indian heritage, a predominantly Black

cultural tradition, under similar pressure, he wants to be Asian. Black is

at the bottom of the social hierarchy and he cannot see any way of

identifying with it that does not threaten his fragile enterprise of self-

construction. (75)

This ―fragile enterprise‖ of ethnic constructs changes later with his supposed friendship with Joseph, a Black Rastafarian living in London. The constant regrouping and dismantling of these communities are the consequence of a history of forced migration.

However, when taken from the comfort of a familiar cultural group, the threat is no longer of oppressive government officials or race riots as in Guyana, but Anglo-British terror. When Nasim is hit by a car after being chased by five white youths, the narrator is overcome by the desire to ―hurt [Nasim], to kick him‖ (Dabydeen, TI 14). Nasim

111 becomes a mirror to the dangers of being brown skin living in a white society. His powerlessness becomes another shameful scar for the narrator that he proclaims that he could no longer be Nasim‘s friend. The spectacle of Nasim‘s family whispering in their

―strange tongue‖ makes the narrator, by association, one of them when in fact he knows

―I [was] not an Asian but that these people were yet my kin and my embarrassment. I wished I were invisible‖ (15). The desire for invisibility is present when the narrator feels shamed by his culture, be it West Indian or South Asian. The act of being shamed and judged by various South Asian communities, his fellow Guyanese, and British

Whites exemplifies the complicated ―mess‖ of his postcolonial condition in contrast to other immigrant groups.

When the narrator‘s father abandons him in London, another remapping occurs in his bond with a Black figure as he arrives at ―The Home‖ (Dabydeen, TI 60). In this place, he is the only West Indian, apart from Joseph, one of the Blacks. Both have absent fathers; both are searching for meaning in their lives; both are navigating through the filth of London. The strife between Blacks and Indo-Guyanese is surprisingly obsolete; whereas, in Guyana, it is part of everyone‘s consciousness. As a child, the narrator is aware of the news in Georgetown that ―black people were beating up

Indians, burning down their shops‖ (92). In one instance, in Guyana, he knowingly cheats a fellow Black Guyanese. In England, Blacks and coolies have to renegotiate their racial borders to form an allegiance. The Indo-Guyanese assists the Black man many times by convincing Patel to help Joseph with his film project even when Joseph deliberately ruins the first one. Moreover, he states ―there‘s no need to call him a

112 nigger. He‘s one of us and we‘re one of him‖ (169). After he is admitted to Oxford, the narrator begins to:

despise Joseph, his babbling, his half-formed being, his lack of privilege,

his stupid way of living and dying. I will grow strong in this library, this

cocoon, I will absorb its nutrients of quiet scholarship. I will emerge

from it and be somebody, some [recognizable] shape, not a lump of

aborted, anonymous flesh. (141)

His acceptance of Joseph is called into question when the narrator gains social visibility as an aspiring West Indian writer, while Joseph, an illiterate Black, remains anonymous.

Nevertheless, the narrator is without a name, who ironically is the ―anonymous flesh‖ that is being molded by hands of the white establishment. Fee argues that Joseph‘s memory saves the narrator from going white and from ―vanishing into the heart of whiteness‖ (83); furthermore, Joseph‘s memory reminds the narrator of his own racial construct in which he cannot forget his ―double self‖ or his ―divided othered‖ of being

Black and Indian, brown and Caribbean, as this cannot be forgotten within the Empire.

Like the shame for Nasim, the narrator despises Joseph‘s ―half-formed‖ self, seeking to be recognized on his own merits. Despite their shared British ―blackness,‖ the narrator places himself above Joseph. On one hand, his remembrance of Joseph saves the narrator from vanishing into whiteness as Fee proclaims; on the other hand, the denigration of the Black figure keeps Joseph firmly within the social hierarchy—Whites

(top rung), Asians (middle rung), and Blacks (bottom rung).

As the narrator maps and remaps his way through cosmopolitan London, his measure of success is based on his aspiration to become a writer. When he leaves

113 Guyana, Auntie Clarice tells him that he ―must tek education‖ (Dabydeen, TI 31). It is the immigrant expectation to live up to the dream of upward mobility especially when their origin is one of relative poverty. His scholastic accomplishments also justify the worth of his company to Nasim‘s family. His achievements negate his West

Indianness, his lack of a father and a family, and his poverty. The narrator seeks the knowledge of Western education as his model of success. He immerses himself within a Western literary canon as he studies for his A Level examination, often engaging in analytical arguments with Joseph and Shaz on such books as Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of

Darkness: ―I would select key passages from the text, read them aloud and dissect them in terms of theme and imagery, as I had been taught to do by our English teacher‖ (70).

On the surface, it seems like the narrator is the classic mimic man13 who subscribes willingly to the imitation of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, and Conrad. When he attempts to write in the broken way that he spoke, paying no attention to grammar, he is caught up in a fit of ―savagery‖ in which he suddenly longs ―to be white, to be calm, to write with grace and clarity, to make words which have status, to shape them into the craftsmanship of…English anything‖ (141). Aspiring to be a writer who writes in

Standard English suggests that he will continue to mimic conventional rhetoric without any revision to the master script.

However, the Indo-Guyanese mimicry can be quite subversive. As Homi

Bhabha contends, ―mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge‖ (The Location of Culture 122). By engaging in dialogue with those around him, a Black illiterate man (Joseph), and a promiscuous

Indian (Shaz), the Indo-Guyanese invites a verbal rewriting of Conrad‘s themes and

114 symbols when discussing Heart of Darkness. These three unlikely friends, a Black

Rastafarian, a British Muslim, and a West Indian Hindu, provide multiple perspectives regarding the endeavors of British imperialism. In London, racial, religious, and cultural barriers are fluid, and are used at times as a contrived production, a product of occasional shame, but open to discussion unlike the inflexible barriers that exist in

Guyana. Regardless of this apparent fluidity, a hierarchical racial construct still exists in both locations; however marginalized, the professional background of Asians places the narrator higher than Blacks in the British construct of race. Even with the academic authority the narrator wields over his friends, he still questions his worth, and thus places his value in Oxford: ―Perhaps I am not English enough: a piece of pidgin, not knowing where the past ended, where the present began, not knowing how the future was to be made. The years at Oxford would see to that though‖ (Dabydeen, TI 154).

When he leaves, he is regarded by his friend, Patel, as a ―white man‖ (162); however, he rationalizes that:

Patel‘s taunt that I want to become a white man is ridiculous. All I want

is to escape from this dirt and shame called Balham, this coon condition,

this ignorance that prevents me from knowing anything, not even who

we are, who they are. How else am I to make sense of what happened to

Joseph? (163)

Fee argues that his assimilative education can be ―turned against assimilation‖ in that it can be used with ―confidence and power to look again at the past‖ (84). The initial advice from Auntie Clarice to take his education is a possible subversive strategy to escape this ―coon condition‖ and uplift his Guyanese state. He can escape the misery of

115 their conditions through higher education resulting in a higher class status, but not the memories of their existence. The continuous interruptions of Joseph, Auntie Clarice,

Patel, and Shaz into his psyche prevent his complete transformation into a mimic man.

When the narrator leaves Guyana, he is told by Auntie Clarice, the old Black woman living in his grandparents‘ village, that ―you is we, remember you is we‖

(Dabydeen, TI 32), but to whom is the ―we‖ connected? Does she remind him that despite his brownness to her blackness, he is still a Guyanese? When his white girlfriend, Janet, places herself in a ―collective we‖ in proclaiming what ―shall we do?‖

(120) to help Joseph, the narrator is puzzled by her identification into their world.

Later, he separates from the ―collective we‖ of Auntie Clarice by stating that after

Joseph‘s death, ―the most important thing is to save himself from the misery of his kind of being‖ (163). Fee states that Auntie Claire‘s advice that ―you is we‖ is a riddle that is concerned ―both with the act of memory itself and with how the highly educated narrator of such a novel can remember properly someone like Auntie Clarice‖ (67). In

England, the people he once knew in Guyana ―were fading to a set of foreign-sounding names. They were like the characters in [his] geography textbook, vividly illustrated but unreal all the same‖ (Dabydeen, TI 23). The act of forgetting is supported, as Fee claims, by not only ―distance, education and time, but also by the way the British literary institution works, by what it publishes, what it valorizes‖ (68). Arguably,

Dabydeen is conscious, like many Guyanese authors, of the demands for stories that play upon the racial and cultural expectations of those in the Caribbean. To remember

Auntie Clarice is not to ―risk literary obscurity‖ (67) as Fee maintains, but to reposition this native Guyanese woman back into his site of identification. The narrator finds no

116 shame in Auntie Clarice‘s appearance like he does in those wearing saris and turbans in

London. It leaves us to wonder whether her presence is one of aged wisdom urging the narrator to remember his roots or a narrative ploy to ―folk‖ up the novel.

Regardless, as the narrator spends his adult years in the Oxford library, he cannot forget the collective ―we‖ that informs his multiple selves. His collective definition of ―we‖ is inclusive of Guyanese, West Indian, Indian, and Black British identification. Evelyn O‘Callaghan, in ―The ‗Pleasures‘ of Exile in Selected West

Indian Writing since 1987,‖ also questions to whom does this ―we‖ refers: Ex-African slave populations, the Asian diaspora regrouped in the schoolyard, or a West Indian

Creole alliance? This ―collective we‖ is further problematized by the narrator‘s

―reluctance to be parceled up with any racial or national groups in the eyes of the

British‖ (O‘Callaghan 97). He moves in and out of several groups for his benefit.

Unlike earlier depictions, as with Kampta in Dabydeen‘s The Counting House, this narrator is supported by various minority communities who place value, not nothingness, on his selfhood. As Patel states, ―It‘s us lot who have given you everything, and don‘t you forget that. Oxford has only money, but the Asian community made you rich‖ (Dabydeen, TI 163). When he leaves, the narrator remembers how Shaz ―shoved the notes into my pocket and told me to shut up when I began to mumble my thanks, and that I didn‘t have to write, he‘d still send a small piece every month, so long as I keep passing the exams…‖ (150). He is claimed by Auntie

Clarice as part of a collective Guyanese community as Patel and Shaz claim him as part of the Belham Asian community who want to see him achieve the immigrant dream as a collective success for all of them.

117 While the narrator seeks education to escape his impoverished situation, his other Indian friends, Shaz and Patel, participate in the capitalistic system by exploiting the weakness of whites for sex, pornography, and drugs, all subversive to notions of white supremacy and imperial dominance. They play on the greed of whites for profit.

By dismissing the codes of Indian respectability, they are able to make money from white culture rather than become a commodity to it. While the narrator seeks educational pursuits, his friends strive on the margins as ―amateur pimps, small-time drug dealers and inexpert purveyors of pornography‖ (Parry 92). Even though Shaz is brilliant, he is more concerned with making money by ―pimping‖ his own white girlfriend. He remains firm in his traditional duties by providing for his family, yet, has a ―shrewd sense of the dominance of money-oriented values in society‖ (Relich 136).

He limits his opportunities to become an accomplished artist or a respected writer given his chosen ―occupation‖ as a pimp. This challenge is taken up by the narrator who desires to achieve both financial and social acceptance. The question still remains—at what cost? His recognition as a writer comes from being somebody in the white world who enters the academic marketplace instead of selling out to the commercial enterprise, like Shaz and Patel. In the end, the focus remains on his experimental identity, instead of a community unity as he states:

I‘ve only known them on the surface, Shaz and Joseph. Now and again

they would say or do something which would reveal some aspects of

their character. But in the end all you‘re left with is a random collection

of memories which you try to piece together into some grander truth.

(Dabydeen, TI 153)

118 Even though these memories can be questioned as to what is imagined and who is real, the constant remembering of the past prevents the narrator from being completely whitewashed. By having a privileged education, he has chosen to reside in the country that colonized his history, enslaved his people, and divided his land to prove his worth as a West Indian writer; at the same time, he is forced to contend with the responsibility placed on him by Auntie Clarice to ―remember you is we‖ (32). The challenge for this aspiring writer, and for other postcolonial Caribbean novelists, will be how to modernize the readings of the Black presence in British culture without abandoning their responsibility to those who they seek to represent and vow not to forget.

While the Indo-Guyanese narrator in The Intended is constantly negotiating his identity within the metropolis of London, the unnamed Afro-Guyanese narrator of

Disappearance is forced to face his ancestral African past in a quiet coastal village.

This Afro-Guyanese narrator is not confronted with a constant remapping of South

Asian/Caribbean identities. In fact, in this small town, he is the only person of color; the other minority to which he can be judged against is Christie, an Irish laborer. The whiteness of Christie‘s skin still places him above the blackness of the narrator‘s. The

Indo-Guyanese narrator navigates through the complexities of his selfhood in the company of other young Indians. This subjectivity (Guyanese, East Indian, West

Indian, Caribbean, and Black) becomes messy as it crashes into other identities.

However, the narrator of Disappearance states, ―I was West-Indian, someone born in a new age for a new world…As a West-Indian I had no cause to anticipate the future nor to fear death because I had cultivated no sense of the past. I was always present, always new‖ (Dabydeen, D 16-7).14 Stuart Hall writes that Caribbean cultural identity ―belongs

119 to the future as much to the past…Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, [cultural identities] are subject to the continuous ‗play‘ of history, culture, and power‖ (―Cultural Identity and Diaspora‖ 394). Without any cultivated sense of the past, the narrator claims he is subject to change, but this leads to nothingness as he refuses to contemplate the ―play‖ of history. He states that he ―was no African though, and my fetishes and talismans were spirit-levels, bulldozers, rivets. I was a black West-

Indian of African ancestry, but I was an engineer, trained in the science and technology of Great Britain‖ (Dabydeen, D 14). While he claims his past does not make him, he is still a part of its construction by way of his ancestry (Africa), his resettlement

(Caribbean), and his use of academic tools (Western knowledge). His identity is one of professional training, which is similar to the Indo-Guyanese narrator‘s methodical quest to be a writer; the difference is that the unnamed Afro-Guyanese narrator constantly refers to himself as an engineer rather than as an African, a West Indian, or a Guyanese.

He plainly states that ―I‘m me, not a mask or a moment of history. I‘m not black, I‘m an engineer‖ (93). Earlier, in Guyana, his teacher states that he would never become an engineer on the account that he ―speak waywardly like the nigger you are‖ (58). He may have accomplished his goal in being more than the impoverished lot of his race; however, in doing so, he loses connection to all cultural roots by retaining an engineer mentality. He seeks to ―balance the elements, organising mud, wattle, brick, timber and stone to control the flood of water‖ (103), rather than the uncertain balance between the multiple identities that he occupies. He thinks of his identity in terms of uncertain water routes, and not through secured ancestral roots, failing to acknowledge how these paths,

120 by way of the Middle Passage and other transatlantic journeys, are the origins of his transnational selfhood.

While the narrator of The Intended intermittently contends with the conflict of his East Indian past, the narrator of Disappearance is constantly reminded that he is

African despite his assertion that he has no past. It is a coolie laborer, Swami, who first reminds him that deep down he is still an African who hides this knowledge through his soft manners and correct grammar. Moreover, he states, Mrs. Rutherford ―convinced herself that [he] was African after all, and of special quality, since my spirit remained ancient (whatever that meant) in spite of my mastery of modern technology‖

(Dabydeen, D 96). When he arrives at his post in the coastal village, he is immediately seen as a Black man, bound to be ―barbarous‖ (97). His shiny briefcase and clean clothes do not mask the fact that he is still a Black figure. When he states that he is an engineer from Guyana, identifying his place of origin, it becomes a space where folks are primitive, ―from the Third World and all‖ (99). He constantly goes back and forth as a Black person living in Great Britain and a West Indian of African origin; both labels are imposed upon him. Unlike the Indo-Guyanese narrator who profits from his

South Asian and West Indian/Caribbean identifications, the Afro-Guyanese cannot capitalize on his imposed shifting positions. For deep down, he ―knew a dam was my identity, an obstacle I sought to put between shore and sea to assert my substantialness, my indissoluble presence, without reference to colour, culture or age‖ (118). This desire to control the destructive movements of the sea by creating walls becomes metaphorical blocks for his sense of self. By stating he is simply an engineer, he gives others the power to define him as a ―prince of [a] tribe…all polished like mahogany‖

121 (142). He is accused of being a White colonialist by the coolies in Guyana; in contrast, he is seen as an African artifact by Mrs. Rutherford, and, simply, as a Black man by those in this coastal village.

Unlike the narrator in The Intended, this unnamed narrator does not have an imagined community to remap or reconfigure. There are no companions like Shaz,

Patel, or Nasim to distinguish the differences that exist within his own ethnicity. By refusing to investigate his Guyanese heritage, he allows others to delineate it for him.

He is defined by the coolies as a ―white man‖ in Guyana because of his education and mannerisms. While he works in the jungle managing a coolie gang in Guyana, Swami enters his tent and is immediately taken back by the insurmountable number of books.

