In an older version of the debate on the definition of the Caribbean novel (older than Ruel Johnson's and Michael Gilkes's--two recent voices featured somewhere on this blog), Juanita Cox writes that Edgar Mittelholzer (and others like Sam Selvon) argued that the role of the writer was to focus on universal concerns and qualities of human nature, while Alfred Mendes, Doreen Grayson, and others maintained that the focus needed to be more inward looking and regional. Those in the latter group, Cox writes, championed the development of folklore over the possibility of becoming "the imitation of a British Council dummy."
Naipaul, she adds, pronounced a lack of "West-Indian-ness" in Mittelholzer's work, and theorized that this was so because the books (generally) read by the professional West Indian novelist tended to be books of England and American and European writers. Naipaul saw this as a detrimental condition where art followed art instead of life.
Far away (in knowledge and emotion) from the jostling of that crowd, I contend that in Shadows Move Among Them, Mittelholzer was probably having a little fun with those who saw his work as devoid of West Indian-ness, particularly the folklore advocates.
Shadows Move Among Them is set in Berbice (called the Jungle in the novel), and is a story about a British missionary family who set up an experimental community, a utopia, in the Jungle among Amerindians, complete with its own rules and religion (all anti-Western, but certainly not devoid of Western influence), and over which they exercise authority. The society set up by Reverend Gerald Harmston is a loosely hierarchical, spartan, communal one, in which the citizens are allowed to freely pursue their talents. There are no prohibitions against (protected) sex, their religion is a casual unceremonious affair, as is their attitude towards all other types of typical milestones in peoples' lives--birth, marriage, death.
Into this world comes Gregory, a visitor (family member of the Harmstons) from England who is seeking respite from his life there. He is wealthy, mentally tormented, and sexually repressed, and he very quickly finds himself in an antagonistic relationship with the free-spirited members of the Jungle society. This of course provides much of the novel's tensions.
The depiction of this utopic, anti-Western, Jungle society is done with a realistic mix of humor, truth, and incredibility, a fitting combination for the period in Guyana. The novel was published in 1951, a noteworthy year in Guyana's quest for independence. In 1951, the PPP under the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the late Forbes Burnham was at its galvanizing point: 1951 was the year of the first PPP congress, and was the year when the British Colonial Office sent a commission to Guyana to examine proposals for constitutional changes.
As we know, the once promising union in the original structure of the PPP would dissipate and in its place would be much of what we see in Guyana's politics today. The societal experiment in Shadows could be seen as mirroring (and foreshadowing) the larger societal experiment playing out in New Amsterdam (Mittelholzer's place of birth), and Georgetown in the 1940s, 1950s and onwards.
In addition to its messages about the possibilities of forming a society based on anti-Western ideals, Shadows, with its mysterious dark moments filled with folklore, which all turn out to be part of the reality of Jungle life, may well be Mittelholzer's attempt to poke fun at the ongoing debate on the true definition of literature from the region. In Shadows folklore is dark, erotic, and comic, which would most likely have appealed to a wider audience outside of the region After all, regardless of the way the writers sought to define their West Indian-ness, there were (still are for many) bigger marketability issues with which to contend. (Mittelholzer must have had some fun demonstrating the outside appeal of folklore.)
Shadows was a notable success, described as "foreign, hard-to-classify, showed skill with an out-of-the-way-locale" by Time Magazine in 1951. And as much as some may cringe at the Time Magazine description today, it would certainly have been pleasing to a publisher, and would have taken precedence over any other description of the West Indian novel at the time, especially if the West Indian writer wanted to earn a living with his craft.
I found Shadows an entertaining combination of rich and strange (yeah even to me, Time Magazine), gothic and comical, sexy and romantic. Its characters are full of depth and memorable, and I fully recommend it as a good read.
And to bring both sides of the old debate together, I also found Shadows to be both a story of Guyana (a West Indian story), and a story with universal concerns and qualities of human nature.
(Hmmmm...wonder if it's possible to do the same with the newer version of this debate on the Caribbean novel...)
Posted 24 February 2009 on the following website: http://signifyinguyana.typepad.com/signifyin_guyana/2009/02/a-lack-of-westindianness-in-mittelholzers-work.html
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