The Dichotomized Life: Claude M6ray to Zee Edgell

THE DICHOTOMIZED LIFE: CLAUDE M6RAY TO ZEE EDGELL

Elaine Campbell THE DICHOTOMIZED LIFE: CLAUDE McKAY TO ZEE Ea;ELL

Elaine Campbell, Ph.D.

CARIBBEAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION NINTH ANNUAL MEETING MAY-JUNE 1985

ST. KITTS WEST INDIES THE DICHOTOMIZED LIFE

With the advent of Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb, which Reinhard Sander be- 1 lieves "is probably the first novel to be published by a Belizean author," and of Crick Crack Monkey, the first novel of Trinidadian activist Merle Hodge, the Caribbeanist might expect a new theme and perhaps even a new style in West

Indian novels. Hodge and Edgell represent the younger women writers from the

English-speaking Caribbean; consequently,one might look for radical departures from the work of earlier women writers: Jean Hhys, Phyllis Allfrey, Ada Quayle,

Lucille Iremonger, Sylvia Wynter. While Quayle and Iremonger's preoccupation with White creole degeneration makes The Mistress and Creole now dated, it would take some talent to surpass the high quality of Rhys's writing or the basically revolutionary content of Allfrey's. Wynter, of the earlier women writers, re- mains in a class by herself--her only novel, The Hills of Hebron, antedates the literary and social criticism for which she is better known. Despite the long separation between Wide Sargasso Sea and the new novels or the even longer separation of thirty years between The Orchid House and the two new novels, Beka Lamb and Crick Crack Monkey offer disappointingly little advance over the offerings of the past. Indeed, the most significant distinction that Edgell offers is that of a sympathetic depiction of Black middle-class life--something we haven't seen much of in literature from the West Indies with the exception of John Hearne's

novels that have often been treated as anomalies for that very reason. Hodge's

Crick Crack Monkey, well-written as it is, throws the West Indian novel back

upon the familiar theme of the exile-at-home.

Announced formally by George Lamminj in his J060 publication or The

Pleasures of Exile, the notion of the exile -at- home was a sophisticated varia-

iion of the widely recognized theme of the alienated West Indian abroad. The exodus of West Indian artists to England in the nineteen-fifties is too well- Dichotomized Life Campbell - 2 known a phenomenon to detail here. It was an exodus that paralleled the gen- eral migration of West Indians to London, and the writers among the emigrants replaced the phenomenon of emigration with the metaphor of exile. Lamming, himself writing from London, looked beyond the exodus to England to those West

Indians who remained at home to write. He perceived the special quality of their search for a literary identity in the face of a long history of linguistic and literary colonization. His conclusion was that in spite of their decision to remain at home on their respective islands, they, too, experienced a sort of

separation from their ancestral roots which he identified as specifically West

Indian. Lamming saw the writers-at-home as poised on the horns of a dilemma:

West Indian or British,and he believed they would eventually have to choose one identity or the other. What he did not anticipate was that some of the artists

might not succumb to the dilemma but would instead encompass both worlds in their writing. These artists could manipulate the materials and values of two

cultures without coming down on one side or the other. Such recognition and ac-

ceptance of a dual heritage has produced much of the thoughtful poetry of Derek Walcott. Taken to its outside limits, it has enabled Wilson Harris to work

with not only two but with three or more cultural identities in West Indian life.

In addition to the British and West Indian components, Harris includes the fairly obvious African components, the less obvious Amerindian contributions, and even, at special moments as in The Far Journey of Oudin, the South Asian contributions.

For the most part, however, the West Indian writer has reduced the components to the British and the West Indian, the latter being increasingly identified with the African. Expressions of cultural dichotomy remain active in the novels of contemporary West Indian writers much as in the novels of the older or