He emphatically states that it is ―like Georgetown Public Library! I never know before black man who does read so much…‖ (Dabydeen, D 30). The narrator‘s practicality and education distance him from the land and his fellow Guyanese; moreover, his quiet persona is immediately contrasted with the emblematic images of ―all-you African people can dance and beat drum, all-all night!‖ (35). Like a typical white colonialist, the narrator dismisses the coolie and sits ―under a large umbrella at the entrance of my tent, distracted by their wailing. I wished they would stop, and I could concentrate on the calculations before me, yet glad that the singing had got them into a rhythm of work‖ (32). Instead of listening to native knowledge, he chooses to rely on Western constructions to regulate the land and the people. The coolie Swami proclaims, ―The white man who used to rule you so fulsomely left you with a plastic ruler to rule you. If

I take the ruler way, what will you do? Without the edge, you wander off in the bush and get lost…‖ (38). Living in the margins is a lost concept for the narrator as he

122 naively questions, ―So if you don‘t respect the straight line, how do you live?‖ (38). He can only follow a linear path, the familiar master script, failing to comprehend the circular passages of his ancestors who occupy the land. Ironically, he cannot see the implications of his own circular journey as he travels to England and returns back to

Guyana. He cannot connect to a Guyanese history, asserting that the land is barren from a past: ―In Guyana itself, there was hardly a suggestion of [African] existence, much less commemoration of it. There was no burial grounds holding the bones of slaves, no old sugar mills where they worked, no letters or books that they left behind, no carvings‖ (21). Indians, he states, claim the land when they arrived to work on the sugar estates. For him, it is better to forget the past and ―get down to the business of making a new country for a new age‖ (22), but is the land capable of bearing new marks as he claims? The footprints may be washed away, but the memories of Amerindian tribes, slave rebellions, and Indian labor cannot be annihilated.

On the other end of the binary is his construct as an African in England. As soon as he arrives at Mrs. Rutherford‘s cottage, she schools him on her travels to the

Congo and the mysteries of Africa. He is immediately terrified by the three ancient masks that she has hanging on her wall. While these masks provide Mrs. Rutherford with some memories of the past, he is disgusted at the hideousness of these images, rejecting his own origins as part of the colonial project. In Guyana, his ―Africanness‖ is seen as a ceremonial cultural ritual in which coolies also participate in through dance, rum, and festivities. In England, his African roots are immediately connected to the wilderness as ―their experience was commemorated in timeless ritual or timeless mark, testifying from Africa or from the walls of an English cottage‖ (Dabydeen, D 21). The

123 narrator is persistent in proclaiming that ―what happened long ago was not of my making and didn‘t make me‖ (21). He cannot relate to an African past as he is too afraid of the darkness that emanates from these artifacts. By setting himself in the present moment, thinking of future defenses, he has no foundation on the kind of wall he is building. By proclaiming to be simply an engineer, he forgoes his past, and he allows others to reach past his Guyanese heritage to Africa, a land that no longer has a hold over a Black West Indian. Dabydeen suggests that until that past is reprised and understood, the problem of selfhood will not recede. However, the same cannot be said in Dabydeen‘s portrayal of the Indo-Guyanese who rarely contends with his past, yet, this narrator is still get down to business in the remaking of a new South Asian diaspora. More revealing is that Indians within the Caribbean have a stronger hold to their ancestral homeland of India through their timeless practices and rituals, while

Afro-Caribbean rarely connect with their African roots other than in stories.

Nonetheless, Dabydeen places the weight on the Afro-Guyanese to come to term with his familial land that is in incongruous with the cultural reality of Africans from the

British West Indies.

Despite both narrators‘ claims to books as a way to achieve success in the world, their quest towards educational pursuits is marked by differences. In The Intended, the narrator appears to be a mimic man as he analyzes the Western canon in a traditional manner through themes and imagery; nevertheless, his quest for such knowledge affords him the opportunity to attain a prestigious scholarship to Oxford University. While it appears that Englishness is his intended destination, Dabydeen implies that within the belly of the beast, the attempt to counter colonialist sentimentalities is a possibility. He

124 cannot forget the memories of those in Guyana or his half-formed self in Joseph. The narrator in Disappearance continues to travel with books even after attaining his degree in Engineering. Unlike the former narrator whose quest is in literary studies, the latter chooses a practical profession that presents a technical manner in which he deals with the world around him. The Indo-Guyanese narrator has a community around him to challenge this knowledge. Instead of placing himself above criticism, like the narrator in Disappearance, the Indo-Guyanese narrator engages in a lively dialogue between

Shaz and Joseph on the nature of Africa as portrayed by Conrad. These conversations produce a social consciousness, which is absent when the Afro-Guyanese narrator communicates with Swami. There is a clear division in education among these men, as

Swami addresses him as ―massa‖ and ―sir‖ connecting him to a colonial overseer rather than an equal or a native Guyanese. However, there are moments when he doubts the knowledge he has acquired:

Now, surveying my unfinished sea-dam, I began to doubt everything that

made me, all the learning I had absorbed from books in the years of rapt

concentration. I began to doubt my blackness, my ability to work the

land as my forefathers had done. Perhaps the Indian was right, perhaps

all I had were the trappings of white people‘s ideas, white people‘s

science, and I knew nothing else, nothing of what he claimed to know

through circuitous contact with the earth and intimacy with its ghosts.

(Dabydeen, D 39)

The Afro-Guyanese narrator acknowledges the familiar trap of many in Guyana, from politicians to writers, who continue to follow the ―white people‘s ideas.‖ Dabydeen is

125 making a strong statement that all Guyanese need to acknowledge the work done by

Caribbean pioneers who paved the way by working the land in order to create something new for future generations. However, he places a difficult burden on the

Afro-Guyanese narrator who cannot ―make a new country for a new age‖ when he is trapped by the discourses of those within and outside his homeland. Edward Said states in Orientalism that ―knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control‖ (36). While these narrators have attained knowledge through books, it is questionable whether they have achieved power along with such knowledge. One is accepted into a Western institution, while the other, after the completion of his project in England, returns back to Guyana. Similar to the Afro-Guyanese narrator who uses technical tools to navigate through life, one wonders if the other will employ Western literary rhetoric to make his way in the world. However, these Western tools can easily slip into anti-colonial strategies that destabilize the colonial institutions. Even though one claims he has no past, he is still given the task to rebuild the empire wishing at the end that it would crumble into the sea; in contrast, the other understands that Western academic pursuits create opportunities for him to respond back to the colonial motherland.

The narrator in The Intended remaps the Asian diaspora with his relationships with Muslims, Hindus, West Indians, and Blacks. Each one is part of the construction of his identity that provides a way for him to achieve his academic dream. The narrator of Disappearance simply disappears without knowledge or care of his identity. It appears that the Afro-Guyanese narrator has little desire to tackle the complexities of his past; however, in the former novel, there is a lively discussion among various ethnic

126 groups about colonial ―mess‖ and cultural experiences. The Afro-Guyanese narrator may not know how to contemplate his African roots, similar to the Indo-Guyanese who can only reflect on India, but he still has an immediate past in the Caribbean. Dabydeen dresses him up as a professional, a man of status, but nothing more is done with him.

The Afro-Guyanese mission is set in the future tense, but that too is lost without a past antecedent. While their journeys are not an everyman passage, Dabydeen clearly privileges one path over the other in which he carries over some of the racial differences within his native soil to the colonial motherland. Nevertheless, the homeland and the motherland cannot be separated, and, once outside of their native land, Guyana becomes an ―imagined‖ place where memories recreate the desire of home, nation, and livelihood.

Section 2. Remembering the Homeland from the Colonial Motherland

While both narrators are seemingly ―lost‖ in England, it is the pull of cultural roots and remembering of their homeland that keeps them from being perpetual wanderers in the colonial motherland. The questions of home, what it stands for those in shifting historical transit, to whom is it available, whether it changes, and if it exists at all are central to those writing in diaspora. The narrators‘ passages through England are often offset by memories of Guyana and the ghosts that continue to haunt them. For the Indo-Guyanese narrator, Guyana is often romanticized through hyperbolized tales of lost fathers, rum shop spectacles, and village scandals. For the Afro-Guyanese, Guyana is a land without a past, a familiar wasteland, yet, the ghosts of history continue to follow him in England. By interweaving memories of Guyana into both their narratives, the homeland is brought from the margin to the center within their

127 consciousness. Both narrators often flashback to Guyana to counter the experiences they come across in the colonial motherland. In doing so, they reimagined Guyana as a place with purpose that anchors them to a home space.

Faced with a treeless cold of Balham, the Indo-Guyanese narrator conjures memories of tropical trees and village life to offset the rotting vegetation and emptiness that exist in England. Childhood memories of Guyana tend to disrupt the adolescent experiences in Bedford. After moving through the cold platform and withdrawn journey within the London subway, the narrator immediately remembers his travels in

Guyana from New Amsterdam to Albion Village. When the narrator leaves Guyana, he is told to ―‗Go and don‘t look back…or else Albion ghosts go follow you all the way to

Englan‘‖ (Dabydeen, TI 53). However, England exists in Guyana before the narrator even arrives in London. Mark Stein states that, in a sense, the ―narrator had already been at his destination in Albion Village; he had already arrived in England (having historically been a part of it) before his departure‖ (151). The narrator situates himself in Englishness as his passages within Guyana are marked by British influences. His mother would place him in buses named ―Duke of Kent,‖ ―Royal Princess,‖

―Westminster,‖ and so forth as he travels from town to the countryside. The journeys between villages are taken in the names of British icons that are commodified into dingy vehicles packed with passengers all making their way home. In these tight spaces, there is no shame for the spectacle of ―live chickens with their legs tied together to bunches of ripe bananas‖ (Dabydeen, TI 18) that accompanies the travelers. In

London, passenger etiquette on the underground subway reflects the restrained English taste as the international community within the train ―could not talk to each other

128 openly in the way people in Asia or the Caribbean offered greetings or waved hands…‖

(16). In Guyana, the narrator vividly remembers the sights from the buses as ―mud houses, many sporting Hindu flags or reds and whites in their yards….mothers beating clothes on the canal banks…young men gathered in the forecourts of rum shops slapping down dominoes‖ (18). Even in poverty, there is beauty and vitality that exists in this landscape.15 This liveliness is immediately contrasted to the sterility that exists in

London, a place where:

people cared nothing for family, dumping their parents in old people‘s

homes, marrying and breeding and divorcing and bequeathing the

children to the welfare, abusing their own kids or abducting other

people‘s; where every Sunday saw churches empty and the pubs packed

with dart-throwing louts relaxing from the hooliganism of the football

match the day before, building their strength for next Sunday‘s warfare.

(19)

The images of live market goods, red and white religious flags, coconut branches used as bats in cricket games are juxtaposed to the ―touting and bawling sounds‖ of market traders, ―canals of filthy water‖ (20), and prostitutes lining the streets of Bedford Hill.

South London is a place where the narrator feels sorry for himself—a place without his family or home. Morality becomes a commercial value rather than a cultural merit; a place where Allah and sex can be uttered in one sentence. In these times of loneliness, the narrator figuratively returns back to Guyana.

The narrator‘s memories of Guyana are either filtered or romanticized through selected recollections to counter the emptiness he feels in London. He hints at the

129 violence of women, including his own mother, the abuse of rum, and his absent father; however, his ongoing memories are centered on his visits to his grandparents‘ home in

Albion Village, which is a place where he feels a sense of community. When he arrives, his grandmother bathes him, feeds him, and his grandfather after returning home digs into his pockets and ―dug out a golden-apple, a few loose guenips and some dounze‖ (Dabydeen, TI 25).16 There is an uncertainty of the authenticity of these colorful memories as the narrator admits, speaking of his grandfather, that:

This is how I remembered him, but perhaps in the treeless cold of

Bedford Hill, vegetation rotting in the gutter and the whores climbing in

and out of motorcars, I fabricated his memory, and his stick becomes a

wand which with one wave conjures up a dream world of jamoon tree

and tropical fruit whose tastes are not, like a magician‘s trick, still fresh

in my mouth. Perhaps I am still dreaming in the hammock and the last

day I saw him, when my mother sent me to Albion for the last time

before taking me to the airport and the plane for England, never existed

except as a romance of the mind. (25)

The tropical village becomes a fictionalized space through fractured memories to combat the cold reality that exists in England. Whether imagined or not, in his final morning in Albion, his grandfather takes him on a journey through the mud and bushes in which the ground ―was hard and painful to walk over‖ (26); his grandfather easily glides over the land, ―his feet hardened by a lifetime of such journeys‖ (26). When spending time with his grandmother, he remembers the lazy afternoons of combing her hair, and the ―cracked…soles of her feet‖ (30); even though she has never traveled out

130 of the village, her ―feet mapped all the pathways of the world‖ (30). These two pairing of memories of his grandparents are significant in several ways. Firstly, the cracked soles of their feet are emblematic of hard labor each endures and of the diasporic journeys from India to Guyana. Each passage is marked on their body as reminders that while they may not have traveled outside their small village, their journeys, historically, have been just as long and wide. Secondly, these memories are ones in which the narrator feels part of a community. The lazy afternoons and adventures with his grandfather are questionable as to whether they happened or not; nonetheless, the details of the village with houses that are brightly painted and colored flags on bamboo poles distinguishing the Hindu houses from the Muslims indicate a vivacious place that intersect and counter the images of a wasteland that are often portrayed of the

Caribbean.17

While the narrator‘s memories of Guyana might be filtered, and somewhat idealized, the inhabitants of the village are just as susceptible to the fantasies of England and their own village life. The narrator is given a gift from Auntie Clarice‘s garden to take with him so that when he sees a white man, he can present this gift to him and say it‘s from ―Albion Village, Berbice, Guyana, South America, all the way across the

Ocean…and that he and he race must be kind to you and we, for all body on dis earth is one God‘s people, not true?‖ (Dabydeen, TI 32). Auntie Clarice imagines England as a tolerant place where her gift will produce acceptance of the narrator and by extension all Guyanese people. Moreover, the notoriously stingy shopkeeper uncorks a bottle filled with toffees and gives the narrator a handful as a gift to take to England (50).

Later, his friend Peter is immersed in the make-believe stories that the narrator shares

131 with him of Rohan Kanhai18 and the signed pictures he would get for him once he arrived in England. When Peter‘s father disappears, his whereabouts become common talk among villagers as they are more interested in the imaginary stories of legendary proportions rather than the reality that he basically left his wife and children. These tales of the daily lives of those in the villages are not simply entertaining. They validate the culture that exists through a creolized retelling. By acknowledging these stories, the narrator subverts his use of Standard English by using a Creole19 language that speaks of the dislocation and oppressions of history. Moreover, Creole memories and Black voices, as Tobias Döring states, will continue to ―assert themselves and threaten [the narrator‘s] project of complete Anglicization‖ (118). Later in London, the narrator wonders what has become of Peter, of his grandparents, and Albion Village. The letters he receives from his mother hints in a sentence or two of their realities as they line up in queue to get flour, the certainties of deaths, and the state of debilitating houses; however, his response is equally as dismissive as he writes about his own heightened fantasy of living in a government owned apartment and procuring Michael Caine20 in a film he is producing to mask the reality of his own dismal condition in England. In both locations, the act of retelling and recreating memories are necessary as survival tactics to endure harsh conditions.

The narrator is constantly at odds on how to tell, how to remember, and how to reinvent the memories of Guyana. At one point, the narrator holds up two letters, one a formal letter of admission to Oxford, the other a letter from his mother. The letter from

Guyana is written by his mother in ―struggling English, the verb-tenses mixed up so that

[he] couldn‘t figure past from present from future‖ (Dabydeen, TI 152). He suddenly

132 becomes a stranger to his own native land: ―The white people‘s names on our streets…stand out and make no sense. And my sisters are strangers, I don‘t know them.

I have forgotten what my mother looks like…‖ (152). William Boelhower argues that the ―poignancy of the scene lies in the boy‘s sense of being away from home so long that he has perhaps become an outsider‖ (131). As he looks at both letters, each becomes a mirror of his past and his future, of which he cannot reconcile. When he tries to think of his mother writing, his mind goes blank, and his memories become skewed. He remembers vividly the trees in the front yard, the domestic duties his mother performs each day, but cannot picture her ―with a pen in hand‖ (Dabydeen, TI

152). The intimate lives of his family, of which the letter could have been written by a sister or a neighbor, is blurred, and all clues of her appearance in the ―twist and curls of letters‖ (152), is blocked out of his memory. It is only when he recalls climbing into trees can he reposition his mother in the narrative as she scolds him to come down

(Boelhower 131). The everyday mundane activities of eating fruits, hunting for crabs, climbing trees are ―random memories of iterative value that stand against the semantically empty alternative of ‗certain exotic recollections of Guyana‘‖ (128).

