Skin like midnight, baby, white sheet on its way, Skin like midnight, baby, white sheet on its way, Jus’ know your Mama loves you, prays for the break of day." - unrecorded Blues lyric
Late for class, bouts with anger, too lean for baggy-sagging - hip shoulder glide through bowls of raisins, winter suns, Hansberry & Martin fiction dreams corn rows tight set for homework.
Never knew, know what you’re saying! days stopped & searched, street cornered bitch again; black looks snot wiped, white look aways, snuffed fear they dare you share outside the crew; cool Math mapping: [lead point stray/intended] ÷ [licensed breath remaining] and your parent’s Sunday shepherd churching, her single lamb picked off, the blue wolf cruising.
Happy, still, you graduated; shook your hand so hard from years knife chipping, shaping the grip of Exit found, all grown & ready – Go, get medieval! – for that flag caped mutha – any triggery finger! – fucker, making you grind halt again. -W.W.
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CLOUD
I come to pass like everything else but I do not pretend that pausing denies the stretch. I’m already no longer myself: quick, pause and read what you can of your dark mind in my faithless body of a thousand urgings and as many faces, all as naked as they’re shadowed, as good as gone.
On the first day back after an extended break there was this wonderful feeling of returning to waxed floor surfaces, scrubbed chalk boards, painted exteriors (if money had been found). After the summer vacation staffers could look forward to new class assignments, the timid faces of the freshmen. Regardless of how long they were out the John Wayne Cotter H.S. family, or those who considered themselves family, would confess with a laugh they actually missed the old school. They prayed no one had clipped the padlocks on their book cabinets while they were away. It was nice, really nice, to be back.
There were stories to tell, or no stories to tell, about what happened over the Christmas or the summer season: a plane hijack foiled on a trip to Spain; this absolutely gorgeous man on the boat cruise to the Caribbean; a boring husband who didn’t want to go anywhere; the rain in England; a wedding in California, My daughter got married to this computer analyst.
There would be meetings, of course, and new program schedules, the faculty assembly in the auditorium. Some teachers sported deep tans or beards that made them barely recognizable; some showed signs of weight loss, sometimes down to worrisome fat-free levels. There were jeans and sneakers, bright Polo shirts and bright T-shirts with logos; huddles of laughter, smooched cheeks and getouttaheres!
Bilicki was always happy to be back. He’d enter the building and rightaway his adrenaline started racing. He’d touch base with the department, exchange gossip with the department secretary (any new faces this year?) and any of the old crew who came in. He’d wander down to the cafeteria where he encountered other faces, more hellos, a touch on the arm, more pleasantries. The secretaries teased him about his haircut; it made him look so much younger.
He had few stories to share since he didn’t care much for travelling, at least not to vacation hot spots overseas. He looked forward to his class of new seniors taking notes, asking questions or staring out the window. Everyone needed to recharge the batteries, scrape off the dross and accretions of the previous semester. He’d be the first to admit that despite its problems and frustrations it was good to be back in the Bronx to John Wayne Cotter.
Reality began to set in at the faculty assembly in the auditorium. Still loose and relaxed, staffers toned down their chatter; there was an attentive hush as the principal began her welcome back address. The hush deepened into silence.
Bilicki was always prepared for this. He settled down, slouching a little, in the middle of the auditorium so no one would have to squeeze past his legs for a seat; and he opened his Times and got ready to immerse himself in the pages. He looked around for his co-conspirators, Radix and Mahmood. Bits and pieces from the podium floated past his head, sometimes making contact, as far away he switched to a fresh caption or headline on the page.