post-World War generation. Cultural dichotomy is emblemized by the novelistic

protagonist who is often engaged in weighing the values of conflicting cultural systems. The pattern has had a long lifcspan--so long as to suggest artistic Dichotomized Life Campbell - 3 arrest in the development of the West Indian novel. The subject of the dichotomized life has been drawn as a woman often enough as to express sexual stereo- typing, and this woman has been drawn to settle her dilemma--for good or for ill-- through marriage or mating. The most notable early heroine displaying this pattern is Claude McKay's Bita Plant in Banana Bottom. Bita does not share the spotlight with a hero; she is the true protagonist of the novel and McKay details her Jamaican heritage with care. Her roots are deep in the soil, as her name so obviously suggests. Her father, Jordan Plant, is a respectable, God-fearing villager, a leading peasant 2 with "the best acres of any small proprietor in Banana Bottom." As McKay not very subtly tells us,- "Rooted in the soil, Jordan then was obviously the one thriving Plant." And Bita is indeed his daughter. Her adoption by a British clergyman and his wife, her seven years abroad acquiring an English education, her expertise at the piano, all notwithstanding, Bita is a daughter of the soil. But before coming around to verifying that fact, McKay explores Bita's need to sort out her cultural situation upon her return to the village of Banana Bottom after seven years overseas. Her British acculturation is supported by her re- moval from Jamaican life as a young child, by her overseas education, by her return to the home of the Craigs, and, finally, by her engagement to the young theology student, Herald Newton Day. The struggle between the two halves of

Bita's self--the indigenous half and the acquired half--is the substance of

Banana Bottom. Her struggle is in some ways McKay's struggle. He was open-minded enough and certainly traveled enough to have seen the advantages of both cultures. Had the novel been written earlier in his life, he might have opted in favor of Bita's expatriation overseas, in either London or New York. However, written late in McKay's life, in the final phase of reconciliation with his own

Jamaican past, the novel points at every turn to the "correct" solution to Bita's quandary. The dichotomized heroine, torn between the British ways of her foster- Dichotomized Life Campbell - 4 parents and the Jamaican ways of her peasant father and stepmother, rejects the man-of-the-future, Herald Newton Day, in a final affirmation of indigenuity.

Choosing instead to marry Jubba the Drayman, the dependable village laborer,

Bita casts her lot with the peasant progenitors of rural Jamaica.

This choice of the steady Jamaican peasant in an affirmation of cultural authenticity is a not unfamiliar treatment in the West Indian novel. Forty years later, Orlando Patterson in Die the Long Day. has another West Indian heroine bypass the more attractive males available to accept a man of the soil.

Quasheba is a much more romantic heroine than Bita: she is a glorious African goddess of pre-emancipation Jamaica and she can have any and as many mates as she wishes. But in her wisdom she recognizes the quiet heroism of the plodding field slave Cicero and she chooses to live the final days of her doomed life with him. The act of choosing a man of the people is the plot device by which the heroine, whether divided like Bita or transcendent like Quasheba, satisfies the male West Indian novelist's paradigm of authenticity.

When George Lamming was ready to create his first heroine-protagonist, he used the same pattern as Claude McKay before him and Orlando Patterson to follow. After the success of his novel about childhood, In the Castle of My

Skin, and the relative failure of his novel about expatriation in England, The Emigrants, Lamming turned to writing about the dichotomy of West Indian life.

The dichotomy depicted in his third novel, Of Me and Innocence, is, as the title indicates, generational. Pitting the guardian of the past, embodied in Ma Shephard and her conservatism, against the harbingers of the future, the young gang boys and their revolutionary impulses, Lamming options for the latter. The nature of the dichotomy takes on cultural specificity in the fourth novel,

Season of Adventure, wherein Lamming presents his first heroine, Fola Piggott. Fola is the lineal descendant of McKay's Bita Plant. Although Fola is not sent overseas to acquire an education, she is groomed by her mother and step-father .Dichotomized Life Campbell - 5 to take her place in the new Black bourgeoisie of Lamming's fictional island,

San Cristobal. Lacking an agricultural setting (the novel has an urban back- ground), Lamming supplies the indigenous element by his creation of the Forest

Reserve. Here San Cristobal's social rejects live a shantytown life. Lamming paints the Forest Reserve as the antipodes of the suburbia where San Cristobal's civil servants live. Knowing only this suburban life, Fola is unprepared for the "backward vision" (to use Lamming's term) she encounters during an expedition to a vodum ceremony, a scene Lamming borrows from his visit to Haiti. Escorted to the ceremony by an expatriate suitor, Fola moves from contempt and fear to an urge to participate. This urge is the springboard for her experimentation with the lifestyle of- Forest Reserve residents, among whom is Chiki, a physically unattractive painter with a police record. Chiki replaces Fola's expatriate beau in a movement toward a resolution of cultural dichotomy through marriage or mating. Fola's rejection of her parents' suburban circle of friends with a con- comitant espousal of Chiki's Forest Reserve lifestyle is another instance of the female protagonist's enlightened choice of a man of the people.Fola's road to resolution is somewhat more anguished than Bita's, but it is questionable if the message conveyed by her decision is appreciably different from that which Bita delivered twenty-five years earlier.

