Review Article
The Red Man's
Burden
The Wild Coast: Jan Carew (Secker & Warburg: 1958)
Back in the days of British Guiana when tolerance, if not trust, plus false modesty and muted animus helped the colonized races get along, mixed-race individuals moved like shadows among us. For anyone curious about their 'role' in pre-Independent Guyana Jan Carew's early novel The Wild Coast provides a useful window. Carew himself (b. 1925) is of mixed race so it's safe to assume he knew what he was writing about. The book is out of print now and its author has moved on to become a distinguished Professor; he has written many important works, fiction and non-fiction, on issues of Pan African cultures.
Since The Wild Coast is a work of fiction one must be careful not to read it for sociological insights. Carew seemed more interested in showing publishers that a colonized people, or their representatives, could think about themselves and write good narrative fiction. There are strong colourful characters, many situations of personal conflict, those cultural paradoxes one comes across in colonial settings, plus "vivid" scenes, settings and prose.
His mixed-race central character is a boy. What concerns him is not his "mixture". Choices in British Guiana then were simpler: towards a legitimizing colonial "whiteness" or the downgraded creole "blackness". Readers hoping this would turn out to be a book about the growth of consciousness, or the anguish of a divided self might be disappointed. What Carew gives us is more of a coming of age tale, from boyhood through a man-child phase to what the author describes as his "pristine manhood". That path towards manhood is determined primarily by his experiences in the black creole world.
Hector, the boy, lives a sheltered life in the city but at age nine he yearns for a life that is more adventurous. He envies the life of a black boy, Togo, his freedom to play with the tenement children, his "cunning and enterprise". In contrast Hector is described as sickly and like his mother "secretive and locked inside himself". On his first boyish adventure he leaves home to roam city streets, which is like taking a giant step into the creole world. He meets a vagrant named Mr. Dodo - "an old black man with big alligator eyes" - who just happened to know about Hector's family history.
Hector's grandfather, he tells the boy, was Busha Bradshaw, a man with a weakness (or an appetite) for women and liquor. Hector's father, Mazaruni Bradshaw, made a fortune in the diamond fields and owns a store in Camp Street. He, too, has a weakness for women and liquor. Mr. Dodo ends this scene by expressing the hope Hector would be a "better man" than his father. At this point one anticipates a book about the moral and spiritual development of a mixed-race boy, whose father, when he finds out about Hector's venture into city streets, beats him badly for his disobedience, and wonders if he "had spawned a cipher and not a son".
To aid his self-development Carew dispatches him to the wild coast, the Courentyne. Not the Courentyne of East Indians, rice fields and Hindu rituals. He is sent by his father (as punishment for his adventure in the city) to a creole village named Tarlogie. There Hector will continue his forays into the black creole world. He would spend five years in Tarlogie and would receive private tutoring, pass important exams, and grow to manhood. Returning to the city his choices are clearer: a university future abroad, or off to the diamond fields like his father - burdened with the "freedom" to do as he pleases.
Tarlogie is a dismal place. It is an environment "ruled by a cruel sun", known for its swamp, forest, mud, the occasional drought and floods, plus all the marks of post-slavery hardship. But Hector's father has an estate there, a "big house" set apart from the villagers' huts on stilts, with servants and a black matriarch who "was working for the family before your papa born and…knew all the family secrets" - like the Bradshaw "mad blood" and the Bradshaw profligate way with women. The secret, too, about the identity of his mother whom Hector never knew.
Hector is perceived as "master of the village" and he conforms to villagers' perception by acting like his father, with Bradshaw "reserve" if not aloofness. Not for one moment does he forget his position of privilege and fortune. Eventually he will experience "wild urges" and impulses and in fulfilling these he will make the transition from man-child to manhood.
His first big act of wildness is with Elsa, "a samba woman", who just happened to be the former mistress of his father. (She grew tired of the relationship and told him one day with creole candor: "I scraping you off!") Young Hector is unaware of her past. He doesn't actively pursue her. In fact, he is at once "repelled and excited" by her and he allows himself to be seduced. (He "sucks at her nipple" and Elsa eventually "drains the sap out of him".)
