Gifts of darkness: Our West Indian writers
Colonial politics apart, this month, ten books for each of the seven decades of the Queen’s reign (Platinum Jubilee) were selected by a panel of librarians, booksellers, readers’ recommendations, and literary “experts” across 31 Commonwealth countries.
The Guardian (UK) reported that the Big Jubilee Read includes “brilliant, beautiful and thrilling writing…shared stories that define our social and cultural heritage” in novels, anthologies of short stories and poetry published since 1952.
We’ve been part of the 54-country strong Commonwealth, former territories of the British Empire. The Commonwealth comes with compensations. Good intentions enabling a kind of group therapy for previously raped and pillaged nations and small island states like ours.
Tribes of all races brutally uprooted, stripped of history and language, were transplanted from continents across the old world to this our new world. This wild, cruel and exploitative experiment by colonisers has miraculously given our people unexpected gifts.
At first, with no choice, people from every corner of the earth mingled, percolated, all colours bleeding bright into one another’s destroyed pasts. Miraculously, this created a savant-like brilliance in our West Indian people.
These are the West Indian writers chosen to be among the 70 most celebrated writers across the Commonwealth for the Big Jubilee Read: “The darkness brought a strange kind of release, and you wished secretly in your heart that darkness would descend on the whole earth so that you could get a chance to see how much energy there was stored in your little self. You could get a chance to leave the cage. You would be free.”
Barbados: George Lamming: In the Castle of My Skin 1953 “The air was heavy with water-vapour—and the scent of vegetation and river water; a musty, sweetish rankness that at one instant would seem very refreshing and make you want to breathe deeply, then would suddenly awaken distrust, for there would seem to enter it an earthy dankness as of centuries of rotting leaves and the bones of long-buried corpses.”
Guyana: Edgar Mittelholzer: My Bones and My Flute 1955 “When you come to think of it, everything in life like that . . . People in the world don’t know how other people does affect their lives.”
T&T: Sam Selvon: The Lonely Londoners 1956 “A man who is strong and tough never needs to show it in his dress or the way he cuts his hair. Toughness is a quality of the mind, like bravery or honesty or ambition; it has nothing whatever to do with muscles.”
Guyana: ER Braithwaite: To Sir With Love 1959 “Set in a yard which is a microcosm of Kingston slum life, this novel gives a picture of Jamaica and the terrible conditions in which the working class live. This book precedes the Rasta story of “Brother Man.”
Jamaica: Roger Mais: The Hills Were Joyful Together 1953 “They say when trouble comes, close ranks, and so the white people did.”
Dominica: Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea 1966 “All his life, he had managed in such ways to disconnect himself from things which he couldn’t escape and which threatened to define him in a way in which he didn’t want to be defined, and go on untouched, untouched by things that should have touched him, hurt him, burned him.”
T&T: Earl Lovelace: Salt 1996 “I don’t care if I don’t turn teacher with press hair and new dress. I believe it better to be someone that can laugh and make other people laugh and be happy too.”
Jamaica: Olive Senior: Summer Lightning 1986 “The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
T&T: VS Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas 1961 “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”
St Lucia: Derek Walcott: Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1992 “Chilman poked out his head.
‘Digson, where you get them words from? You went to England for one blaastid year, and they send you back to colonise we arse again. Meet me at the office!”
Grenada: Jacob Ross: The Bone Readers 2016 “But some fire don’t go out, they go quiet under the ash, waiting for one little dry stick to feed. So the white man sleep with one eye open, waiting for the fire next time. That fire coming.”
Jamaica: Marlon James: The Book of Night Women 2019 When Lovelace titled one of his novels The Wine Of Astonishment, he could have been commenting on the alchemy of what our post-colonial writers do for us: mirror us, define us, heal us, show us the truth of who we are, keep wonder alive, and through their toil and insight, replenish us through our most difficult days.