Six years after the publication of Lamming's Season of Adventure, one of the West Indies' few women novelists published her contribution to the canon of the dichotomized heroine. Jean Rhys's Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea con- fronts her cultural dilemma vis-a-vis a mate. However, Antoinette has less free choice than Bita, Fola or Quasheba. Bita picks her own man despite the preference of her family and friends; Fola finds the course to defy her family and social circle when she chooses Chiki; Quasheba defers to no outside judgment when mak-

ing her choice. But Antoinette finds herself railroaded into an arranged marriage before she has any chance to explore the possibilities of a marriage with her Dichotomized Life Campbell - 6 lover Sandi. Rochester, the opportunist from Elyland, is imposed upon her by her half-brother Richard Mason, and Antoinette becomes a victim of the dichotomized life. Attempting to satisfy her husband by learning about the England whose existence she only half believes, Antoinette is forced to turn away from the West Indian life she understands and loves. She and her alter ego, Christo- phine, are unable to outmaneuver the expatriate husband and so Rhys's heroine suffers mental and physical destruction. The authorial recommendation for a resolution of the cultural dichotomy very subtly favors an indigenous rather than an expatriate mate. Sandi's role is part of the subtext of the novel; his existence as an alternative to Rochester is sketched with the lightest of strokes. Nevertheless, Rhys's message is ultimately the same as that of her male colleagues, but it is stronger because we are made to read it in its nega- tive version. Whereas Bita and Fola succeed to an integration of self through rejection of imported values, Antoinette, denied rejection of those values, is reduced to insanity. In the sheer destructiveness of its resolution, Wide

Sargasso Sea is more radical than the other novels, despite its seemingly a- political surface. More overtly politicized than Rhy6's novel is Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey. A novel of racial and cultural commitment, Crick Crack Monkey's polarities are similar to McKay's in Banana Bottom. McKay's clergyman's wife, Priscilla Craig, the White expatriate from England, is replaced by Hodge's light-skinned Aunt Beatrice. Both women display stereotypic nicety of behavior; the difference is that Mrs. Craig's is more sincere than Aunt Beatrice's. McKay offers a more moderate portrait of the female representative of British culture.

Whereas McKay offers the whole village of Banana Bottom including Bita Plant's family as the chalice of indigenous values, Hodge offers Tantie Rosa as the vessel of peasant or proletarian values. Roy Narinesingh points out in his

Introduction to Crick Crack Monkey that "The central character, Tee, moves in Dichotomized Life Campbell - 7 two worlds--the world of Tantie and the world of Aunt Beatrice...The child, Tee, moves in a context in which there is strong opposition between certain social and cultural values, and, as a narrator, she recounts the intensely personal dilemmas of her life in that context." 3 Hodge's valuation of the two antago- nistic aunts is crystal clear. Neither ambiguity nor complexity cloud the issue. Good and bad angels stand to Tee's right and left shoulders. But Hodge updates McKay because she resists the impulse to settle Tee's dilemma through the deus ex machina of a mate. Tee is left in childhood at the end of the novel, too young to address the selection of a mate. Hodge emancipates herself from the possibility of providing a suitable mate for the perplexed heroine, thereby leaving her in her dilemma. Tee is the modern youth, product of a dual culture, heiress to a dichotomized psyche. She is a child of the writer of the sixties.

She longs to return to her earthy Tantie, but she does not. She is left standing on the brink of self-realization. "Everything was changing, unrecognizable, pushing me out. This was as it should be, since I had moved up and no longer had any place here. But it was painful, and I longed all the more to be on my way. "14, Recognizing that her growth has taken her beyond the world that Tantie can provide, Tee is nonetheless unhappy with that growth. She leaves the reader as she wishes for a plane to lift her off the ground. Her situation is not

easily settled: a solution won't be supplied by a drayman, a field worker, or a bohemian artist. Nor will there come a plane to lift her off the ground. The answer will have to be worked out by Tee herself.

