June 7, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
George Brown III, inherited vast wealth from ancestors who once owned colonial plantations in the West Indies.
The abolition of slavery in the eighteen-hundreds had sent the slave-masters packing back to Britain with their slave-labor fortunes safely stashed away in Europe’s largest banks.
George Brown III, had never worked a day in his life. Apart from private tutoring in his parents’ mansion, he refused to go to
At age nineteen, George sped his shiny red convertible sports car along a winding and hilly country lane. He spotted a tomboyish young lady wearing farmers’ overalls and tending sheep in a pasture. He stopped to gaze at ‘Little Bo-Peep’ in the flesh and chuckled. When the shepherdess noticed him, she put her hands on her hip and stared at him in defiance. Her feisty attitude sparked a challenge in him. He shut the engine off and hopped out of the little car without opening the door.
A broad grin lit his face when he approached her. He asked her if she had lost her sheep like the nursery rhyme.
She did not find his remark amusing and stood toe to toe with him to scold him. He did not back off. Her verbal launch only served to widen his grin, exposing even white teeth. His charming resistance disarmed her but she used her crossness to hide her nervousness. Her knees buckled when he took her hands. He had to hug her to keep her from collapsing.
That day marked the beginning of a whirlwind romance and marriage one year later. On her wedding day, Effy Peters wore a pure white and flowing wedding dress. Her soft glowing beauty and radiant smile captured the hearts of all who witnessed the event. The little sheep herder had become the enchanting belle of the ball. George’s pride lit his eyes throughout the ceremony.
On one guided tour during their honeymoon, they discovered their mutual love of exploring caves. They loved to enter these worlds that time had forgotten.
Throughout their marriage, they ventured into multiple caves and swam in many underground waterways.
After swimming in one underground stream, they returned home with an unexpected stowaway. Effy felt a movement at the top of her head in her thick damp hair. George gently removed a lizard-like amphibian from Effy’s tangled hair.
Research told them that they had discovered a rare and prized amphibian called an Olm, which resembled a ‘Human Amphibian’. They had to keep the blind creature in the dark, since it had lost its ability to dwell in sunlight. Survival had forced it to seek the darkness of cavernous waterways.
Their hearts raced when they realized that they had come into possession of the only known amphibian able to live and breathe under water.
They locked their new pet in a glass jar of water and hid it in a dark closet under the surveillance of Effy, while George dashed to the local pet store to buy a small aquarium. He painted the fish-tank black and pushed a funnel through the tank’s cover to feed the carnivorous amphibian a diet of worms, larvae and tiny fish.
Using the darkness of the closet, George transferred the Olm from the glass jar to the aquarium. During the process, he felt a sting on his finger and a splash in the aquarium. He chuckled under his breath at the feisty little meat-eater.
Effy took over the care for the Olm, which they named, ‘Nipper’, for the bite inflicted on George’s fingertip. Unable to see the creature, they knew it thrived within its blackened walls by splashes whenever they dropped food into the funnel.
After a few months of owning Nipper, George fell ill with anaemia, which kept him bed ridden. The hospital admitted him for a few months then sent him home with tubes for Effy to force-feed into his stomach. He did not have the energy to eat on his own. Months turned into years.
Stress from his condition caused George to age beyond his years. They spent unlimited amounts of money to hire the best physicians from around the world. Their quest for a cure remained elusive and their funds dwindled.
Before going bankrupt, Effy came up with a master-plan. With no remaining relatives, they sold their mansion and used the equity to fund the construction of an additional wing at the local nursing home for patients with George’s condition.
In exchange for their generosity, the home promised George, Effy and Nipper permanent residence until death, with twenty-four-hour care for the rest of their lives.
A plaque beside Effy’s door dedicated the wing to George, Effy and Nipper Brown for making its creation possible.
A year after the Brown family moved into their quarters, George succumbed to his ailment. The nursing home used government funding to bury him.
Shortly after George’s death, Effy also developed anaemia after a mysterious wound on her toe. The home inserted feeding tubes into her stomach to provide nourishment.