When he is asked directly by his white girlfriend Janet to speak of Guyana, he states:

―my mind went blank. It was somehow impossible to talk about Albion Village‖

(Dabydeen, TI 87). Instead, he nibbles on chocolate biscuits and talks about London

(88). His act does not negate Guyana for London; rather, he chooses not to participate in the familiar rhetoric that describes his homeland as a place of superstitions and archaic splendors. For him, stories of devotion to Kali worship seem ―so ridiculous and misplaced in the setting of traffic, bricks, and whites‖ (91). Moreover, it plays on the

133 colonial fantasy of Guyana as El Dorado—a land of fable and plenty. While he does not tell her any stories, he remembers. Instead of exotic images, the narrative returns to gritty reality as he recalls a conversation with his grandmother about widespread hunger and riots happening everywhere. As a substitute of recalling a formal definition of his mother (such as her education), the narrator remembers a home space, in which ―Home, then, represents a form of toposophy which is responsible for shaping the boy‘s character and identity‖ (Boelhower 131).

These random recollections and obvious omissions center on the desire for

―Home.‖ The diasporic identity of immigrants is subject to a changing geographic position; the crossing of borders—from India to British Guiana and from Guyana to

England—opens up the meaning of ―home.‖ The narrator appears to be seeking a home space that has been displaced through his diasporic journeys. Abandoned by his father in London, he invents memories of his village life to feel a sense of community; by doing so, he creates the ideals of a home in the motherland. When handed over to the care of England‘s welfare system referred to as ―The Home,‖ he arrives with his humble belongings in plastic bags. For a while, his diversion to this unbearable place is through his colorful visions of his home in Albion village. He longs for the ―sense of belonging‖ (Dabydeen, TI 172) when he imagines being in Janet‘s home. The idea of a

West Indian‘s home ―as some stable, geographically fixed location becomes increasingly untenable…‖ (Griffith 11), especially when the ideals of ―home‖ is situated within a class hierarchy. Janet‘s parents send her to a fee-paying school. Additionally, her father is an engineer; whereas, the narrator‘s father is nowhere to be seen. The narrator reflects:

134 Our lives were messy by contrast: families scattered across the West,

settling in one country or another depending on the availability of visas;

we lived from hand to mouth, hustling or thieving or working nightshifts

and sleeping daytime; we were ashamed of our past, frightened of the

present and not daring to think of the future. When I looked at the

images of her mother and father in their neat house and manicured

garden the first instinct was to inflict pain, to shatter the security of their

lives, for in some vague way I felt they were responsible for my own

disordered existence. (Dabydeen, TI 121)

This desire to inflict pain is a common reaction as with the shame of Nasim or Joseph‘s condition when he is faced with the reality of what he cannot have or does not desire.

This anger is understandable since his reality of a ―Home‖ is ―a prison for youth‖

(60)—a place in which boys are abandoned by their parents. These flights of fantasies of the past and those in it are more of a desire to anchor him to a home space, a place where he feels safe, loved, and cared for. His memories of Guyana, of his grandparents‘ house, and of the village may have a certain aura of romance, but the need to belong, and not to forget, keeps the homeland at the center of his consciousness.

In contrast, the narrator of Disappearance remembers Guyana as a place that has no past, a wasteland where the marks of history are constantly remade by other cultures.

Unlike the other narrator, this engineer does not romanticize the liveliness of the land or the people; instead, he places Guyana in a metaphorical darkness. Ironically, he returns to this land at the end, while the other narrator is locked away within the academic walls of Oxford University. He states that his ancestry is not subjected to colorful tales, but

135 faded so much that even the ―meaning of their blackness was lost‖ (Dabydeen, D 21).

He spends his life in Guyana not thinking of the past, but preparing for the future.

Guyana, he implies, does not have any marks for him. He ventures to England with a clear goal—to bring his professional knowledge to rebuild the walls of the coastal village. This prestigious opportunity of the Dunsmere Project is in stark contrast to the sea project in Guyana in which the land seems to be ―absent of data‖ (27) apart from a few Dutch bottles or Amerindian flints; whereas, there is ―nothing of [his] personal history in the history of Dunsmere, no evocations of past failures or broken intentions‖

(27). Although these historical relics, Dutch bottles and Amerindian flints, are buried, they still are an important part of his native land. While we have a colorful depiction of the everyday lives of those in Guyana by the Indo-Guyanese, the Afro-Guyanese inverts this lively view by portraying his home space as a wasteland. This gloomy perspective is evocative of earlier works of V.S. Naipaul such as Guerillas and Mimic Men, where

Naipaul‘s homeland of Trinidad is a place of decay seeped in ancestral pessimism. His characters prefer social marginality in London to the political denigration of their home state.

However, the unnamed narrator of Disappearance chooses to return to Guyana, a land he claims has no past, over remaining within the imperial center. His return is not a ceremonial gesture to uplift the land he has so often placed in darkness, but a place in which one can get lost in its wilderness. Guyana, he claims, has ―its own legacies of deceit and cruelty, but there was space to forget. The land was vast and empty enough to encourage new beginnings in obscure corners‖ (Dabydeen, D 156). What happens there in its history or to the people are ghosts of a forgotten past. He cannot see that the

136 same is true in England. Mrs. Rutherford tells him that the inhabitants of the village

―…are ghosts. There‘s only me and you and the sea-wall left, the only concrete certainties. Everything else has gone. Why not accept that?‖ (139). At one point

Christie states:

You pine for your dead wife, for your sister who has emigrated to Boston

or Australia, you pine for the job you once held down that paid enough

for the flashiest clothes and the flashiest women, that kind of

thing…Where have you been for the last hundred years? In the bush I

suppose. (144)

If the narrator did have a past, a wife, a sister, a good paying job, those memories are completely erased from the narrative. Like the Indo-Guyanese narrator, he has retained only selective memories of his homeland. Dabydeen places more of a burden on the

Afro-Guyanese narrator to contend with his past without definitive family or community. However, simple questions, sights or sounds, immediately return the Afro-

Guyanese‘s thoughts back to memories of Guyana. When asked by Mrs. Rutherford why he became an engineer, he remembers the people and his life in the local village, the antics of the local drunk Alfred, his act of breaking the lamp posts on the American built basketball court, and the rivalry with Jamal, a fellow student in his class. Like the

Indo-Guyanese, he remembers, but does not speak of these occurrences to his White audience. Unlike his counterpart, these random memories do not shape his character and identity. As he sits in Mrs. Rutherford‘s cottage remembering his lost faith in

Alfred, the rotting rims of the basketball nets, the ruination of Black people, he does not wonder what has become of those in his village; instead, he figuratively blinds his eye

137 to ―forget Swami, Alfred, Jamal and Mr. Leroy‖ (61). He is not seeking a home space to counter his loneliness, yet, Guyana remains central in his consciousness, a place where he can return to and forget his failures. ―Home‖ is revealed to be a highly complex locus as the narrator, despite his pessimism, discovers that in most cases widespread prejudice in a foreign land causes some nostalgia that is manifested through recollections of his place of origin. This is indeed a place that cannot be forgotten.

Guyana is subjected to either romantic afflictions or dark terrains. Both narrators‘ memories of their homeland are subject to the meanings of truth. In the loneliness of London, without a home or family, one narrator is forced to remember and fictionalize images of his past, while the other personifies the land as a place in darkness. Neither can escape the ghosts of the land. Mark Stein states that ―ghosts are deployed as much as those whom they haunt in the novel‘s diegesis. It is fitting then that the ghosts who are poised to follow the [Indo Guyanese] narrator to England are

‗Albion ghost,‘ that is, on one level, English ghosts‖ (151). The ghost of Swami, the dead coolie laborer, continues to haunt the Afro-Guyanese consciousness, like the death of Joseph by the other. Even though Guyana has no past, according to the Afro-

Guyanese narrator, the ―jumbies‖21 are still present in the ubiquitous presence of the colonizer, in the oral stories of villagers, and even in Dutch bottles buried deep in the jungle. In an interview with Wolfgang Binder, Dabydeen states that ―you cannot be

Guyanese without being British, and you cannot be British without being Guyanese or

Caribbean‖ (―Interview with David Dabydeen‖ 165). Both locations are not fixed against each other; rather, the experiences within those spaces are interrelated. England is present in Guyana prior to the flight abroad; likewise, memories of the homeland

138 disrupt the characters transformation into an anglophile within the colonial motherland.

The strong presence of the past and the power of these memories alter the image of

Guyana as a place without purpose. While the Indo-Guyanese chooses to stay in

England, he remembers stories of his village, portraying the vitality of the people while maintaining his creolized language in the telling of such tales. The Afro-Guyanese also bears in mind the antics of those in his Guyanese community, which prevents a complete erasure of his homeland. Despite the idealism of one narrator and the pessimism of another, the homeland is not a static space steeped in political, economic, and racial turmoil. Rather, it is a re-imagined place where all Guyanese in exile can metaphorically or literally return to for comfort to offset the ―mess‖ that surrounds them in a foreign location.

Section 3. A Divided England—the Cosmopolitan Metropolis and the Dying

Empire

In both novels, memories of Guyana are central in the narrators‘ consciousness within the colonial motherland. In fact, England is split into two worlds—a cosmopolitan center where money is attainable through illicit business transactions and a crumbing Empire hidden within a small coastal village where the old ideas of British imperialism reverberates in the lives of the residents. Both are places of violence; however, its claim on each narrator has opposite results. The Indo-Guyanese narrator is faced with real aggression on the mean streets in Belham as he and his friends maneuver through the dangers of street crime, drugs, prostitution, and racial prejudices.

On the other hand, the Afro-Guyanese narrator is haunted by the ghosts of colonial violence. Confined to a crumbing coastal village, the Afro-Guyanese narrator is

139 confronted with reconciling the story book images of England and its fading history as reflected in the cottage, the coastline, and the inhabitants within this village.

In The Intended, the narrator lives within the center of the colonial state in

London. For immigrants, it is a ―world of uncertain citizenship, dole queues, ever- hostile Whites and shop-lifting blacks, shabby council flats overrun by pimps and drug addicts‖ (Dabydeen, TI 98). The desire for easy money, unabashed sexuality, and prostitution emanates in all corners. Everywhere the narrator turns, he is faced with shame because of the lack of morality in which those of his own race are forced to live, not to mention, the drunken state of people seemingly trying to find a way through the darkness. When Joseph attempts to make a film to honor the death of an immigrant, his vision of England is an idea, according to the narrator, which is highly ambitious. The film is a statement on the condition of England where ―no verbal commentaries nor connecting narrative [are stated]…‖ (113). The camera, he contends, will capture a

―blackened tramp lying drunkenly in the grass,‖ (113) while other conventional images are reinterpreted as, ―Queen Elizabeth and her bejeweled crown were replaced by a

Rastafarian with locks sprouting under a red, green and yellow beret‖ (114). This symbolic oppression is usually used to mark otherness; however, Joseph offers up

―White‖ culture as taboo and a threat. Such radical action within the film does not require a vocal commentary to be poignant. When asked about the story behind these images, Joseph states that it is the experience of immigration: ―the ants were West

Indians laden with suitcases landing on the tarmac of England, and the nostrils were the interrogation lounges at Heathrow‖ (114). The film becomes another language to show future generations of the ―journey, loss, rejection and death not by describing particular

140 episodes or characters but by using what he called ‗a set of open-ended symbols‘‖

(115). This jargon impresses the narrator, but the ―symbolic crossings‖ as reflected in the film becomes a semi-translucent screen that blurs artistic flair with the gritty conditions that immigrants have to endure. In other words, these rich signs are poetic rather than prosaic. The imaginative mixing of art and reality is not available to any audience not because of the highly poetic flair, but simply because Joseph gives up on the project. Moreover, the narrator also strives to honor the death of Mrs. Ali in poetic form by writing a poem; nonetheless, the act of writing reminds him of ―Nasim in his hospital bed, and the image of his helpless, immigrant body punctured a last attempt to soar poetically‖ (112). The attempts to capture the realities of the metropolitan in artistic forms—films and poems—cannot fully articulate the ―messiness‖ and the shame of urban life.

Just as immigrants are often placed on a figurative soap-box for commercial viewing, the location of Bedford Hill is reduced to a peep show for its inhabitants who want to satisfy their curiosity for the unknown, the exotic, and the available marketable product. Growing up in London, the narrator states that they are all inundated with

―images of sex, which had no bearing on morality, or indeed any kind of value at all, apart from the commercial‖ (Dabydeen, TI 19). The streets are littered with sex shops as proprietors call out ―their wares of peepshow girls, striptease, videos, toys‖ (125).

His meager offerings in placing money in a slot to view salacious women cannot afford the narrator a look at London‘s sleaze and cheap thrills. When Janet goes away for her studies, the narrator confesses: ―It‘s a new beginning for you, a new, clean country.

England is so messy and violent and drugged up, everything is going to pot‖ (emphasis

141 added, 170). The immigrant learns quickly that everything in the country is about money. Sex is a casual necessity like food and water—―everybody needs it and a lot of people will pay good money for it‖ (133). A bright Asian boy, such as Patel, is quickly transformed into a ―peddler of pornography‖ (135), shifting his interest from educational pursuits to salacious business ventures. Patel sees the power of money as he states, ―any monkey can make money, once you learn the trick. Soon we‘ll have more than them and England will be one tribe of Patels‖ (173).22 In this mixing pot, the

English identity is liable to change as ―English people will have names like Lucinda

Patel and Egbert Smythe-Patel‖ (173). The fathering of these half-bred children dilutes the pure colonial heritage of the imperial center. Moreover, it indicates that these children can claim both power and knowledge over Whites and minorities. Fittingly stated, Patel proclaims, ―Just because you ain‘t got a mother don‘t mean that England will mother you‖ (173).23 The motherland offers no comfort to her colonized children, but that does not mean that her children have to be miserable and malnourished. Within the celebrated metropolis, there are various cultural groups who ―enjoyed only a

‗market relationship‘ with each other, as ‗people of African, Asian and European backgrounds increasingly meet only where they buy and sell commodities‘‖ (McLeod

159). From a marginal position, minorities are marketing themselves and the dominant culture at the very center. Dabydeen, as a contemporary writer, is addressing the shifting postcolonial condition within a capitalistic enterprise. Certainly within the local space of London, global inhabitants are disrupting borders and boundaries in a world where capital and people are in constant motion.

142 These ―transcultural conjunctions‖ (164) in London are, as John McLeod proclaims, ―aquatic metaphors‖ (165). The journey in trains, buses, and within the streets of Belham recreate the ―passages from India to Britain, or India to the Caribbean to Britain, the long journeys of a previous century across unknown sea towards the shame of plantation labour‖ (Dabydeen, TI 16). The waterways within the metropolis are untidy and tainted as the narrator cleans the dirty contents lodged in the water of the

World Cruise attraction. This carnival boat ride provides a journey through the recognizable images of the global world from A to Z. Moreover, the water ride is evident of the city‘s racial tensions (McLeod 165), as ―[s]omeone had scrawled ‗nigger out‘ on [a black woman‘s] body and had drawn a fat penis pointed at her mouth‖

(Dabydeen, TI 59). It is the task of the young narrator to ―clean up‖ the waterway, but this ―general quest for purity [positions] him at odds with London‘s contemporaneity‖

(McLoed 166). The filth left by the travelers through their virtual global journey is symbolic of a larger diasporic travel over water. Instead of dying black and brown bodies, the narrator is left with the task to clean ―scum of decaying popcorn‖ as the

―smell of unclean water [fills his] nostrils‖ (Dabydeen, TI 58). Within the small scale virtual world of the World Cruise, London ―contains or embraces ‗the world‘ not just as a demographic, historical, or economic fact but as a flattened-out, shrunk-down image of virtual access‖ (Ball 167).

In contrast, the ―aquatic metaphor‖ of the sea is marked as an adversary that the

Afro-Guyanese narrator seeks to conquer in Disappearance: ―For fifteen years I had done battle with the sea, but in all that time I was never afraid of it or possessed by a sense of its malice‖ (Dabydeen, D 21). It gives him a sense of power that he could,

143 with calculated measurements, harness these natural forces: ―How feeble were our strategies to colonise the land compared to the sea‘s ambition. How to shackle it with modern tools was the challenge before me, how to enslave it to my will and make it work for me‖ (23). Such words as ―shackle‖ and ―enslave‖ evoke images of the Middle

Passage by which his ancestors made such a perilous journey. Differing from the murky waters of the comical World Cruise, the treacherous water below the coastal cliffs threatens to not only destroy those who cross these waters to land in the

Caribbean, but also the English who resides in the imperial Empire. The sea is personified as a ―disturbed patient pacing his room, or fidgeting within a straight- jacket‖ (85). This allusion to madness is a common trope in Guyanese literature.

However, the sea is likened to the madness of British colonial exploits that still resonates as a powerful reminder of the trafficking of bodies over such treacherous waters. It reminds the narrator of the English ―sickness‖ (89) for the wilderness, the dark continents, and the transport of thousands to distant lands. He observes that the water reddened by the ores, embedded in the rocks, as the cliff grows wider ―staining the white face of the cliff. It looked painfully wounded, the victim of some gross abuse‖ (128). These images stir up the physical and sexual violations of both East

Indians and Africans in which the British metaphorically still have blood on their hands.