“Good to see everyone back…healthy and reinvigorated faces…what promises to be an exciting year… the challenge before us…happy to announce two of our colleagues got married over the summer… from the Science Department retired and was last seen bike-riding somewhere in Florida… the years go by so quickly … back from sabbatical and pregnancy… gave birth to a bouncing baby boy, we’re all excited at the news… now I’d like to introduce new members of our faculty…our mission for the new year continues …That was the good news, now for the Not so good news… Reading scores remain below acceptable levels…cause for concern…budget cuts…We have no room to put all these kids…bursting at the seams… Those of you who wish to continue receiving the NY Times… mailboxes should be checked daily…exciting possibilities for the new year.” (from "Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!" a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
Characters in Edgar Mittelholzer's novel, Shadows Move Among Them, would have given considerable thought to the suggestion that ghosts or "jumbies" __________________________ as experienced in a forest environment were little more than "electrical misfirings" of the brain. This SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM viewpoint was put forward by scientists writing in by an issue of the journal Nature. Human agents, they Edgar Mittelholzer claim, by sending electrical impulses to the brain, could induce anyone to think "duppies" are real Peepal Tree Press, entities. England, 2010, 358 pgs
In Shadows Mittelholzer's folk had their own theory __________________________ of ghosts and spirits. When asked to explain sometimes bizarre behavior in the jungle, one character described it as “myth pleasure”. This, he says, is when people exercise their creative imagination and amuse themselves in concordance with a code of make believe. “We here create our myths and conventions day by day and discard them as easily as we create them”. Seen in such playful, rational terms and robbed of its ancient mystery and fears, life without spirit visitations could be managed with greater confidence even if futures remain indeterminable.
Myth and innerworldly behavior have been central to the fiction of Wilson Harris. A cozy scholarly complex has built up around his books. The sequence of novels that comprise "The Guyana Quartet" was published between 1960 and1964. Using difficult prose Harris has argued (in "Tradition, the Writer and Society", 1967) against “realism”, asserting its “inadequacy” as a writer’s tool for exploring complexities in Caribbean history and peoples.
Shadows was recognized in Time magazine as one of the significant works of fiction published in 1951, a “hard to classify novel.” It could be read today as a comic parallel to Harris’ hyper-articulate folk taking off on metaphor-laden boat rides up the Canje river, finding at the very top the fabulous connectedness they want to find in "The Guyana Quartet". The humour and inventiveness in Shadows, the “mad slant” Mittelholzer brings to the Guyana landscape would appeal to many in the Caribbean, like folk in Trinidad, not disposed to “brood”.
Europeans as anthropologists, Governors, missionaries, adventurers have been drawn to Guiana with its exploitable Interiors and underrepresented tribes. From Schomburgh to the Roths these very serious men have left us museums and maps and musty volumes of fadingly important information. In Shadows Mittelholzer employs emblematic Europeans as central characters and it is tempting to view the novel as a satirical commentary on those explorers who came before, and the dream merchants who came after.
Reverend Harmston, the central character, is unlike those early serious men. Educated at Oxford he brings his family to British Guiana in 1937 and takes them 100 miles up the Berbice River. There he assumes the responsibilities of coroner, registrar and protector of Amerindian rights. Once settled he starts thinking, maybe he could build his own cross-cultural civilization amidst the splendour of rivers and vegetation, “the gruff roar of baboons” and those gentle residents of the forest, the Amerindians, whose lives seem astonishingly in harmony with nature.
It’s the imperial settler’s dream, after the search for Eldorado; and since he is miles away from official Georgetown scrutiny Harmston wastes no time establishing (what years later in 1960s North American argot would come to be known as) “a hippie commune”.
The location is an exotic-sounding place called Berkelhoost, an old plantation once owned by a Dutch family with an exotic name, the Schoonlusts. In 1763 the well-documented slave revolt took place. As events of that revolt unfold in Mittelholzer’s novel, the white family members were slaughtered, but strangely their 17 year old daughter, Mevrouw Adriana Schoonlust, did not resist when threatened with sexual assault. Her life was spared and she became a servant of the slave leader, Cuffy, attending to his sexual needs, and doing secretarial chores since leader Cuffy couldn’t read or write.
He forbids the consumption of alcohol at Berkelhoost, it’s against the settlement’s health code. He installs the core values of “hard work, frank love and wholesome play”. Order at the forest settlement is maintained with balata whips. Malefactors are generously granted three chances to mend their ways. A fourth offence would lead to their “elimination” as incurably bad folk. Throughout all this Harmston’s autocratic style is never challenged.