If Tee Davis is a heroine of the sixties, ltten Beka Lamb might be called a heroine of the seventies. Published in 1.9B2, Edgell's novel is a show- piece of Belizean literature. Late in its development beyond oratory and journal- ism, the literature of Belize has been an unknown constituent in the larger world of West Indian Literature. Alan McLeod has pointed out that the literature of

the country has been confined largely to rhetoric and poetry because of Belize's Dichotomized Life Campbell - 8 history of public meetings as the conventional means of communication and per- suasion. McLeod hopes that Belize, so cut off from the more England-oriented West Indian island nations, might explore "avenues not yet entered by the

/other/ Anglophone Caribbean countries, developing in the process a new es-

thetic."5 Whatever may be the future of Belize's late developing literature,

Edgell's novel does not indicate a new esthetic. Beka Lamb is a competently written work which in no way reflects the magical realism of its Latin American

neighbors. If anything, it is a solid specimen of the traditional novel, em-

ploying flashback to recount the sad ending of a likable seventeen-year-old

who finds herself pregnant out of wedlock. The villain of the piece is a rather

self-satisfied young . member of Belize's Hispanic population; the novel's weight is thrown heavily in favor of the Black creoles. Beka's own triumph over her

tendency to lie--the declared main action of the novel--does not engage the writer to the same degree as does Toycie's story. The story .of Toycie's fall from virtue is really a frame from which to hang a considerable amount of information about the everyday life of Belize's

newly emergent urban middle-class, a population still too close to poverty to

have developed a set of bourgeois assumptions. Despite the somewhat heavy di-

dacticism of Edgell's understandable desire to explain contemporary Belizean events, despite the highly traditional form of the novel, and despite the ma-

terial of yet another West Indian novel of childhood, Beka Lamb could signal a significant change of pace in the West Indian novel because it by-passes what

have become the pieties of the times. Beka's engrossment in her milieu calls to mind the novels of Michael Anthony, novels singularly devoid of a sense of

estrangement. Anthony's characters are totally integrated West Indians, so ab- sorbed in life's little moments that they bring to West Indian fiction a quality of sweetness rare in the literature of commitment. While Edgell's conservative style may somehow be a function of Belize's position outside the mainstream of Dichotomised Life Campbell - 9

West Indian affairs, she cannot be accused of naivete, because, according to the biographical note on the back cover of Beka Lamb, she has lived in Jamaica,

Britain, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and the U. S. A.: quite an impressive list for someone who grew up in Belize and is still in her early thirties.

At a recent Commonwealth Literature conference in Bayreuth, West In- dian teacher and critic Maureen Warner-Lewis expressed the opinion that the West

Indian novel has seen its day and that West Indian literature has now turned to other genres for expression. Perhaps Warner-Lewis is correct, and the West

Indian novel has come full circle before fading into a secondary or even ter- tiary position in relation to poetry and drama. Perhaps the West Indian novel, having charted the agitation of enfranchisement and independence, is now enter- ing a period of consolidation mirroring the achievement of self-determination by almost all of the English-speaking Caribbean nations. Whether the West Indian novel is consolidated or whether it is fading, the dichotomized protagonist, often written as a woman, has served her term of duty. With a relatively long history behind her, she has become a literary cliche. But with the advent of more women novelists, she is likely to be replaced by female characters who need not define their cultural identities through a correctly chosen mate. She may, like Simone Schwarz-Bart's Lougandor women, be matrilineally defined, or she may, like Hodge's Tee Davis, avoid sexual entrapment. Whatever her future, she is unlikely to suffer, like Rhys's Antoinette Rochester, a marriage arranged to the convenience of everyone but herself.

### Dichotomized Life Campbell - Notes

'Reinhard Sander, "The Year That Was," Kunapipi, 5, No. 2 (1983), p. 102. 2Claude McKay, Banana Bottom (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1961),p. 14. 3Roy Narinesingh, Introd., Crick Crack Monkey, by Merle Hodge (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. vii. 4Merle Hodge, Crick Crack Monkey. (London: Heinemann, 1981), pp. 110-111.

5Alan McLeod, "The English Literature of Belize," World Literature Today, Summer 1982, p. 443.