As the wind and sea ―finger it,‖ the narrator is ―helpless to offer protection‖ (128). This aquatic metaphor is not visible through a commercial ride for cheap thrills, but through a larger force that unsettles the narrator, from the powerful history of violence to the greed that can wipe out nations and populations. Whether the migrant disappeared in the darkness for a cheap fifteen minute ride or was lost in the unforgiving sea from

144 Africa and India, the results are the same—he is thrown into the metaphorical wave that continues to dissolve and defile his history. Either is he left to clean these ―dirty‖ waterways or build sea defenses that ironically place both narrators in a position of authority by controlling, to some degree, the voyages that are currently underway.

John Clement Ball argues in Imagining London that ―Postcolonial novels reflect the relational aspects of place-identity by representing London not as a discrete, stand- alone place but as a site intimately linked to and filtered through images of (former) colonial landscapes‖ (29). These external frames, he proclaims, represent home and childhood. In both novels, Britain constantly prompts imaginary trips back into memories of Guyana, ―thereby making the West Indian migrant feel more psychologically complete in a metropolis that fragments identity‖ (29). Nonetheless, the comfort of a bearable metropolitan experience is not unformed. By using London as a place where ―personal and collective identity can be productively interrogated…the

West Indian novelists present London as an increasingly borderless and global space‖

(173). This ―heart of the empire‖ becomes a network of global relations—a transnational space and a possible counter-narrative to English whiteness as it represent the cosmopolitanism of the empire and its post-imperial relationships. In both novels, there is a bi-polar navigation between the metropolitan center and the imperial margin on the geographical outskirts of England. The Indo-Guyanese narrator moves from a tropical landscape to a treeless environment where his identity is no longer juxtaposed to his Afro-Guyanese counterpart. Instead, the cosmopolitan mixture in the metropolis of various ethnic groups and diasporic journeys are within commercial trains and subways.24 The Indo-Guyanese narrator is constantly seen traveling through South

145 London, and the ―portrayal of spatial practices such as dwelling, walking, working, and riding public transport…shows the enabling and disabling aspects of West Indian metropolitan life‖ (23). This is an evolving space that is constantly subjected to the inevitable social mixtures and encounters. It includes the remapping of the South Asian diaspora; however, these encounters are not without social and racial mishaps. The metropolitan is not simply a space of hostile strangers, but a site of possibility through the renewing of self, as the Indo-Guyanese strives for better opportunities and the surprising friendships of Blacks and Indians, Hindus and Muslims. However, when another narrator moves from the metropolis to the outskirts, a dying England lays crumbling as it becomes resistant to change.

When the Afro-Guyanese narrator of Disappearance arrives at a small coastal village in England, the gardens and walkways are engineered in a spectacle of colors and shapes. Mrs. Rutherford‘s cottage is a hybrid space, traditionally English with carefully cultivated gardens, but on the walls are shrines of ―fetished savagery‖ (Davey

158). The image of gentle cottages nestled within manicured lawns is immediately contrasted with the savageness of the African artifacts in Mrs. Rutherford‘s home. This small village is set in time, emblematic of the African masks on her wall. Everything, even the flowers in the garden, is rooted in English history; nonetheless, this history, like the cliff, is on the brink of crumbling into the sea. Mrs. Rutherford states: ―That‘s why I‘ve kept the garden, I suppose, to remind me of their Englishness, their cruelty.

It‘s the most English thing I can do…I wanted an African to arrive and disrupt the place, perhaps one of the children I used to teach so long ago, a devil in the garden‖

(emphasis added, Dabydeen, D 140).25 Almost Biblically, she desires him to be the

146 temptation that unravels British pretenses of innocence. When the narrator remarks that the names of the flowers seemed ―so essentially English‖ (66), she replies that it ―‗is quite contrary. You have a colonial‘s sense of this place, that‘s all‘‖ (66), in which he is blinded to the dirt that lies below the surface. Though this Kentish village mirrors in appearance the English storybooks the narrator read as a child, he comes to distrust the

―brightly coloured pictures…and other characters who gave such order to England‖

(75). What continues to grow in this village are the weeds as the cliffs start to crumble, as houses decay, and inhabitants fade, disappearing from sight as quickly as they appear without any social interaction with each other. Similar to his depictions of Guyana, the narrator portrays England as a wasteland in contrast to the rosy images from picture books. By returning to Guyana, he places more hope and redemption in his native land rather than this colonial space.

Unlike the metropolis where moral corrosion is visible, this decay is hidden from the outside world: ―Dunsmere…was preserved from the world outside its boundaries; the perilous state of the cliff meant that no one wanted to invest in property‖ (Dabydeen, D 86). Below the surface of this quiet village is a violent past, buried, but still palpable. Mrs. Rutherford states, ―The history of England is a nasty business…It‘s the English sickness. We carried it all over the world. Boatload of ivory or boatload of black bodies, it was all the same‖ (86). This sickness is hidden under the gentle facade of English kindness. When the Afro-Guyanese narrator contends that he is only here to do work, Mrs. Rutherford quickly reminds him that this is the doom of his people who were shipped to the Caribbean to be laborers. The white woman challenges him to reflect on England and all its imperial enterprises. In the shell of the

147 empire, not the center, are the ghosts of a past that haunt him from the masks on the walls to the delicate flowers in the garden. The palpable silence and order of the village covers the violence hidden beneath, an ―English sickness‖ (86), that the inhabitants have become ―immune to‖ (87). Likewise, the narrator resists this illness by protecting himself from being drawn into such conversations and from engaging on how those of his race were marked, displayed, and abused by the very people who inhibit this small village. Without visible Caribbean inhabitants, or other minorities for that matter, he is left alone, in which he finds it is better to protect himself from the constant barrage of

Mrs. Rutherford.

When the Afro-Guyanese narrator journeys to London, his impressions are far from the messy world of Shaz, Patel, Nasim, and Joseph in The Intended. He recognizes himself in the thousand of Black figures, but their lives are boxed up in concrete brick buildings in which he is doubtful they could understand the ―mythic power of the garden which had drawn them here, a garden they could never possess, being holed up in poverty and city slums‖ (Dabydeen, D 68). England, the fragrant garden, the colorful storybook, the lyrical name is packaged and sold as an idea and he apparently is the only one who is buying. The reality lies in the unreal truth of ―rows upon rows of tower blocks flowering from asphalt and garbage‖ (68). Instead of a messy recognizable image of London, those living there, including his own people, become ―all grey together, all dull‖ (70). Similar to the wisdom of Swami, Mrs.

Rutherford warns the narrator about the dangers of following a straight line. She states:

There‘s the sinuous, the curved, the circular, the zigzagged, the

unpredictable, the zany, the transcendental and the invisibly buried.

148 There are stories enough in the brick houses, crooked and abrupt stories

that contradict their seamless straight line. The tower blocks are

perfectly vertical to your engineering eyes, but they‘re drunk and blurred

with human stories. And I‘ve already told you the garden I plant is a

wilderness…. (70)

Whatever these stories may be about lies buried like everything else in the country.

Mrs. Rutherford‘s criticism is applicable to Dabydeen who resists telling the complete story of this Afro-Guyanese character. In The Intended, it is clear that there are numerous stories within these tower rows of asphalt and garbage, as in Patel (Hindu),

Shaz (Muslim), Joseph (Rastafarian), and the Indo-Guyanese narrator (Caribbean), yet, all the Afro-Guyanese has to say of London is that it is all dull and grey together.

Where are the other contending stories to counter this Afro-Guyanese‘s impressions?

London contains little memories of the past as inhabitants are constantly subjected to current regional preoccupations, cultural influences, and multiple personal experiences, while in rural Dunsmere recollections are unsettling as the past occupies the present atmosphere. History is preserved, and the narrator comes to feel, as a West Indian, he could not rest here. Even though the villagers looked hard at him, from their curtains or in person, it made no difference. He is still invisible as he acknowledges, ―[my] face would remain in their minds as alien and imperturbable as the expressions on the masks.

It was not that they ignored me, it was just that there was nothing to acknowledge‖

(117). Ironically, his presence is just as vacant to the reader.

The narrator wants to shake up this sleepy town to uncover the mysteries of the past: of disappearances of residents, of the affairs of Mrs. Rutherford, of the fate of her

149 husband Jack; nonetheless, its history is impenetrable. Maybe because there is nothing left to uncover—simply stone and sand: ―Perhaps that was all that was left of

England—a faint sense of mystery, enough to twitch your nose; a damp and musty smell, like the books lining the shelves of Mrs. Rutherford‘s cottage….the Empire had ended and what was left was palsied decay, like the state of the cliff‖ (Dabydeen, D

118). When Mrs. Rutherford gives him the file of letters and newspaper clippings that attempt to answer his questions about her liaisons with others in the village and the nature of the cliff project, he is disappointed that all England has to offer him is a

―seedy narrative of adultery and civic squabbles‖ (137). Indeed, a pulp novel of sorts.

Unlike the metropolis where seedy alliances are turned into commercial profit by the locals in the village, this scandalous narrative is symbolic of the conquests of England in the high day of the Empire. Without any concrete answers as to the material makeup of the village inhabitants, Mrs. Rutherford gives the narrator some agency to create the story of England with the same abandonment as England used to describe and dominate the narrator‘s lot (140). Even though the colonizer‘s sins are obvious, he could not accuse her or England of their crime against his country, his ancestors, and his ancestral land. This is his pivotal moment to speak directly to the Empire, but he says nothing.

Like Miriam‘s final utterance to Gladstone in Dabydeen‘s The Counting House, it is equally problematic that when given a final say to speak back to history of the wrongs of the colonizer, the Afro-Guyanese cannot create any counter narratives; rather, his stories remain just as isolated and empty as the crumbling Empire within the countryside.

150 The metropolis and the coastal village of England are diametrically opposite in both novels—one is a commercial center of corruption, while the other is a collapsing

Empire. The Indo-Guyanese experiences poverty, corruption, greed in South London, but these social ills are re-appropriated by the immigrant community who used the commercial greed of the British to make money. The metropolis is a marketable enterprise in which one is rewarded with easy money or a better social position through the work ethic. However, in the coastal village, the once glorious Empire lay in ruins in the margins. The Victorian image of the countryside as a place of timeless purity becomes tainted. The Afro-Guyanese is given the impossible task of saving the town from the crumbling cliffs. The Empire‘s faith ironically lies in the hand of one of the descendant of former slaves. That hope of reconciliation disappears along with the narrator: ―I regretted that I had made it and half wished that the sea would breach it, break it down to meek pebbles‖ (Dabydeen, D 154). What is left is an England that is changing: from the center, the Indo Guyanese endures through the corruption and moral filth; from the margins, the Afro-Guyanese disappears within the palpable imperial history buried within the countryside. Even though he seeks educational pursuits, the Indo-Guyanese narrator is lonely in this environment while the Afro-

Guyanese, despite his professional endowment, cannot reside peacefully in the countryside. Guyana materializes through their memories as the place for redemption, community, and belonging; on the other hand, England emerges as a space of capitalistic pursuits and colonial enterprise. By pairing the memories of Guyana with the history of England, Dabydeen privileges his native soil over the colonial motherland. However, he positions the Afro-Guyanese in a dying countryside in which

151 the Guyanese African vanishes; whereas, the other narrator is situated within a bustling metropolis with the intention to create something new. It is not surprising given their contentious history that the Afro-Guyanese‘s narrative is aptly titled Disappearance, while the other remains ―the intended‖ whose successes reaffirm the social elevation of his Indo-Guyanese community.

Section 4. “The Conquest of the Earth is not a Pretty Thing”—the Intertextual

Play on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Both novels engage in an intertextual dialogue with Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of

Darkness, as the unnamed narrators, within their journey through England, are confronted with the colonial legacy of power and conquest. Joseph, the Black, illiterate

‗other,‘ attempts to undercut the dominant canonical text. Like Marlow‘s fascination with Kurtz, Joseph is the Indo-Guyanese narrator‘s moral test; his eventual desire to forget the horrors that Joseph preaches is equivalent to Marlow‘s lie to Kurtz‘s Intended on his endeavors in the Congo. Joseph, the Indo-Guyanese narrator, and by extension the South Asian community are both at odds on how to interpret the consequences of a colonial enterprise while situated in the heart of ―whiteness‖ within England.

Moreover, the metropolitan center dissolves into a ―whited sepulcher‖(Conrad 13)26 as

Mrs. Rutherford exposes the dehumanizing effects of altruistic exploits within the countryside in Disappearance. The naïve Intended in Heart of Darkness is rewritten as an older white woman who has traveled to Africa and refuses to be silent on the costs of exploitation. Her telling is not to her fellow Englishman, but to an Afro-Guyanese.

This narrator is free to question both Mrs. Rutherford‘s narratives and the authority of the books on her shelf. He is sent by an Englishman, Professor Fenwick, to rebuild the

152 crumbling stones of the Empire only to discover that ―beneath the pastoral idyll of rural

England a horror of darkness lies buried‖ (Mitchell 297). Dunsmere is regarded as a place in which it ―might as well be a village in the Congo‖ (Dabydeen, D 105). Both narrators cannot evade the darkness, be it in colonial conquest, racial prejudice, or through the fascination with Englishness. They are not venturing, like Marlow, to the darkest place on Earth, but wandering through the unknown ―blank spaces‖ (Conrad

11)27 of England itself.

While reading Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness for his A Level literature exam, the

Indo-Guyanese narrator‘s Rastafarian28 friend, Joseph, offers a counter discourse to the traditional critiques of symbols and themes. Like Kurtz, Joseph desires for others to see. He claims if one has a vision, then one does not need eyes. However, the vision during the heyday of the British Empire was clear--the idea of enlightenment, glory, and greed. Nonetheless, Joseph‘s desire to do better than Conrad by ―recreat[ing] a feel of the African landscape‖ (Dabydeen, TI 80) is questionable. He attempts to reinvent the Congo in the middle of London through the World Cruise—a cheap carnival ride.

His journey into the Congo is reduced to a sordid fairground ride. By filming the stereotypical images on the wall of the World Cruise ride, he further codifies the painted scenes of Africa as a savage and vaguely familiar place. On one hand, he attempts to recreate the canonical text through film; on the other hand, he reduces

Africa to a squalid backdrop—one that eliminates the human factor of Africans.

This duality is depicted in the images on the World Cruise ride which is lit with red lamps to create a magical journey. This image is a play on the gloomy twilight in which Marlow narrates his journey through the Congo to his fellow listeners. Instead of

153 being in the company of professionals as on the Nellie (the ship Marlow sails on), this ride attracts young lovers and teenagers looking for a cheap place in the dark where in fifteen minutes, they can ―cast off their superfluous clothing‖ (Dabydeen, TI 58).

Guyana is not present in the global ABCs geography on the wall as proprietors look straight to (I)ndia for brown skin history. In fading paint, the exotic images of ―Indian princesses‖ and ―tiger cub‖ represent what Edward Said states as an orientalized view of the subcontinent. As a counterpoint, these images, ―steeped in artificiality, pokes fun at the seriousness of Marlow‘s metaphorical journey into the heart of darkness…by juxtaposing a sober Marlow with the garbage-collecting narrator of The Intended‖

(Stein 164). Once in Africa, the scenes from the World Cruise confirm the imperial fascination of Africans as these crude images project the ways they howl and leap as horrid faces as in the Heart of Darkness:

…five naked black men squatting or throwing spears after a zebra. They

wore necklaces made out of the teeth of animals and each had a bone

running through his nostrils. A black woman with full breasts and

gleaming thighs carried a pot on her head. Another sat on a donkey so

oddly—her buttocks merged into its flank—that it seemed she was

having some kind of bizarre sex with it. (Dabydeen, TI 59)29

These images, as Stuart Hall states, are the subject of a ―widespread fantasy‖ (―The

Spectacle of the ‗Other‘‖ 230) in which cultures are on display. This carnival ride plays on the popular fascination with otherness of Asians and Africans eliciting no critical response from those traveling through this virtual ride. It is simply a dark, secret place

154 of personal gratification, to which the same can be said of Kurtz‘s journey through the

Congo.

Joseph and the narrator look at these crude images in abhorrence as Joseph finally attempts to alter the landscape. Evocative of Chinua Achebe,30 he seeks to re- appropriate the ―haze of distortions and cheap mystification‖ (Achebe 261) of Africa.

He tampers with the scene by painting a white man firing a gun while ―sucking on a bone‖ (Dabydeen, TI 82) who takes his place among the savages. The narrator believes this white man is Kurtz; thus, the narrative reintroduces him back into the colonial enterprise, while two other small white men tug at ivory tusks symbolizing their greed.