The Harmston development model is a basically simple one: shared responsibilities, plus a blending of European enlightenment and the “local influences”. His forest- dwellers are not entirely free to run around, having fun, half-naked in pursuit of interests and pleasures. Depending on their aptitudes the children are separated into “squads”, the Book squad, Drama squad, Labour Squad. Conditions are spartan but life though regimented is far from beholden to the Ten Commandments.
Harmston sets up his own education system which requires immersion in the Best of European Culture: Chopin, “Aida”, Shakespeare, "The Ride of the Valkyries”; and reading US "Time" magazine.
The European through whose interrogatory eyes we wander around the settlement is a tormented young man named Gregory. He arrives with a raft of personal “issues” that spring from crumpled nerves and marriage memories he can’t seem to erase. A psychiatrist had suggested a change of environment (the exotic climbs & discoveries in the Guianas) as a cure for these “issues”. Harmston considers him a refugee from an “over-civilized Europe”.
Slowly he is drawn into the weirdness of the Harmston experiment and he begins to display weird, trancelike behaviours of his own. In time he becomes the love interest of the Harmston girls – a precocious 14 year old who sends him notes (“My Flat Chest Burns For You”) written in her blood; and 19 year old, sexed-up Mabel Harmston who wants to give up her free loving way with Amerindian boys and settle down.
The problem for Gregory is, should he give up the securities of England (its night clubs, restaurants and banking system) and commit years of his life to a forestrial haven of corials, hairy spiders and those erotically-charged Harmston girls.
Events in the novel are not all outlandishly funny. Mittelholzer manages to keep a thread of 1930s colonial credibility running through the pages. Lightning and thunder, torrential rains and the full moon intervene at hallucinatory moments of self- discovery; and though the benabs aren’t built with creaking doors things manage to go bump on the forest floor amidst all the insect and bird noise. His Europeans might come across as cartoony inventions, but the unambivalent depiction of the Berbice wilds is a measure of the author’s imaginative of the Guiana landscape, from city to forest and savannah.
But where, you might ask, are the Guianese men and women in Shadows? Aside from the Amerindians who represent “the local influences”, they are miles away in George- town. These are the 1930s, remember. The brightest local minds, unrepresented in the in the novel, are probably preparing to set out for Oxford U., LSE and other hatcheries of new world ideas. Years later they would return and, like Reverend Harmston, begin to commission their own earth-moving rigidities, be it “socialism” or “cooperative republicanism”, or the ethnic chauvinisim that still grips the land.
With its European settler themes and characters Shadows Move Among Them – first published in 1951, and reissued in 2010 with an escorting Introduction by Peepal Tree Press – could be read as Mittelholzer’s cautionary tale for our unsettled nation, starved for notice of any kind. In the jungle, he might be saying, be wary of white elephants and European dream-builders; and new mobile entrepreneurs, their seed bags bulging with capital and big ideas. Like recurring omens they come to Guyana in many postures and disguises. Some may not even speak in European tongues. A few might well be shape-shifting Guyanese.
Grant them a wish, concessions, tracts of green virgin land anywhere, you never know what they’ll do next – the grand schemes they’ll devise, the human cost and waste if these grand schemes misfire.