This encounter and the second (for Hector goes back for seconds) gives young author Carew the chance to demonstrate his descriptive powers (A different author, say, Naipaul, depicting life in a rural setting, say, Green Vale, might have opted for more precise brushstrokes). Here Tarlogie is presented as simply a place governed by 'the unruly forces of nature'. Carew writes passages that back then might have been considered "colorful" if not steamy: "Elsa wrapped her legs around him and her animal smell attracted and repelled him in the same way it had done the first time he had laboured with her. She kissed him, using her tongue like a serpent's and he knew that he did not want to escape her anymore." (p.165)
(It should be pointed out here that Carew's prose is drenched with animal images: an old man has a "raccoon laugh", "labaria eyes"; a woman "sobbed and whimpered like a sick baboon". Other characters have "eyes like swamp water" or are "serpent-tongued". Living with a woman, one character says, "is like walking cross a swamp full of alligators, you might get through with couple bite; you might even get through without nothing happening at all; on the other hand you might even end up piece meal in some alligator stomach" p.83). In this novel the ungovernable forces of the colonial landscape touch every human act and feature.)
Hector learns to hunt geese. In another wild moment he comes upon the plight of a jaguar surrounded by wild hogs, a victim of "a flurry of bristles and dripping tusks". He feels a rush of the Bradshaw "mad blood" and attempts to save the jaguar. This desire to shield the innocent surfaces again when superstitious villagers attack Dela, his father's Amerindian mistress, whom they perceive as responsible for the sudden death of the long-serving black matriarch. Hector steps forward and shouts, "Leave her alone". The villagers back away.
Central to his growing up is his contact with Africa, in the form of the shango rituals that survive on the wild coast. Hector is drawn to a wind-dance ceremony out of "curiosity", we are told, about his "roots". Carew's description of this ceremony is consciously crafted and detailed: an altar for sacrifice, a ram goat, a sword dance, the beheading of the ram goat, the "slow monotonous beat" of drums, the head of a fowlcock bitten off and spat in a fire, chants of the high priest, dancing girls.
And Hector's reaction to all this? "Hector found himself laughing, shouting, sobbing. He broke away from the ceremony and headed for the swamp." One isn't sure what to make of all that laughing, shouting and sobbing. What Hector does next after he "breaks away" is far more interesting. The ceremony sends him through the swamp to the door of "the samba woman", Elsa - she lives at "Maiden's Head" - where after some cajoling he finds himself at her breasts labouring with her one more time.
Hard to tell how readers today with sharpened ethnic sensibilities would react to this novel if it were available. Young Amerindians, more omnipresent and socially active, might wince at the depiction of the sole Amerindian woman in the novel, Dela. She is brought to the city as a replacement for Mazaruni Bradshaw's concubine, a role she accepts with little fuss. At seventeen she is described as wearing "the disciplined inscrutability of her people". She has "the gift of quietness" and is "clever" at not understanding a word of English when it suits her. East Indians are few in this book. The most prominent is Laljee, a chauffeur to Mazaruni Bradshaw, a man of "oriental patience", whose "oriental breadth of vision enabled him to regard his master's interests and his own as one". (Laljee is quietly saving his money for the day he can invest in a salt goods shop.)
Staying close to the conventions of realist fiction (which his mixed-race author and contemporary Wilson Harris eschewed) Carew gives readers an ample spread of colorful peripheral characters, plot twists, the neat pairing off of interlocked souls (a childless woman lives for 25 years with an abusive man who has swollen testicles; finally she kills him) amusing colonial juxtapositions (as when two characters discuss the merits of Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn while just outside one can see "a donkey cart bumping along the public road with clay pots full of water. Behind it women… carrying earthenware jars on their heads.") This issue of the divided self has been dealt with by other mixed-race Guyanese authors, notably Mittelholzer, but perhaps not with the same sharp-focussed directness. In another setting, say, Jamaica, and with the prose management of a different mixed-race author, say the late John Hearne, Hector's journey to manhood might have ended with his crossing class privileged and income boundaries, subsuming his "redness" in the adopted faith of born-again Rastafari. Or maybe not.
In any event The Wild Coastis very much a piece of social drama representing a specific time, place and authorial ambition. It has the confident realist prose of an author who knew what Guyanese thought and felt about each other at that time. It was not Carew's purpose to reveal the essence of Guyanese society then, or draw a road map with routes toward our common citizenship. At the end Hector, grown up but not necessarily mature, takes his father (in the grip of the Bradshaw "madness") back to the city. The Tarlogie villagers prepare to carry on their dreary folk lives.
The Wild Coast is a story about that slowly vanishing Guiana past. You could argue it's a book about perceptions, prejudices, scorn, deprivations, shifty loyalties, dark little secrets and selfish desires among colonized peoples, not yet ready for civil discourse and full nationhood. Some of these "perceptions" and "dark secrets" impair our vision even to this day.