Instead of naturalizing differences, Joseph opens the colonial exploits of white culture to modification. By doing so, he unfixes stereotypes by making the white man culpable of savagery. Moving beyond these stereotypical images on the wall, Joseph ventures into South London to film the backdrop for the African setting; however, tragically, he cannot attain Africa within the Empire. He loses all curiosity in the racial constructs around him and his revisions are seen by no one. He states at one point that ―A film is like a mirror….everybody who watch it see something different but is not necessarily what they want to see‖ (113). Kevin Davey proclaims that Joseph whose film-based

Creole renegotiations of Conrad are ―haphazard episodes of jouissance, and whose itinerary leads from prison to suicide, figures the inauthenticity of all identifications, the acknowledgement of the self as stranger pursued to the point of delirium and loss of meaning‖ (157). This presents a central question: What does Joseph sees or more importantly what is reflected back that prevents him from going further? Perhaps the reflections of the chaos within himself and around him are too much for him, and, thus,

155 he fails to convey the meanings of his voyage into self-discovery. Like Kurtz uttering

―The horror! The horror!‖ (Conrad 68), Joseph stares wildly at his friends muttering

―‗the camera, the camera‘‖…(Dabydeen 120). What is caught on film, similar to what is experienced in the Congo, is reduced to two utterances that haunt both men to their deathbeds.

Instead of producing a counter narrative of colonial exploitation, Joseph becomes more interested in ―nothingness, colourlessness, the sightlessness of air, wind, the pure space between trees…‖ (Dabydeen, TI 97). After the death of Kurtz, Marlow found with humiliation that ―he would have nothing to say‖ (Conrad 69). Joseph questions if it is because ―nothing is left to say, because Kurtz become nothing‖

(Dabydeen, TI 74). What Marlow may have to say cannot be articulated into words like the failings of Joseph‘s Conrad project. In the end, their idea, their vision becomes a dream, a rumor, and an atom (74) that can no longer be physically and mentally broken down. Marlow can muse over his thoughts; however, Joseph‘s nothingness is subject to criticism by those around him. Shaz calls it the ―curse of the black race‖ (97) stating that when Blacks cannot attain their goals, they simply adopt a religion of being nothing. The meaning of nothing is regarded as worthlessness for a Black man, while

Kurtz‘s nothingness is more of a philosophical meandering rather than a curse. The ―z‖ at the end of his name, Joseph states, stands for ―zero which was what Kurtz turned black people into, and himself, in his deeds of extermination‖ (76). Nothingness, like blackness, carries multiple connotations where this Black seer cannot simply escape into an abyss. Frantz Fanon proclaims in Black Skin White Masks that ―Blackness, darkness, shadow, shades, night, the labyrinths of the earth, abysmal depths, blacken

156 someone‘s reputation; and, on the other side, the bright look of innocence, the white dove of peace, magical, heavenly light‖ (189). The white man is sealed in his ―angelic‖ whiteness, while the Black man becomes a half-form amalgamation that reminds the narrator and by extension the South Asian community that they cannot escape their

―coon‖ condition by simply proclaiming nothingness. It appears that the South Asian community can profit from their marginal position; whereas, in both novels, the Black characters, a Black British Rastafarian and the Black Caribbean are confronted with the discourse of nothingness. They arrived at a point of ―delirium and loss of meaning‖

(Davey 157), while for everyone else the process of identification continues with

―differing degrees of dislocation, racialised distinction and reflexivity‖ (157).

Dabydeen rearticulates racial differences as seen in Guyana from its colonial days onwards where Indians are industrious laborers aspiring for more in their lots, while

Africans are reduced to squalor as unproductive workers who lack a formidable counter discourse to answer back to these colonial and racial stereotyping.

Although illiterate, Joseph positions himself as a postcolonial critic like Chinua

Achebe when he urges the narrator to find him a book ―which told the whole story‖

(Dabydeen, TI 79) of Africa as he attempts to recreate the Congo in London. He attempts to reconfigure the Congolese figures in Conrad‘s novel, but he renounces his anti-colonial stance when he abandons these images for the interest in ―nothingness.‖

His failure is questionable since he attempts to act rather than passively read passages from Conrad‘s novel. Mark McWatt argues that the ―fact that such a reading is available to the illiterate Joseph, and not to the narrator is a further counter-discursive ploy, countering the assumed marginality of the black, illiterate ‗other‘‖ (113).

157 Similarly, the Afro-Guyanese narrator in Disappearance states that the masks on the cottage wall rob Africans of speech allowing others like Mrs. Rutherford to offer her interpretation. He proclaims ―when the missionaries came with the Bibles bearing strange words, they killed off the African god and reduced the Africans to pathetic silence, by making them speak alien words‖ (Dabydeen, D 19). In 1958, Chinua

Achebe published Things Fall Apart as an antithesis to Heart of Darkness; this novel portrays the complex social and artistic traditions of the Ibo tribe prior to their contact with white colonialists. Joseph is attempting to find the whole story of Africa in

London while the Afro-Guyanese follows along silently from exhibit to exhibit without interruptions. Both characters are left with nothing—no voices, no reactions, no community—in which they become ―absent of data‖ (27). Instead of creating a

―counter-discursive ploy‖ as McWatt proclaims, Dabydeen places a heavy responsibly on both Black characters to come to terms with their history in which their selfhood and their people are continually put on display that cause these Black figures to simply disappear.

Joseph is packaged and parceled into multiple metaphorical figures. On one hand, he takes on an authorial voice when Shaz and the narrator interpret the text forcing them to see beyond the conventional images. When he comments on the meaning of selected passages, he occupies the role of a ―black Conrad‖ instructing those around him on the nature of his writing. He does not hesitate to interrupt their discussion of the novel with his own interpretations. Like Conrad‘s characters, Marlow and Kurtz, he is seeking to bring enlightenment to the ―natives‖ around him. He becomes a regular in the narrator‘s room ―pestering [me] to read aloud passages of

158 Conrad and asking convoluted questions which my training in theme-and-imagery spotting didn‘t equip me to answer fully‖ (Dabydeen, TI 73). He notices the color of the river, the burial ground, the steamships, the women in the Company‘s office, the

Russian trader, and asks, ―Why indeed had Conrad suddenly introduced a kaleidoscopic burst of colour in the novel, after a narrative of black, white and green?‖ (73). Joseph, then, emerges as a critic, who despite his illiteracy attempts to bring the Congo to the center of discussion. He proposes that the burst of colors is a reflection of a modern

English society as browns and blacks undermine English whiteness. The

―kaleidoscopic burst of colour‖ is an apt commentary on race relation in England:

No, it ain‘t, is about colours. You have been saying is a novel ‗bout the

fall of man, but is really ‗bout a dream. Beneath the surface is the

dream. The white light of England and the Thames is the white sun over

the Congo that can‘t mix with the green of the bush and the black skin of

the people…The white man want clear everything away, clear away the

green bush and the blacks and turn the whole place into ivory which you

can‘t plant or smoke or eat. Ivory is the heart of the white man. (72-3)

Joseph understands that greed and racism are still prevalent in English society. For a moment, he transforms his blackness into a ―coal to feed flames [to]…Burn, burn, burn…‖ (98) like a prototypical Fanonian warrior who seeks violence to preserve his nation and his race. The narrator proclaims, at one point, the fiery nature of Joseph‘s rebellion stating that it is no ―wonder Joseph was fascinated by the wind, because it was the wind that spread fires‖ (98). Likening him to destructive images causes those around him to fear the social programs that he espouses as radical, but they are still

159 willing to protect him. This indicates that despite their differences and class restrictions it is possible for Blacks and other oppressed groups to form a collective union to fight for their national liberties. Ultimately, Joseph is changed into a subaltern who burns off his Black skin as he sets himself afire,31 perhaps wanting to burn like ―a Hindu corpse to show us Asians that he was not different from us, that he was not an inferior being, that ‗you is we,‘ as Auntie Clarice had said‖ (140). Below the surface, White or Black,

Joseph once contends, that we are all clear in the inside, but, his philosophical meanderings do not prevent the denegation of his race. In the end, his eyes show his abandonment of will, ―as if he had come to know everything and no longer wanted anything‖ (138). Instead of screaming out in horror about his social condition, he desperately copies the word ―cocoon‖ in the dirt, stating, ―It‘s me, all of that is me‖

(139):

‗Look! C is half O,‘ he continued to jabber, ‗it nearly there, but when it

form O it breaking up again, never completing.‘ He grew wild at my

incomprehension […]. ‗A is for apple,‘ he babbled, ‗B for bat, C is for

cocoon, which is also coon, N is for nut, but it‘s really for nuts, N is for

nothing, N is for nignog. (139)

His seemingly mad rhetoric and increasing incoherence reveal multiple layers of truth.

In the mud, he recognizes his half-formed self reminding the narrator that ―He was doomed to be a coon, like myself, like all of us, including those white Oxford students‖

(140). Like Marlow, the narrator cannot rid himself of his ―dark double,‖ that is, his metaphorical Kurtz. Locked within the walls of the Oxford library, the narrator claims he will emerge and be somebody. However, Joseph, the ―lump of aborted, anonymous

160 flesh‖ (141) is the metaphorical butterfly, who, despite his death, is still emerging and changing shapes. Nonetheless, Joseph writes the words ―coon,‖ ―nothing,‖ and

―nignog‖ as the final interpretation of his selfhood. Dabydeen allows him an intellectual voice in analyzing the ramifications of colonialism within canonical works, but within this postcolonial text, Joseph‘s final evaluation is that of nothing. Similar to the Afro-Guyanese, Dabydeen dresses Joseph up as a character of substance, yet, in the end, he has to burn his flesh as his only way to let everyone know that he is still present in various forms that triumphs over ―all their greedy search for things, tokens, mementoes, [and] status symbols‖ (140). This final act of immolation—the fascination, the horror—is recirculated by the Indo-Guyanese narrator in which Joseph becomes a site where various versions of his subjectivity are elaborated and contested. Similar to widow immolation in India, nowhere is he a subject of the debate and nowhere is his subjectivity represented. We learn little or nothing about his final act—of his reasons, of his internal pain. He is recreated as a symbol for those around him, rather than a man of substance who can speak for himself.

Even though Joseph cannot film the Congo within the Center, the metropolis, in and of itself, is highly symbolic of Kurtz‘s conquest in Africa. The difference is that, in

London, sex and money are for sale to everyone. The narrator states that Kurtz would have now ―come out with his boatload of ivory and paid for his sex instead of wanting it on the cheap with black who didn‘t know how much to charge because they didn‘t have a money system‖ (Dabydeen, TI 129). The narrator‘s childhood friend, Patel, profits from the pornography he buys and produces for his customers; additionally, if White clients want drugs, he supplies that as well: ―That‘s more precious than a boat-boat of

161 ivory….White people will pay and pay and pay…I tell you, they‘re more crazy than coons‖ (170). Consequently, it is the immigrants who are plundering the Whites and monopolizing on their addictions as profit. When Patel abandons school to join the

―enterprise culture‖ (133), the family-run store represents an orderly station in which the Asian shopkeeper replaces the chief accountant32 through his ―power and control over the public‖ (134). The excessive greed for ivory is transformed into illegal sex films and drugs all organized akin to a ―proper business‖ (135). Like slaves from

Africa and indentured servants from India, Whites are now being bought and sold.

Patel states directly that ―As far as I‘m concerned, it‘s a real world, and every white person I see is worth ten pounds or one hundred pounds to me‖ (142). When Joseph attempts to ―distil some clear statement from the mess of bodies‖ of Patel‘s pornography project, he cannot untangle the muck that exists—―all money and sex, dirt and drugs‖ (emphasis added, 166). As McWatt proclaims, Joseph can see the ―horrors‖ of England as an ―enterprise culture; and in his final role he finds his heart of (sexual) darkness at the imperial centre questions the values of the imperial text and subverts the perception of these as axiomatic‖ (114).33 If Joseph is given such a prominent role, as

McWatt states, this message fails to carry over fully to the reader. Instead, the Indo-

Guyanese narrator becomes the moralistic Marlow who journeys through these various stations, but does not occupy these spaces long enough to go mad with greed or die in moral conflict. He traverses through the darkness of seedy cinemas, brothel houses, but maintains a high sense of morality within this commercial sleaze through the interaction with his Intended.

162 In this dark world, within the heart of London, the narrator attempts to preserve the purity of Janet, his Intended. He cannot discuss Heart of Darkness which they are both studying because as he notes, the sex in the novel and ―the description of blacks in the bush, were too shameful for me to contemplate in her company‖ (Dabydeen, TI 88).

When she asks him to join her on the World Cruise ride, he lowers his head in shame as they pass through the crude images of Africa. As soon as Shaz attempts to offer sexual advice in pursuit of Janet, the narrator maintains his dignity by refusing his counsel.

Shaz responds that he is just like Marlow, stating, ―Rivets are no substitute for a pair of tits…‖ (86).34 The first time Janet visits, he takes the entire day off of work to polish and clean his room in order to meet her approval as he spent his last few shillings on

―an expensive cake and three varieties of tea biscuits which were proudly displayed on the table‖ (emphasis added, 87). When she expresses concern for Joseph after his escape from jail, the narrator does not want her to see the dirty building in which he is hiding out. Like Marlow, he wants to ―protect her from the dirt…[wishing] I belonged to her family and the village she came from with all its protections and confident virtues‖ (122). When her body surrenders to the pressure of his hands, he cannot penetrate her and keeps going out of pride. His attempts fail and he is left to fulfill his desires on Monica, a prostitute, in order to regain his manhood. When Janet states that some men go to whores because they need it, he tells her that she is fragrant, everything he intended. Earlier, she declares that ―Men always go for vulnerable images, things they can control and dominate. Me, I think poetry is a meat-eating, cunning flower that traps your tongue and never lets go‖ (146). This declaration indicates that Janet is not

163 as innocent as the narrator believes; despite her controversial outburst, he remains faithful to the idea of her.

Upon his acceptance to Oxford, Janet immediately states, ―I can‘t send you there looking like something from the Congo, stepping off the wall of the World Cruise‖

(Dabydeen, TI 164). Instead, he allows her to dress him in a white shirt, one he will put on as he arrives at Oxford, and one he imagines wearing when he sees her again as a sign of his faithfulness. The shirt, as Fee asserts, has ―unfortunate connotations for the narrator‖ (80), whose father wore a similar shirt while beating his mother. Moreover, the crisp white shirt carries an ―allusion to the ‗starched collars and got-up shirt fronts‘ of the Company‘s chief accountant in Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, which may well have depended on a similar oppression of the native woman who ‗had a distaste for the work‘ of doing laundry‖ (80). Janet no longer occupies a submissive female position, but one in which she has control over her ―native.‖ Similar to the masks on Mrs.

Rutherford‘s wall, Janet sees him as an exotic relic. By telling him to keep the shirt white, and to not spill ink on it, she appropriates her white authority of his brown skin by becoming a ―gatekeeper‖ of white culture. Fee states, ―she stands for England, for

Oxford, for white privilege‖ (81). As Janet checks the fitting of the shirt, the narrator feels like ―one of Shaz‘s whores, or a slave on an auction block‖ (Dabydeen, TI 171).

Mark Stein proclaims that the ―violence of such a gaze, where one is financially empowered to bare, debase, and purchase the other, is associated with the violence of the slave trade‖ (154). The narrator willingly contends that he will be her ―dark secret, her illicit pregnancy, her underdeveloped child‖ (Dabydeen, TI 173). He romanticizes his degradation into poetic flair similar to Kurtz‘s Intended who does not seek the

164 knowledge of ―The horror! The horror!‖ (Conrad 75), but the illusion that her name is the last thing Kurtz utters before dying. The narrator places himself in the role of the naïve female who accepts what is told to him wishing only for the fantasies not the reality of the situation. She is the ―inheritance‖ of the Empire that the narrator desires in his aspiration to write in the metropolitan center, in which she fashions him into someone who her parents can recognize, a man of class, of education, and of worth.

Marlow once wonders how many ―powers of darkness claimed [Kurtz] for their own‖

(49). By taking a ―high seat‖ in Oxford perhaps indicates that the narrator has ―taken

[his] high seat amongst the devils of the land‖ (49). Kurtz is depicted as ―going native‖ in the Congo (the interior of Africa), while the brown narrator appears to be ―going white‖ within South London (the center of the Empire).

Instead of reading and reacting to the ramifications of darkness as the narrator and his friends attempt to do in The Intended, the Afro-Guyanese narrator in

Disappearance is faced with the actual remains of colonial exploits in Mrs.

Rutherford‘s cottage. She is the ―abroad‖ the narrator is warned against as he suddenly finds himself keeping company with a ―Churile and Dai-Dai and all them others‖

(Dabydeen, D 39),35 rather than being a quiet vision of white purity. The white woman is no longer sheltered from the horrors of Africa, but goes along on the journey and brings back artifacts that haunt the narrator of the wilderness that continues to exist.