Book Reviewed: “Shadows Move Among Them”: Edgar Mittelholzer, Peepal Tree Press, England, 2010, 358 pages. (A version of this article appeared in 2007)
"How’d you end up with a name like that?” Radix asked, that first day Degraf- fenbach reached over to shake his hand. “How did you end up with a name like – sorry, what did you say your name was?” Degraffenbach shot back, pulling in his chair, keeping things on even keel. He went on: “There’s this guy in the Math department, he’s from Nigeria, he’s got this funny-sounding name, nobody can get their tongue wrapped around the syllables… Oban…jem…funa! See, even I have a hard time with it. Anyway, everybody calls him Mr. O. The kids call him Mr. O. Even the payroll secretary calls him Mr. O. And, get this, he doesn’t mind! Says it makes things easy for him.” Then turning to Radix, he said, “By the way, everybody calls me Dave or Mr. Degraff. I have no problem with that.” Not to be outdone, or to seem outsmarted, Radix said there was someone in his department with a name everyone managed to pronounce correctly, with no abbreviation, despite its strange spelling. “Zbryznski… anyone know him?” Degraffenbach said he hadn’t heard the name, nor did he know the guy. “In any case, what did Shakespeare say…That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…? Isn’t that Romeo and Juliet?” Bilicki assured him it was. "That line has stayed with me since 9th grade.” Radix thought he heard in the tone of the other man’s voice an attempt to slide him down a notch. He figured Degraffenbach had just stopped by and had no intention of joining them. But the next day he was back, with his tray of cafeteria food, and his ebullient manner. When Radix tried to draw him out on political or current issues he got the same joking response. Once Degraffenbach slapped him on the shoulders, telling him to “lighten up”. Radix played with his coffee spoon, refusing to lighten up, his resentment of the man growing. For his part Mahmood seemed put off by Degraffenbach’s lack of seriousness, but chose not to make an issue of it, putting it down to the younger man’s inexperience. Raised on Long Island what could he possibly know about the lives of “rock breakers” around the world? One morning Degraffenbach joined them just as Mahmood was explaining an incident in California involving a white police officer who had found him in his stalled Volkswagen in what they considered a “wrong” neighborhood. Bilicki shook his head and reminded everyone there were “wrong” neighbor- hoods in New York. “I live in a “wrong” neighborhood just across the river in New Jersey. If someone like you happens along there at certain hours, acting suspiously, as they say, there are nice old ladies peering through the blinds who would not hesitate to reach for the phone.” Degraffenbach looked down at his plate, chewing thoughtfully; then as his forked picked away for the next food dispatch he made a startling disclosure: he’d lived among white people all his life on Long Island, and he couldn’t honestly say he had experienced racism. Everyone looked at him, mildly amazed. “No, I’m serious. I hear talk about taxis not stopping when you hail them in Manhattan, because you’re black. Well, I’m black, and I’ve never had a problem with cabs in Manhattan.” “Why do you think that is so?” Mahmood asked. “I really don’t know.” Degraffenbach leaned back, and seemed to give the question some thought. Then he said, “Maybe taxi drivers find me attractive.” Bilicki laughed; he was the only one who didn’t mind Degraffenbach’s jokes. “That's it,” Degraffenbach went on. “That's why they stop for me every time. They find me irresistible.” His voice climbed to a falsetto of mock incredulity; his boyish face beamed amusement. A lost cause, Radix thought, his mouth compressed in irritation. Telling funny stories, simply refusing to think. Beyond saving, Radix felt sure.
(from Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!” a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.” - Requiem Mass
Mujeres in migraine storm, occupy a morgue, naming, wanting the bodies of loved ones struck numb in a prison fire.
Fear borne refugees cross burnt fields away from villages ravaged by soldiers; drop infants too heavy to carry, leave bones not keeping up.
Memo declassified: from men upright in blue suits: to men with chest medal drawers: Our future is in your hands. Burn their library.
Island school youth sentenced five years for stealing spice mango sleeps back to the window – fearing his bed – watching the door.
God shrilling warriors hurl stones, ferry open coffins of comrades shot up check scarf streets; gather again fresh, stone fresh.
Sun waxed plants stored away by squirrels thirty two thousand years ago see, disbelieving, skies of spring again, cheer scientists.
Days of glory, nights of stars – what, from nothing fallen, buried for that first tribe stare touch word? what something? whose voices of release? - W.W.
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PLAINER AND PLAINER
my confusion of voice and eye, nothing left to prove or improve: a plain peace
sculpting certain ghosts drifting in and out of time, the wind caught by an ancient curtain:
sketches of essences, graphs of a stare whose centre is any, whose aim is all.