After a few days, Elly became paralyzed. Mechanical lungs breathed for her. Clear heavy-gauged plastic bags hung on hooks under her bed to collect bodily waste. She remained alert to her surroundings but could not respond.
Staff edged past the pet’s shaking tank during the day to attend to Effy. They shut the door during the dark hours to keep Effy and her eerie pet locked away.
On the last night that Effy lived, Nipper opened the aquarium cover and hopped out of the tank to slosh across the floor and climb into Effy’s bed. It climbed into Effy’s feeding tube and extracted a dozen offsprings. George and Effy had mistaken Nipper for a male Olm.
Nipper the female Human-Amphibian and former African Slave Voodoo Priestess, guided her children to an open window where another dozen adolescent Olms, born out of George’s body, received them and disappeared into the night.
The Olms had returned to the land of the living to seek revenge and wreak havoc on the humans who had enslaved and brutalized them.
It had taken Morowa, the Queen of Priestesses, three generations after turning herself into an Olm, to locate her sworn blood-enemies.
During the process, she had discarded her sight to sharpen her other senses to navigate the dangerous waters of the oceans and caves, darting around in the dark to stay out of sight of predators.
Effy died that night. A new resident arrived the next day. Morowa grinned, exposing razor sharp teeth. A dozen offspring per human held the promise of a rapid rise to global dominance and vengeance on the descendants of their nation’s former ruthless and cruel abductors.
his conservatism
By Romeo Kaseram
Herbert George de Lisser was born in Falmouth, on December 9, 1878, into what was then Jamaica’s near-white middle class, his parents of Afro-Jewish descent. His father was employed as the editor at the Jamaica Daily Gleaner. His father died when George was 14 years old, his passing forcing the young man out from school at William Morrison's Collegiate School in Kingston and into the working world. He found employment at the Institute of Jamaica, then joining The Gleaner at age 17 as a proof-reader; two years later he became a reporter. During his young working career de Lisser read extensively, learned French and Spanish, and explored the social and political history of the Caribbean’s social and political history. He did not leave The Gleaner for the 38 years, staying on from 1904-1942, becoming its editor-in-chief. He married Ellen Gunther in 1909, who was from a well-established white Jamaican family.
His career did not only focus on writing. As Dr Frank Birbalsingh points out in his ‘The Novels of H. G. DeLisser’, for 22 years he sat on the Board of Governors of the Institute of Jamaica, which was established “for the Encouragement of Literature, Science, and Art”; he was also secretary of the Jamaica Imperial Association for 27 years. Along with the broad principles of the defunct Imperial Federation League, this association also sought to preserve the British Empire, and to even federate it. He also held roles in the Jamaican sugar and banana industries.
His was a prolific writer, exploring the world around him as a journalist, academic, and a writer of fiction. Today, the body of his fiction is categorised broadly as “historical” and “regional” explorations. In 1909 he published a collection of essays, In Cuba and Jamaica; a second book, Twentieth Century Jamaica, was published in 1912. In this time, Jane, A Story of Jamaica, was being partially serialised. This novel was later published locally in book form in 1913, reissued in 1914 as Jane's Career. In the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Rhonda Cobham writes that Jane’s Career, along with Susan Proudleigh (1915), are among de Lisser’s best-known early novels, with both works falling “into the category of social realism”. Cobham adds his other books, Myrtle and Money, a sequel to Jane's Career, ranks as one of his best-written works. Also among his better known works is The White Witch of Rosehall (1929).
Most of de Lisser’s novels first appeared in the periodical, Planter’s Punch, which he established and edited, and which was published from 1921 to 1945. Under the Sun, was first serialised in Planter’s Punch during 1935 to 1936, and was later published as a book in 1937. The Rivals also appeared as a serial in Planter’s Punch in 1921. The Jamaica Nobility was also serialised from 1925 to 1926; as was The Jamaica Bandits, from 1929 to 1930. So were The Sins of the Children (serialised in 1928), and The Crocodiles, serialised from 1932 to 1933. As Cobham points out, through Planter’s Punch, de Lisser “was one of the first Caribbean writers to try to attract a popular readership for locally produced fiction”. So voluminous was his output, he published about 20 full-length books of fiction, with around half of these classifiable as romances, the rest falling into the categories of historical, social realism, and political satire. He published a new novel almost every other year, some as full books, others as novellas, in Planter’s Punch.