Mrs. Rutherford is a collector of African relics that become conversation pieces within her quaint cottage. These ―exotic‖ products are ―characterize[d], not by remoteness but by proximity—by their availability‖ (Huggan 15). These cultural artifacts are not replicas from a local marketplace, but actual relics from her travels to Africa. Their

165 authenticity, not artificiality, creates an immediate intimacy with Africa that makes the narrator uncomfortable in their presence. The masks are ―increased considerably by their prominence on the whitewashed walls of this English cottage…[as the fireplace] were keepers of the ritual of lighting up the darkness and giving warmth and life to the human body‖ (Dabydeen, D 15). This emitting light is a reminder that the English holds the torch of enlightenment,36 but what happens when the wilderness is brought back to England and resides quietly, tamed on the walls? It becomes rather unsettling and troublesome for the narrator. Unlike Joseph‘s Intended project, this Afro-Guyanese narrator does not want to interrogate the wilderness and reinterpret the images before him. Nevertheless, he finds books everywhere, one curiously bearing the name Joseph

Countryman. The inscription ―Ex Libris Joseph Countryman Esq. Domius Illuminatio

Mea‖ (16) is an intertextual nod to the illiterate Rastafarian youth in The Intended.

However, this narrator is not an ―everyman‖ like his namesake Countryman (a possible play on Conrad) whose understanding of colors and canonical texts revolve around constant dialogue and inquires. He is more evocative of the colonial overseer, such as the accountant in Heart of Darkness, rather than a Black man living in London or an

Afro-Guyanese in Guyana.

While working inside the jungle in Guyana, the narrator sits under an umbrella like a colonial figurehead, much like the Company‘s chief accountant, unaffected by the wilderness around him. He states that there are ―hundreds of bare-backed coolies moving earth whom I controlled with a pharaoh‘s authority‖ (Dabydeen, D 29). He wonders whether Swami was right that in fact his ―drawings had imposed impeccable order on this malarial landscape, envisioning it as a precise rectangle of dams, canals

166 and sluices‖ (38). Similarly, when Marlow first sees the Company‘s accountant, he wonders how he keeps up his appearance amid the demoralization and death around him. He exhibits annoyance when the groans of a sick person ―distract [his] attention…[which made it] extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors‖ (Conrad

22). This ―kept up appearance‖ and ―sedentary desk-life‖ (21) of the accountant is reflected in the actions of the Afro-Guyanese narrator as he journeys to England. When he arrives at his work scene in Dunsmere, he is ―quietly distressed by the untidiness of the whole scene, the lack of purpose and absence of authority‖ (Dabydeen, D 102). By privileging the mechanical responsibilities of his profession, he fails to recognize the darkness in himself and around him until Mrs. Rutherford reminds him of the wilderness. By seeing himself above his workers, he cannot witness the demise of his race. Christie, an Irish worker, tells the narrator that he is also a colonial subject who has been lured to the imperial center as he warns of the madness, of the horror, that exists: ―I keep telling you, don‘t pry into this country. Keep to yourself. Act black and dumb. Get the banjo out. Sing like Al Jolson. Run the hundred metres at the

Olympics. Do anything but don‘t enquire too deeply or you‘re done for‖ (147).

Christie also contemplates ―the horror,‖ as he travels from (European) periphery to centre and discovered that heart of darkness‖ (McWatt 120). Nevertheless, the advice he gives is one in which the Black figure has to play dumb and perform his role as a non-threatening Black man. It is not that the narrator is naïve to these colonial horrors; it is that he chooses to separate himself from such truths, like Marlow does for the

Intended, shielding her from the reality of Kurtz‘s exploits. Nonetheless, by refusing to refute the narratives of those around him including Mrs. Rutherford and Christie‘s, he

167 allows others to speak for him and impose their knowledge upon his selfhood.

Dabydeen rewrites the Black Caribbean figure as an educated professional with sound reasoning skills, but this narrator is just as mute and ancient as the masks on Mrs.

Rutherford‘s wall.

Instead of a white male figure retelling the journey to the darkest area on Earth, the passage to Africa is told through a female. Mrs. Rutherford narrates how she and her husband, Jack, headed off to Africa and encountered more wilderness than they had expected. As she narrates the stories of the African exhibits in her cottage, the narrator states ―[I] stood behind her to shield myself from being seduced by the power of their ugliness, their inhumaneness. The fact that this woman—so solid in her presence—was my guide offered me protection against them…protecting me from myself‖ (emphasis added, Dabydeen, D 20). Marlow is the figurative guide to those aboard the Nellie of his travels to the Congo; however, Mrs. Rutherford refutes the English idea as something she can ―set up, and bow down before‖ (Conrad 10). Unlike Marlow, who wants to protect the deeds of Kurtz, Mrs. Rutherford is critical of English history and the mission of talk, law, and order. The narrator questions whether her enlightenment is juxtaposed to his sense of darkness (Dabydeen, D 137). His darkness seems to be a metaphorical transportation back to Africa and the exploitation of the land and its people. However, this white woman continues to dismiss the fact that Africa is his distant past, not his immediate history. Mrs. Rutherford‘s stay in Africa opens her to the philanthropic goals of the Empire. He resists her stories; nonetheless, she is confident that the illumination of her exploits would diffuse his sense of darkness. Mrs.

Rutherford‘s anti-colonial attitudes, as Davey contends, points to the ―black Other‖—a

168 tactical commonality as they both share a history of subordination by the Anglo-British male (157). Nonetheless, I question this tactical point; rather than seeing Mrs.

Rutherford as a victim, she is more of a formidable figure who places the Afro-

Guyanese in an inferior position. By pointing to the ―black Other,‖ Mrs. Rutherford rest on him the impossible task to solely diffuse all pretenses of English imperialism as representative of the African people when in fact he is much more rooted in Caribbean history.

Why Mrs. Rutherford‘s husband, Jack, took her to Africa is open for speculation. The narrator can only hypothesize that maybe Jack had to take her away from her ordered and quaint English garden in order to make ―love to her freely‖

(Dabydeen, D 65). Like Kurtz, Jack seems to long for ―nothing but sin and cruelty, abandoning her for native flesh‖ (65). She proclaims that Jack ―was either the backbone of the Empire or the penitent who surrendered the Empire, paid back some of the money and retreated to the island and village of his home. He returned from Africa with me but he couldn‘t settle. He was restless. He had to go back for more‖ (125).

Whether he is remorseful for his actions or not, he still craves the seduction of Africa.

Initially, Jack had gone to Africa to set up an English language school in order to bring the natives up to the level where they could manage themselves (66). In reality, he went to Africa for sex as, ―He‘d bulldoze them into submission with his superior money, superior skin colour, superior civilization‖ (72). When asked why they did not kill

Jack, the connection to Conrad is evident, ―Because they are remarkably restrained.

They are not savages‖ (72).37 In her telling of Jack‘s exploitations in Africa, Mrs.

Rutherford does not protect Jack from scrutiny, nor does she project herself as someone

169 who is pure in contrast to his demoralization; in fact, Mrs. Rutherford states she is ―no madonna either‖ (72). Unlike Kurtz‘s Intended, ―Mrs. Rutherford has lost any glittering illusions about European activities in Africa‖ (Popeau 104) in which she is self-critical of the place. The narrator concludes that these masks on her wall are not her ―spiteful children,‖ (Dabydeen, D 72) as she claims, but ―sad symbols of Jack‘s conquest, abuse and abandonment of her‖ (73). Even so, she is not a helpless woman who is broken by his betrayal; rather, she becomes a spokesperson to the atrocities of what happens in

Africa without abandonment and wants the narrator to do the same. She problematically places this responsibility on a narrator who truthfully has no way of tackling these anti-colonial sentiments.

Mrs. Rutherford‘s journey to the heart of darkness provides a possible answer to the outburst by Kurtz of the horror. The revelation is that there is more wilderness in

England than in Africa—greed, power, sex, all mask under manicured lawns and orderly gardens. The villagers, as a pastime, dig up all kinds of artifacts and buried weapons on the beach, but ―none of them wants to see the horror‖ (Dabydeen, D 92).

Like Joseph, Mrs. Rutherford longs to be alone and invisible, but could not ―escape being English‖ (94), like he could not escape his ―coon‖ condition. As she spoke passionately about the wilderness, of blackness, of sex, of blood, and of violence, the narrator becomes increasingly more uncomfortable:

I began to appreciate the reason for Jack‘s absence. He had not

abandoned her, he had to run away! She was too formidable for him, so

he fled. All his fantasies of blood and sex were nothing compared to the

170 knowledge of horror she possessed and was determined to proclaim.

(emphasis added, 94)

Like Swami, she accuses the narrator of being White; she understands the Empire‘s mission is to make him ―whiter than white‖ as she states any ―fear and hatred you should have for us is covered over completely‖ (94). Unlike Janet, she is empowering him with the knowledge to speak up, to write back, instead of showcasing him on an auction block. He wants neither; instead, he remains quiet in the wake of these revelations. He is resisting the orchestration by the white woman, and by doing so, he is stronger than the Indo-Guyanese narrator who allows the Janet to dictate his worth as a man who is respectable to white culture. Davey contends that Dabydeen ―frequently identifies white women and the literary and artistic canon as the central point of black affinity and challenge to the reproduction of Anglo-British whiteness‖ (143).

Evidently, Mrs. Rutherford is feared by the Afro-Guyanese narrator, and possibly her husband, Jack, as a formable opponent. Nonetheless, the black/brown man and the white woman are not linked together as a forced against Anglo-British whiteness. Janet wants to turn her ―native‖ white as a display of his value, while Mrs. Rutherford desires a Black man to avenge the horrors she witnesses in Africa. As affluent white women, they are still socially placed above these narrators who impose their knowledge upon them rather than join in a cause to challenge English subjugation.

The civilized idea is that the Empire is a moral wasteland even before the colonialist journeys to Africa—the heart of immoral depravity returns firmly back to the center of the Empire. The civil war and blood letting in Africa becomes a moral warfare in the English village as affairs are rampant, scandals are widespread, and greed

171 and corruption fuel the passionate blood of its inhabitants. In the end, Mrs. Rutherford states that she does not need protection, she needs to be scandalized. The narrator, she hopes, would have been one of her ―spiteful children‖ (Dabydeen, D 72) who would be her ―means of revenge‖ (96). She needs to be told in the cruelest of language of her brutality, of Jack‘s violation, of England desecration, and she is disappointed at the narrator‘s inability to be ―cruel enough to cause havoc‖ (140). The narrator only wishes to disappear in which he wants no battles with the past forces of imperialism, and by leaving this colonial mess, he turns a blind eye to these brutalities. Marlow wonders at the end of Heart of Darkness if the house Kurtz‘s Intended lives in would have fallen if he revealed the truth of Kurtz‘s exploits to her. Mrs. Rutherford offers justice by speaking the truth, and like Kurtz‘s Intended, the narrator naively believes that he can create something new by turning away. Ironically, in the end, it is Mrs. Rutherford‘s cottage that will collapse when the sea walls crumble into the sea.

One narrator reads about the heart of darkness within the metropolis, while the other is faced with the darkness in every corner in a small village. Joseph, the anti- colonial, fails to create a film to rewrite the images of the wilderness while the Indo-

Guyanese understanding of Conrad‘s novel enables his admittance to the Ivory Tower; the greed of the English is re-appropriated by immigrants who capitalize on the former‘s desire for sex and drugs. Moreover, the marginal Black ―Other‖ is placed in multiple influential roles, as a critic and authorial voice, a possible ―black‖ Conrad, ending problematically with his claim of nothingness. However, in Disappearance, the ivory, the greed, and blood do not disappear. While the village is falling into the sea, the colonial history is resilient. Jack disappears; however, his conquest of Africa is

172 visible through masks and artifacts. The entire town is suggestive of the English idea, of Kurtz, of Marlow, of the Intended—all of whom are rewritten in Dunsmere, Jack, the

Narrator, and Mrs. Rutherford. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow realizes that the

―conquest of the earth…is not pretty thing‖ (Conrad 10). His desire is to leave England, but still be part of the project of imperialism in order to fill the blank spaces on the world map. What is redeemed is the idea: ―An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea‖ (10). The idea for Kurtz is exclaimed in his outburst of ―‗My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my…‘ everything belonged to him‖ (49). The conquest of the Earth is no longer solely in the hands of Whites and everything is not attributed to the British Empire as proclaimed by

Kurtz. The old ideas are fading, the Whites are being scandalized, and everything is open to those who want a part of a capital enterprise. In Disappearance, Curtis, a play of Kurtz, the reclusive inhabitant in the village, writes in a Pamphlet his favor of sea defenses for Dunsmere: “We once gathered the world in a commonwealth of nations, bringing harmony where there was discord, seeding and nurturing civilised ideas in the most far-flung moral wastelands. Now we were in veritable collapse, each sickly man for himself” (emphasis added, Dabydeen, D 136). Similarly to Kurtz who scribbles the words ―Exterminate all brutes!‖ (Conrad 51) at the end of his pamphlet, it is the English who are on the brink of imminent collapse through the interaction with its alterities.

Davey states that Curtis deploys a series of ―resonant Anglo-British tropes‖ (nationalist, imperial, and Churchillian) in a campaign to save the cliffs from crumbling into the sea

(158). Like Kurtz, the rumors Curtis‘s scandals overshadow his post-imperial writing on colonialism. These moral wastelands reside within the center, no longer in far flung

173 lands. The Indo-Guyanese capitalizes on the knowledge of the West to gain his station in life; whereas, the Afro-Guyanese leaves the place of darkness with the awareness that the Empire of past lore is no more. Like Kurtz, the Afro-Guyanese figuratively dies.

Nevertheless, Kurtz is left with a voice38 while this unnamed Afro-Guyanese is left with only hollow whisperings that he needs to create something new.

Conclusion

The Indo-Guyanese narrator at one point proclaims, ―I wanted to get off. All the stopping and starting was making me sick. I wanted to stop moving‖ (Dabydeen, TI

171). Both Indo-and Afro-Guyanese narrators seemingly want ―to get off‖ from the exhaustion of the immigrant condition as a succession of rebirths and transplantations in multiple locations. With each departure, a starting over begins again; the black cab with its ―bright eyes‖ would pick up the Indo Guyanese narrator for Oxford University, and

―soon [he will] be gone, [h]e and all [his] things‖ (173). Upon his departure back to

Guyana, the Afro-Guyanese narrator carefully holds the dried flowers he once picked from Mrs. Rutherford‘s garden in the cup of his hands, ―appalled that the slightest movement could cause it to flake and disappear‖ (Dabydeen, D 157). These journeys back and forth produce not only a desire to belong to a stable environment, but also to create a deep psychic exhaustion from historical and personal flights. As John Clement

Ball states, ―the larger point Dabydeen is making with these metaphoric messes is that imperialism makes a mess—of identities, of cultures, of societies, of places—wherever it goes‖ (171). Whether a Guyanese is locked within the Ivory Tower or hibernating in whitewashed cottages, memories of the homeland, of a colonial past, of messy identities prevent cultural and historical amnesia. They cannot escape, be it physically or

174 metaphorically, from the ramifications of diasporic travel. George Lamming states in

The Pleasures of Exile that:

When the exile is a man of colonial orientation, and his chosen residence

is the country which colonised his own history, then there are certain

complications. For each exile has not only got to prove his worth to the

other, he has to win the approval of Headquarters, meaning in the case of

the West Indian writer, England. (24)

Within Oxford University, the Indo-Guyanese narrator gains visibility by seeking the profession of a writer. By being the authorial double of Dabydeen, we can surmise that his future novels will continue to respond to his past and present condition from a location of his choice. Aleid Fokkema, in the article, ―Why Write in English?—The

Postcolonial Question‖ states that the community Dabydeen is appealing to in his writing becomes complicated by race and location: ―Is it the West-Indian community in

England, his fellow intellectuals affiliated with an Oxford education, or his native

Guyana?‖ (316). Whose approval is Dabydeen seeking? This complication is evident in both novels with the perspectives of Indo-and Afro-Guyanese narrators. The Indo-

Guyanese narrator remaps his community in England, seeks an Oxford education, and aligns himself with intellectual pursuits, while the other seeks to forget everything

Guyanese, African, or English. Even though they are more linked in England by sharing a common British ―blackness,‖ Dabydeen creates two separate paths for each narrator when reconsidering their postcolonial position and the legacy of Empire.

The central queries of these novels are the ramifications of these two narratives on diasporic ―messes‖ and the renegotiations that occur within the Empire. The

175 narrators‘ journeys to the ―messiness‖ of the center produce numerous counter discourses. At times, these discourses are deliberate as in the intertextual dialogue with

Joseph Conrad, and the fluid relationship between the Indo-Guyanese narrator and

South Asian community, in particular his bond with Joseph, the Black prophet. Other times, it appears as if these counter discourses are unconscious features of the text. The

Afro-Guyanese resists all attempts to acknowledge his colonial past both in Africa and

Guyana. Thus, those around him, such as Mrs. Rutherford, and by extension the narrative structure, offset his mechanical mentality and force him to be conscious of the darkness that lay hidden within and outside the Empire. It is evident that within the belly of the beast, both narrators have to contend with being othered to Anglo-British in multiple ways as an Indo-and Afro-Guyanese, a West Indian, a Caribbean, a Black

British expatriate, and so forth, which complicate the binary tensions that exist in

Guyana. However, Guyana, despite its lack of opportunities, its bleak racial and political condition, is not forgotten. The memories of the homeland might be fractured, romanticized, fictionalized, and all together fuzzy, but these memories continually interrupt the narratives and prevent a complete amnesia of the native land.

When situated within a colonial state, from the metropolis to the margins, what is reflected back, what is rewritten, what is said of the Empires and British Caribbean colonies? These narrators may be unnamed, but their journeys are not an ―everyman‖ quest. Each is lost to his own messiness, navigating through darkness and whiteness, leaving and returning to homelands that ultimately create a jumble of memories, challenges, successes, and failures. Through constant social, economic, and cultural collision within the heart of the Empire, future dynamics are altered with these initial

176 impacts. South Asian communities are continually changing, the capital market is open to all, and cultural relics cause the native, not the oppressor, to reflect and react to the implication of colonial exploitation. By implanting themselves in the West, the consequences will be that of remapping, constant self reflection, and the gradual decline of an Empire. To quote Stuart Hall, ―Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference‖

(―Cultural Identity and Diaspora‖ 402). As such, the Afro-Guyanese is whispering continually that we need to create something new. This creation should not dismiss the past, but alter the master script in which both the Afro-and Indo-Guyanese are equally telling the tales of their past and present condition. It is not only British imperial history that Guyanese have to contend with, but their own creolized retelling.

Dabydeen emphatically states in an interview ―Fuck the ‗masterscripts‘…let me write instead to Harris and Naipaul, write back, quarrel with, borrow from, love, praise, worship them‖ (Davey 156). After a while, Dabydeen claims that the ―colonial texts will disappear‖ (156). In The Indented, Dabydeen is successful in creating a transnational space in which multiple ethnic groups are crashing into each other, and by doing so, they redefine their colonized position; whereas in his other novel,

Disappearance, he rearticulates familiar social and racial impulses by placing the Afro-

Guyanese in darkness, similar to Naipaul, who often depicts his homeland as a wasteland. Dabydeen condemns the masterscripts, but he is still seeking approval from the Headquarters. By responding to the discourses on Empires and opening it up to various interpretations gives the Caribbean experience current efficacy, but the lesson to be learn is that it is necessary to unsettle all perspectives.

177 CONCLUSION

EMERGING VOICES, NEW DIRECTIONS

―When the colonized intellectual writing for his people uses the past he must do so with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring them into action and fostering hope‖

(Frantz Fanon, The Wrenched of the Earth).

The works in this dissertation open a space to speak about race, gender, and politics in Guyana. As argued, these counter narratives recreate some spaces to negotiate cultural roles while at the same time these texts reinscribe the dominant colonial discourse. This presents a two part thesis that speaks to both the restriction and potential of this emerging literature. While East Indians and Africans view each other as competition, their localized actions often unravel social boundaries and gender limitations as depicted in David Dabydeen‘s The Counting House. The atmosphere of distrust reverberates more powerfully as Shewcharan and Kempadoo perpetuate a familiar colonial script of complacency. Nonetheless, these authors‘ realistic portrayals of political corruption depict the historical context of the volatile conditions of 1970s as they see it. They cannot offer an ―optimistic‖ solution to Guyanese problems because they do not see one immediately available. It is only when Indo-Guyanese take flight again can they reopen a space to contest social and political boundaries as depicted in

Dabydeen‘s The Intended. We move from disruption of identifications, to reverberation

178 of old rhetoric, to remapping the Caribbean experience—migration, nationalism, exodus.

It is important to note that Guyana ethnic diversity is not the singular condition for conflict. Not only did colonialism and the indenture system provide the context for breeding ethnic mistrust and resentment, but as independence drew near in the 1950s, the United States and Britain did not hesitate to exploit this legacy of racial divides in the name of the Cold War (Seecoomar 16). By the time the US-CIA and the British completed its covert operations and the PNC and its partner had been maneuvered into position to begin the task of building a new nation, distrust and fear became the dominant emotions between the two races. What appears to be missing at times in these novels are the initial cause and ongoing participators in fueling racial tensions—the colonial traders, the missionaries, the British colonizers, and the US operatives. By dismissing their involvement and working within the dominant rhetoric of divide and conquer, the faults and failures of the nation become the burden of both settled groups within the texts. Old racial prejudices are re-circulated, the colonizer is spared from blame, and gendered and cultural spaces are only temporary diffused. More so, it is crucial to remember that Guyana is known as the land of six peoples—Africans,

Amerindians, Chinese, East Indians, Europeans and Portuguese—who are also lost in the telling of these stories.

Nevertheless, David Dabydeen, Oonya Kempadoo, and Narmala Shewcharan address the serious issues of racial conflicts, corrupt governments, and unstable experiences within the Caribbean. While they tilt their allegiance toward the Indo-

Guyanese community by privileging the Indian voice, their works still open a

179 comparative discussion of these tribulations to all audiences. What these novels reveal about the real Guyana, the world outside the novel, through its depiction of Guyana within the novel is a sober lesson of the current problems as they are. In 1998, two new words and their conceptual significance entered the Guyanese political lexicon: dialogue and facilitator. As emerging Guyanese authors remember Guyana, it is necessary to generate a thoroughgoing criticism of their own ideology that diffuse the binary racial constructs by facilitating a multifarious dialogue of gender, ethnicity, and class. This small nation has been under the radar in both Caribbean and South Asian studies, but its struggles are no different from other countries who tussle with the consequences of decolonization along with economic, racial, and political discord.

This dissertation focused on a specific locale by exploring the Indo-Guyanese history within contemporary literature. However, the academic discussion of East

Indians in the British West Indies extends to other areas. It is not surprising that people of Indian descent living in the Anglophone Caribbean retain many practices and values with those in India. Clearly, traditions, practices, and values deriving from the homeland carry a cultural inheritance to emerging Guyanese communities overseas that are continuously promulgated, recollected, and talk about in the literature. Many East

Indians living in the Caribbean continue with their Indian customs that is evident of the resiliency of the Indian culture and those who preserved their heritage under conditions of exodus, exploitation, and marginalization. With that said, there needs to be more scholarly attention to Indo-Caribbean literature within the South Asian field. There is a radical opposition in Guyanese literature between modernity (the mixing of multiple cultures) and tradition (the hold on rituals and customs). Each enigma of arrival, from

180 India to the Caribbean and from the Caribbean to the First World, opens a space for transformations, but also a desire to return to what one has left behind. Pairing novels by Indo-Guyanese to works by South Asians such as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni,

Jhumpa Lahiri, and Shyam Selvadurai can offer an insightful analysis of ancient Indian traditions still held by West Indians as they modernize into a creolized Caribbean space.

While this dissertation centers on the twofold play of history and racial constructions, other Guyanese literature provide new directions that acknowledge the diverse cultures within this small Caribbean country. For example, Jan Lowe

Shinebourne, a Chinese Guyanese writer, in her novel The Last English Plantation

(2001), confronts ethnic mixing in this creolized society as her main protagonist June

Lehall tackles her Indian-Chinese background during heightened racial tensions and political turmoil of the 1950s. Her upcoming novel, Chinese Women (2010), pairs the grievances of political Islam with the unrequited love of Albert Aziz, a Guyanese Indian

Muslim and his compelling attraction to a young Chinese girl, Alice Wong. Moreover,

Sharon Maas, daughter of Cheddi Jagan, debut novel Of Marriageable Age (2000), covers three decades and three continents: from Madras, India, to Georgetown, British

Guiana, to London, England. As the title indicates, the novel examines the concept of marriage from families and society within the three cultures that often make up the

Guyanese Indian identity. Afro-Guyanese author Fred D‘Aguiar, in his fourth novel

Bethany Bettany (2003), depicts a five-year-old Guyanese girl, Bethany, whose suffering is symbolic of a nation looking to make itself whole again. These emerging works from Guyanese authors reveal a country of six peoples in the process of healing

181 itself from colonial wounds and political corruption while celebrating the rich lives and experiences of a truly multiethnic society.

An important question is whether Indo-Caribbean living in more or less stable environments or within powerful metropolitan centers can articulate their shifting positions so that their voices can be heard, and more importantly recognized by fellow

Guyanese, South Asians, those within the scholarly world. The Guyanese diaspora is emerging as an important site of analysis for postcolonial critics concerned with a relatively new body of literary works. While the literature in this dissertation depicts the harsh realities of those living in the Caribbean and the difficult borders between East

Indians and Africans, the intention of these contemporary authors to a large degree is to affirm the persistence and resilience of Indo-Guyanese culture. To view this experience as one of racial conflicts leading to regret would be the ultimate tragedy. As Fanon notes, these writers use the past as a way to open future discussions in hope that a discourse can take place both inside and outside of Guyana. Martin Carter, a highly praised Guyanese poet of mixed European, Indian, and African descent, passionately charges in his poem ―Looking at your Hands‖ that ―I will not still my voice,‖ and his voice along with many others carry on in recognition of the lives of all Guyanese.

182 NOTES

Introduction:

¹ Peter Kempadoo was born on the sugar estates in 1926. Oonya Kempadoo is the daughter of Peter Kempadoo.

² See Peepal Tree Press (website) for more information on Jeremy Poynting‘s publications.

³ Metha, Brinda J. ―Kali, Gangamai, and Dougla Consciousness in Moses

Nagamootoo‘s Hendree‟s Cure.‖ Callaloo 27:2 (2004): 542-560. Print.

Trotz, Alissa D. ―Between Despair and Hope: Women and Violence in Contemporary

Guyana.‖ Small Axe 8:1 (2004): 1-20. Print.

Chapter 1:

¹ Sugar cultivation in British Guiana was first introduced by the Dutch in the late

17th century. Its economic imported advantage to the British enterprise in the 18th and

19th century depended on a large labor force. This labor was first provided through slaves from Africa until their legal emancipation in the 1830s; planters, then, sought importation of indentured laborers to offset their economic loss. Sugar production has been a major economic activity from colonial penetration to later capitalist consolidation. See Thomas, Clive Y. Plantations, Peasants, and State: A Study of the

Mode of Sugar Production in Guyana. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American

Studies, 1984.

183 2 Guiana was made famous by Sir Walter Raleigh as the home of the fabled land of El Dorado. See Raleigh, Walter. The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful

Empyre of Guiana. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1618 (1997). In the novel, the recruiter plays upon this myth, ―‗In this sack here,‘ he said, ‗is magic. Ramayana.

Guiana. White magic‘…And it have so much gold there that you don‘t have enough hand and neck and foot to wear bangle‘‖ (Dabydeen, TCH 14).

3 Albion is an actual community within the East Berbice-Corentyne region of

Guyana that still produces sugar. Plantation Albion is one of the largest sugar estates in

Guyana. The Plantation within the novel certainly could have been based on the many sugar estates within this region.

4 The term, ―coolie,‖ was used in the 19th century to signify manual laborers from Asia, particularly from China and India. The term denotes a low class worker, for example, Chinese working the railroads in the United States, or East Indian sugarcane workers in British Guiana. The term coolie is now widely used within the West Indian community to refer to anyone of East Indian descent. This historically racialized term is somewhat troubling in its reappropriation within the community as a neutral/positive label. Nonetheless, it allows for a calculated degree of freedom from social subjugation. It is part of the remapping of identity—from East Indian to West Indian. I retain the use of ―coolie‖ in the paper to refer to East Indian sugar laborers arriving in

British Guiana, not as a derogatory insult, but as a historically situated term to assert

East Indian presence in the Caribbean.

184 5 The phrase in Hindi means ―dark water‖ refers to the dangerous sea passage of

East Indians from India to the Caribbean. The term was used by Indians to describe the unknown waters beyond the Indian shores.

6 Ramayana, a religious epic, recounts the story of the adventures of Sri Rama as told by the sage Valmiki. When Rama is exiled to the forest for fourteen years, he is accompanied by his wife, Sita, who is renowned for her beauty and virtue. When she is kidnapped by the demon, Ravana, Sita rejects his continuous advances, and maintains her virtue. After she is rescued by Rama, she proves her chastity by walking through a fire. Still, her righteousness is questioned by the people; subsequently, she is forced into exile for a second time. Once her sons, born in exile, are accepted by their father,

Sita prays to the Earth Goddess to free her of her pain and is taken by the Earth to a better world. Within this epic, Sita is seen as the self-sacrificing, dutiful wife, who becomes the epitome of Indian womanhood.

7 The relationship between Radha and Krishna within Hindu mythology is said to be an embodiment of immortal love, passion, and devotion. Dale Bisnauth states that on the sugar estates in British Guiana:

Rama and Krishna were known without being popular objects of

immigrant worship in the period up about 1917…Perhaps, the veneration

of the Kshatriya [warrior] heroes was felt to be incongruous on the sugar

estate under the conditions of indentureship, though Rama might have

taken on an additional significance because of the story of his exile.

Perhaps, too, it was felt that the high ethical and moral ideals for which

they stood were unattainable and therefore out of place in the ‗bound

185 yard‘ and the ‗nigger yard‘ where more amoral strategies for survival

had to be adopted. (124)

See Bisnauth, D. A. The Settlement of Indians in Guyana 1890-1930. London: Peepal

Tree, 2000. Indentured laborers from Madras (the heaviest concentration of Madrasis were in the Corentyne area of Guyana) often worshipped the Goddess Kali. Even though Kampta is suspected of Madrasi ancestry, no reference of Kalimai Puja is mentioned in the novel.

8 On the sugar estate, indentured workers lived in logies that were separated from the manager‘s house and the overseer‘s quarters. Dale Bisnauth states that:

the range itself was a long, low, barrack-like building…The roof of the

building might be made of galvanised iron sheets, while the floor was

often made of clay smoothed over with a mixture of clay, fine sand,

water and cowdung…Rooms were separated from each other by a ten-

foot high partition…the lattice-work make it impossible to keep

conversation and noises in one room from being heard in another. (85)

Ibid

9 See Introduction for the historical meaning of Gladstone. Gail Low notes that the play on John Gladstone may be a ―wonderful joke‖ as an inversion of marginality:

―there is a rough kind of poetic justice in creating a character who ostensibly attains historical importance (books devoted to him, a statue commemorating him) but whose credentials turns out to be (equally) hollow‖ (217). See ―‗To Make Bountiful Our

Minds in an England Starved of Gold‘: Reading The Counting House.‖ No Land, No

186 Mother: Essays on the Work of David Dabydeen. Eds. Kampa Karran and Lynne

Macedo. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2007. 204-217.

10 Kshatriya, derived from ‗ksatra‘ in Sanskrit, meaning warrior, is one of the four varnas (social orders) in Hinduism.

11 Male violence against women was quite visible in British Guiana. Between

1859 and 1907, eighty-seven women were reported killed on the estates, while between

1886 and 1890 alone, some thirty-five cases of women chopped with estate implements were reported. See Baseo Mangru‘s ―The Sex Ratio Disparity and its Consequences under the Indenture in British Guiana‖ in David Dabydeen‘s and Brinsley Samaroo‘s

(eds) India in the Caribbean.

12 Huntley and Palmers was founded in 1822 as a British firm that ran what was once one of the world‘s largest biscuit factories, exporting to Africa, the Americas, and the Far East. In her discussion of the Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin, Anne

McClintock writes:

In the flickering magic lantern of imperial desire, teas, biscuits, tobaccos,

Bovril, tins of cocoa and, above all, soap beach themselves on far-flung

shores, tramp through jungles, quell uprisings, restore order and write the

inevitable legend of commercial progress across the colonial landscape.

(219)

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial

Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.

187 13 Rum shops have become a central institution in Caribbean culture. In Guyana, nearly every village has at least one rum shop that is the center of social interactions, mainly among men.

14 Walton Look Lai argues that vagabondage was seen as a ‗habit‘ of laborers from Madras who were viewed as inferior to workers from other parts of India and ―not worth the trouble and expense of acclimatizing.‖ See Walton Look Lai‘s Indentured

Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies 1838-

1918. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

15 According to Governor Light of British Guiana, East Indian men married and cohabited with Black women in the early phase of indentureship. Such mixing might have taken place due to the shortage of Indian women on the plantations. However, images of early marriages between Blacks and Indians are difficult to locate. Today, an offspring of African and Indian descent is known as a ―dougla.‖ This is a troubling identification; a mixed child would ascribe to the racial identity based on their appearance. Often times, a dougla child is rejected by the Indian community, but accepted by the Afro-Guyanese community.

16 South Asians often view West Indians living in the Caribbean with mixed emotions. By crossing the Kali Pani, or dark waters, upper caste Brahmins considered those who journey away from their homeland as polluted. Moreover, West Indians cultural and racial mixing with other ethnic groups further tainted their connection with

India.

17 Basdeo Mangu states that the strategy of survival by East Indians in British

Guiana is both resistance and accommodation. During the first 30 years upon arrival,

188 the strategy appeared to be one of accommodation (as seen by Vidia). Some of the initial immigrants were compulsive deserters, like Kampta, who preferred a precarious existence as fugitives of the plantations. From the early 1870s, resistance began, as workers became more assertive in pursuing their interests through riots and violent protests. See Mangu‘s A History of East Indian Resistance on the Guyana Sugar

Estates, 1869-1948. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. Bechu, a bound coolie radical, was the first Indian in the Caribbean to appear before a Royal Commission. In numerous letters to the liberal newspaper, The Daily Chronicle, Bechu articulates the grievances of Indians under the British plantocracy. See Clem Seecharan‘s Bechu

„Bound Coolie Radical in British Guiana 1894-1901. Kingston: U of the West Indies

P, 1999.