De Lisser is remembered today mostly for his political conservatism, and perhaps as Cobham points out, for being an “astute and accurate observer of his society”. She adds somewhat generously, “His urbane satirical style and facility with closely observed detail anticipate V. S. Naipaul's later achievement in his Trinidad novels.” However, Birbalsingh holds another view, seeing his fiction as “adversely and perhaps unavoidably affected by the literary models which were available to him in colonial Jamaica at the end of the [19th] century. These models were British – eighteenth-century Gothic, and the Victorian ‘sensation’ writing… De Lisser's style recaptures and amplifies some of the sentimentality, repetition, indulgent explanations, and florid descriptions of British writers who are nowadays considered of less than first rank.”
In his commentary on Jane’s Career, Birbalsingh says: “The peasant heroine… tempted for economic reasons to become mistress of a married man, is finally able to evade this predicament by finding true love. Despite his comprehensive knowledge of Jamaican society however, and the conspicuous authenticity of some scenes in Jane's Career especially, de Lisser still cannot be said to provide plots that are wholly convincing, nor characters about whose fate we are genuinely concerned.”
Birbalsingh adds: “Jane's Career contains a skilled journalist's observations of Jamaican lower-class poverty, as well as of middle-class hypocrisy at the turn of the century, when de Lisser's long editorship of the Daily Gleaner – 38 years – had evidently endowed him with an authoritative grasp of topical issues and living conditions in his native land. We perceive his authority in abundant examples of assorted local manners including Jamaican speech of both the educated and uneducated variety. But this impressive knowledge of actual Jamaica one feels is not successfully transformed or integrated into a coherent, fictional world of balanced human relationships, and fully credible characters.”
Birbalsingh explores further the reception then of de Lisser’s work, saying: “Comments on his work by… local contemporaries are undiscriminating and unreliable: certainly they are exaggerated when they suggest that his work was highly regarded in England. What seems more likely is that he had some following among those who enjoyed the Imperialist-paternalistic brand of colonial fiction made popular in Victorian times by such idolaters of Empire as Sir Henry Rider Haggard, John Buchan, G. A. Henty, and the acknowledged high priest of Imperial worship Rudyard Kipling. W. Adolphe Roberts, a fellow Jamaican novelist and historian, states in Six Great Jamaicans that de Lisser was warmly praised by Kipling and Somerset Maugham, the latter congratulating him for giving, in his first two novels, a picture of the Jamaican native which impresses one very strongly as true. Maugham no doubt bases his judgment on stereotyped colonial natives found in Kiplingesque fiction – loyal Gunga Dins who acknowledged their burden to the white man, and by servility, strove to lighten it.”
De Lisser received the Musgrave Silver Medal for Literary Work in 1919, and the C.M.G. of the British Empire for Journalistic and Literary Achievement in 1920. He died on May 18, 1944.
Sources for this exploration include: Cobham, Rhonda, ‘De Lisser, Herbert George (1878-1944)’, Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Second Edition; Balderston, Daniel, and Mike Gonzalez, Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003, London: Routledge, 2004; Birbalsingh, Frank, ‘The Novels of H.G. DeLisser’, The International Fiction Review, 9, No. 1 (1982).
Sources for this exploration are: Dr Victor Ramraj, Arts Journal: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, Art & Culture of Guyana & the Caribbean, September 1, 2010: The Distinctive Indo-Caribbean Art and Voice of Harold Sonny Ladoo; Peter Such, The Short Life and Sudden Death of Harold Sonny Ladoo (http://www.pancaribbean.com/ladoo/such.htm); and Dionne Brand’s epigraph in No Pain Like This Body, House of Anansi Press Inc., 2013.