18 Kampta‘s attempt to take vengeance on Gladstone, the colonial authority, for his abuses to Miriam‘s body is similar to Cambridge‘s exploit in Caryl Phillip‘s

Cambridge. Even though Cambridge withstands the physical and verbal abuses of plantation slavery with quiet defiance, the abuses done to his second wife causes him to attack the perpetrator with a sharpened old copper skimmer. Despite his poetic language in describing his tribulations, he still completes the act by killing Arnold

Brown, unlike Kampta, who falls immediately to the ground in hiding as soon as

Gladstone arrives. Cambridge acts in a moment of defiance in which he regains his masculinity by defending the honor of his wife, while Kampta doubts his mission in killing the proprietor of the plantation, even going as far as to say that Gladstone should have a piece of Miriam to ease the fatigue of his troubles.

189 19 Miriam‘s ability to trigger fear to those around her is reminiscent of

Christophine in Jean Rhys‘s Wide Sargasso Sea. Even though she is treated like an outsider, Christophine retains her worth rather than allowing herself to be objectified and marginalized. Like Miriam, when she walks through Gladstone‘s cemetery,

Christophine is the only character who is not in awe of the colonizer. However,

Christophine is able to stand her own ground and speak directly back to her oppressor,

Rochester, while Miriam can only hurl insults at the dead.

20 There is some tongue-and-cheek humor in Dabydeen fictional character‘s name, Vidia. This is a play on V.S. Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. Vidia‘s return to India ends in disaster, similar to Naipaul who views his return to his ancestral homeland as ―a journey that ought not to have been made; it had broken my life in two‖

(265). See V.S. Naipaul‘s An Area of Darkness. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.

Chapter 2:

1 See Introduction. When Forbes Burnham won the elections in 1968, calls of electoral fraud and questionable political tactics by the PNC were voiced by the opposition. These outcries produced little results of political change. By nationalizing

Guyana‘s bauxite and sugar industries, the PNC government attempted to redistribute the national wealth by fostering an establishment of agricultural enterprises. These economic development policies failed to diversify the economy. The declining economic conditions in the 1970s along with continued racial strife led to instability in the population. The government responded to any social unrest and protest with terror tactics and violence. Electoral frauds and increased authoritarianism escalated in more racial and political hostility. Questionable government policies, divisive political

190 strategies, and amplified racial tensions scattered the hopes of a unified country and set up resistance as futile.

2 From 1964 to1992, the People‘s National Congress (PNC) dominated

Guyana‘s politics. Founded by Forbes Burnham after his split from the People‘s

Progressive Party (PPP) in 1957, this political party is mostly supported by Afro-

Guyanese. Burnham initially blamed British colonists for racial divides, yet, by 1961, he was issuing his own explicit racial appeals warning Blacks that Indians will take over their economic livelihood. See Stephen G. Rabe‘s U.S. Intervention in British Guiana:

A Cold War Story. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005.

3 See Chapter 1.

4 From independence talks in 1962 to Independence in 1968, civil unrest and riots were initiated by a USA-CIA led covert operation to destabilize Cheddi Jagan‘s socialist campaign. After Burnham wins the General Election and becomes Prime

Minster of Guyana, years of racial riots and uprising continued and this fear is perpetuated from generations to generations. See Introduction.

5 The People‘s Progressive Party, founded by Cheddi Jagan in 1950, along with

Forbes Burnham, and Jagan‘s wife Janet Jagan, called for an independent nation built on socialist principles. Viewing their initiatives as ―communist,‖ the British sent troops into Guyana and suspended their bill for independence in 1953. Both Jagan and his wife were imprisoned for short periods of time. The party split along racial lines in

1957 as Burnham left and formed his own oppositional party, the PNC. See

Introduction.

6 In a speech, ―The Cooperative Republic,‖ Burnham states:

191 You have been told by party leaders that the cooperative is the means

through which the SMALL MAN CAN BECOME A REAL MAN, the

means through which the small man can participate fully in the economic

life of the nation and the means through which the small man can play a

predominant part in the workings of the economy.

See Selected Speeches by the Prime Minister of Guyana. New York: Africana Pub.

Corp., 1970.

7 In 1976, the People‘s Militia was created as a part-time military organization with the goal of making ―Every citizen a soldier‖ (153). See George K. Danns‘s

Domination and Power in Guyana: A Study of the Police in a Third World Context.

N.J.: Transaction Books, 1982.

8 In 1974, a new political organization, the WPA, began to challenge the dictates of the PNC government. By appealing to Indians and Blacks, this independent Marxist party sought to bring unity to the working people. The policies announced in 1974 stated that the ―Alliance stands for the destruction of imperialism and its neo-colonial systems and the revolutionary unity of all subject and liberated peoples.‖

9 This is similar to V.S. Naipaul‘s vision of colonialism and his unsentimental of portrait his ancestral homeland, India, and native soil of Trinidad. See An Area of

Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

10 Kempadoo and Shewcharan fail to create empowering spaces for women.

Historically, this is not the case. In the early 1980s, the Red Thread organization formed in Guyana as a woman-centered movement that reconstructed the domestic space into an empowering economic site. It offered a point of departure from the fixed

192 male-female dynamic by ―denying the essentialist privileging of the party and its (male) intellectuals and crossing the classed and racialised ethnic divides to create gendered political subjects outside the logic of a fixed identity‖ (Peake and Trotz 181). See

Peake, Linda, and D. Alissa Trotz. Gender, Ethnicity and Place: Women and Identities in Guyana. London: Routledge, 1999. By using their skills of embroidery, rural women created small retail stores as an income generator to offset Burnham‘s leadership. While progress is small, and at times funds limited, it widened the gap between ―necessity and choice‖ (192).

11 See Chapter 1.

Chapter 3:

1 As discussed later in this chapter, the metropolitan center (London) is different from the periphery, (the countryside). Zareer Masani states that the English treated

Indians differently in England than in India: ―Many [Indians] who went to England as students were surprised to find how much friendlier the British were on their home ground‖ (56). See Masani, Zareer. Indian Tales of the Raj. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1988. In these two novels, both narrators still feel a sense of hostility in England. However, the diversity of the metropole makes it more tolerable for the

Indo-Guyanese than the Afro-Guyanese, who is residing in the countryside.

2 ―Empire,‖ Gayatri Spivak observes, ―messes with identity‖ (85). See Gayatri

Spivak‘s Gayatri. ―Reading The Satanic Verses.‖ Public Culture 2:1 (1989): 79-99.

The unnamed Indo-Guyanese narrator states, ―Our lives were messy…‖ (Dabydeen, TI

121). Taken together implies that colonialism disrupts the identities of the colonized. I use Spivak‘s term ―messiness‖ repeatedly throughout the paper to highlight the

193 distortion of Guyanese history, the narrative structure, emerging cultures of London, and finally the ―messiness‖ of identities within England that each narrator has to contend with. The idea that layered identity with contradictory elements is applicable to most immigrants from the postcolonial world; however, Dabydeen suggests that this messy experience is more problematic for the Indo-Caribbean than other South Asian groups in England.

3 Abbreviated throughout paper—The Intended as TI.

4 Dabydeen‘s Disappearance rewrites and replies to V.S. Naipaul‘s The Enigma of Arrival. Mostly autobiographical, Naipaul‘s novel takes place in England where a writer has rented a cottage in the countryside. While residing there, the narrator is preoccupied with the idea of loss and ruin.

5 I use the term ―nothingness‖ throughout this chapter to represent two voids in each novel. Within The Intended, nothingness is emptiness in self, as seen with Joseph, the Rastafarian Black British, who relinquish his quest to understand the colonial history of England by giving into the nothingness of his existence as a ―coon.‖ In

Disappearance, nothingness is a void of history as the Afro-Guyanese claims no hold on Guyana, stating that his nation is wasteland. Interestingly, in both novels, the Afro-

Guyanese and the Black British are the ones claiming nothingness.

6 I use the term ―darkness‖ throughout this chapter in various contexts. In

Joseph Conrad‘s novel, Heart of Darkness, darkness is both literal (the Congo), and metaphorical (the darkness of colonial enterprises in Africa). Both Indo- and Afro-

Guyanese narrators encounter a metaphorical ―darkness‖ in England through capitalistic enterprises as seen in South London and a crumbling Empire within the British

194 countryside. Similar to Marlow‘s journey in the Congo, both narrators travel through the darkness that exist in England as well as the darkness within themselves. This psychological voyage is more prevalent within the Afro-Guyanese who is faced with the ruins of colonial projects.

7 In Heart of Darkness, Marlow states:

the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from

those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than

ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What

redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental

pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea — something

you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . .‖

(Conrad 10).

Likewise, immigrants contend with the idea of England as a place of power and prestige as seen by the Afro-Guyanese narrator in Disappearance who offers his alliance to the old Empire by rebuilding the seawalls, thus bowing down to this imperial belief. Each narrator has his own illusions of both England and Englishness that is illustrated further in this chapter.

8 Marlow travels from the Central Station to the Inner Station in Heart of

Darkness; this journey is a navigation into his psyche to understand the dynamics and hypocrisy of imperialism. Likewise, the two narrators navigate from the Center

(London) to the Inner Station (the countryside), reflecting in each place on their identity as formed by their Guyanese history and their postcolonial relocation in England.

195 9 See Chapter 1. Within the racial history of British Guiana, ―coolie‖ refers to an indentured Indian worker in the Guyanese context while Black connotes a slave of

Afro-Guyanese descent.

10 In May 1964, gangs of Blacks at Wismar, in upper Demerara/Berbice Guyana, raided the businesses and homes of Indians, demanding valuables. After a house was set on fire, the entire area became an inferno as gangs terrorized the 1,600 Indians as they tried to escape. Men were brutally beaten, while women and girls were raped in full public view by gangs of men— see Dwarka Nath, A History of Indian in Guyana.

11 Desi is typically used as a slang word by Indians meaning ―of the homeland.‖

12 In an interview with Wolfgang Binder, Dabydeen comments on the shame of seeing other Asians in England:

I went to a boy‘s school—and the Asian boys were very ashamed, and I

was when we walked home from school and saw a couple of Asian

women in saris who obviously looked different. We always felt ashamed

and we would talk about that to each other…Or we would be ashamed if

we were in a train carriage or in a bus, and two Asians spoke loudly or

audibly in Urdu or whatever. As little boys, we wished they would keep

quiet. In other words, there was a very great pressure among us to

become invisible. (161)

See The Art of David Dabydeen. Ed. Kevin Grant. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1997. 159-

176.

13 Homi Bhabha explains his use of ―mimic men‖ by stating in ―Of Mimicry and

Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,‖ that:

196 At the intersection of European learning and colonial power, Macaulay

can conceive of nothing other ‗a class of interpreters between us and the

millions whom we govern - a class of persons Indian in blood and

colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect‘ - in

other words a mimic man raised ‗through our English School‘ as a

missionary educationist wrote in 1819, ‗to form a corps of translators and

be employed in different departments of Labour.‘ The line of descent of

the mimic man can be traced through the works of Kipling, Forster,

Orwell, Naipaul…. (The Location of Culture 124)

14 Abbreviated throughout paper—Disappearance as D.

15 V.S. Naipaul has been criticized for his unappealing portrayal of his Trinidad homeland in his novels, such as Guerillas. Guyana is depicted during the 1970s as a political wasteland; nonetheless, Dabydeen portrays the vitality of the land and its people through the flashbacks of both narrators.

16 Golden-apple, guenip, and dounze are three of many tropical fruits grown in

Guyana.

17 See Endnote 15.

18 Rohan Kanhai is a famous West Indian cricket player who was born in

Guyana. He was known as one of the best batsman of the 1960s.

19 Guyanese Creole is a creolized language spoken by many in Guyana. It is based strongly in the English language with inflections in Hindi, African, and indigenous cultures. Different ethnic groups within various regions of the country alter and include words from their own ancestral background.

197 20 Michael Caine is widely known to Guyanese people for his marriage to

Shakira Baksh, a Guyanese model and actress.

21 Jumbie is a term for ―ghost.‖

22 Mark Stein states that Patel‘s invocation that England will become one tribe of Patels is alluding to Calban‘s desire, ―I had peopled else/ This isle with Calibans‖

(156-157) (The Tempest I, 2, II. 352-53). See Stein, Mark. Black British Literature:

Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.

23 David Dabydeen states in an interview with Kwame Dawes that ―I grew up without a mother, so that the absent mother is probably what moves me very deeply and created writing‖ (220). See The Art of David Dabydeen. Ed. Kevin Grant. Leeds:

Peepal Tree, 1997. 199-221.

24 In an interview with Frank Birbalsingh, Dabydeen states, the pattern of the immigrant life is not a linear experience in The Intended:

This is what migrant life is: you appear in one society, then you

disappear; you are either deported or move on somewhere else; you are

always moving on. That‘s the structure. It‘s set on buses and trains, and

there is a lot of waiting at bus-stops, a constant sense of traveling which

ends up with a boy waiting for a taxi. There are taxis, buses, planes and

trains which represent the constant affliction as well as the creative

potential of migration or diaspora. (195)

See The Art of David Dabydeen. Ed. Kevin Grant. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1997. 177-

198.

25 See Rudyard Kipling‘s White Man‟s Burden: ―Half-Devil, Half-Child.‖

198 26 Marlow refers to the city as a ―white sepulcher.‖ However, the Afro-

Guyanese arrival to the countryside reminds him of a buried white colonial past of violence and conquest.

27 Marlow states in Heart of Darkness, ―At that time there were many blank spaces on earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‗When I grow up I will go there‘‖

(Conrad 11).

28 The narrator states that Joseph had become a Rastafarian and ―all he wanted to do was to learn black history and spread love and feelings to everyone‖ (Dabydeen, TI

65). However, the beliefs and doctrines of the Rastafarian movement are negated throughout the narrative. He is a Black Rastafarian, but only in mentioning. David

Dabydeen states in his interview with Kwame Dawes that he is not:

talking about the Rastafarian as a Rastafarian, but about the notion of the

Rastafarian. Rastafarianism was important as a ‗concept to me because

of course there is the overlap with Hinduism; the smoking of ganja

(supplied on the plantations to the Indians by the British) or all kinds of

other ritual and mystical correspondences.‘ (207)

29 The famous display of colonial fantasy is Saartje (Sarah) Baartman, who was brought to England in 1819 and regularly exhibited over five years in London and Paris.

As Stuart Hall noted, ―She became a spectacle for ballads, cartoons, and measured, observed, molded and plaster casts to scrutinize every detail of her anatomy, dead and alive. Saartje (Sarah) Baartman did not exist as ‗a person.‘ She has been dissembled into her relevant parts. She was ‗fetishized‘—turned into an object‖ (266). See Stuart

199 Hall‘s Representation Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London:

Sage, 1997.

30 Chinua Achebe‘s Things Fall Apart is postcolonial textual response to Heart of Darkness. See Achebe‘s criticism of Conrad in the article ―An Image of Africa:

Racism in Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness.‖

31 By lighting himself on fire, Joseph performs the old Hindu custom of Sati. In

India, a widow would burn to ashes on her husband‘s pyre after his death. This custom has been widely debated by many postcolonialists including Gayatri Spivak and Lata

Mani.

32 The chief accountant in Heart of Darkness is known for being an efficient worker despite the heat and squalor of the Outer Station in the Congo. Likewise, Patel and other South Asian owners operated efficient businesses amid the sex and filth of

London.

33 See Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe‟s Twentieth Century (2000), a title that plays off the 19th century European characterization of Africa as dark because it was unknown and because its inhabitants had dark skin. Nevertheless, in retrospect,

Europe was the darkest continent in the 20th century considering the world wars and the

Holocaust.

34 When Marlow arrives at the Central Station, he states, after seeing the sunken condition of the steamer, that all ―I really wanted was rivets, by Heavens! Rivets. To get on with the work—to stop the hole. Rivets I wanted‖ (Conrad 30).

200 35 In Guyanese folklore, a Churile is an evil spirit of a woman who died in child- birth and who haunts pregnant women and seeks their children. A Dai-Dai is an

Amerindian spirit who protects treasures such as gold and diamond.

36 Marlow notices in the Manager‘s office a painting of a woman ―draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch‖ (Conrad 27). This image represents the blind ideals of the English in their hypocritical quest to bring enlightenment to the natives.

37 Marlow observes that the ―cannibals‖ on the steamboat, although malnourished, conduct themselves with dignity, stating, ―I looked at them as you would on any human being with a curiosity of their impulses, motives, capacities, weakness, when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity. Restraint!‖ (Conrad 43).

38 Marlow states of Kurtz‘s discourse—―A voice! A voice! It rang deep to the very last‖ (Conrad 67).

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