March 1, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
On the day before the assignment due date, the history teacher reminded Jasmin of the deadline to submit her project. The teacher’s declaration that he had already received the reports from all the other students, shocked her into panic.
She had put the boring project at the bottom of her priority items, since receiving it a month earlier. Each student had to pick one of twelve topics. She had selected ‘Games of Chance’, from the uninteresting list.
After a nervous glance at the clock, she shoved her laptop and instruction sheets into her schoolbag. She called her mom’s cell phone and left a voice message and a text when her mother did not answer. Shaky fingers scrawled a swift note, which she placed in the center of the dining table for her mom to notice upon entering the apartment.
She sprinted along the sidewalk with bag in hand, toward the library a few blocks away. She had about four hours before the library closed.
Gasping for breath, Jasmin picked a spot in the far corner of a fifteen-foot long desk in the reference section of the library. She selected a dozen relevant books, with plans to short-cut the process, by preparing a padded document with over-descriptive words and random internet pictures to account for half of the work.
Halfway through her sweat-filled efforts, a library announcement advised of its closing in five minutes. Jasmin stared at the wall-clock in horror. She grabbed her study materials and dived under the desk, stacking the ten large reference books, one on the other. She turned off her cell phone and closed her computer to keep her location silent and without light. She slowed her racing heart with slow deep breaths.
Jasmin tracked the movements of library’s staff by their hard heels on the wooden floor. She waited an eternity for the lights to go off and breathed a sigh of relief at the closing double-clicks of the lock on the large oaken front doors.
A minute of waiting confirmed her sole occupancy of the building. She searched for security monitors and spotted a motion detector on the wall above her. Trapped under the desk, she exhaled and slumped in resignation. She had to stay in her spot until the library opened the next morning.
She turned on her cell phone and called her mom to lie about her whereabouts. She called her best friend to corroborate her story of spending the night at her home to complete the assignment.
She gasped and clutched her throat when a large book in the middle of the stack moved sideways and dropped to the floor without moving any other book. The books above it dropped to fill its vacant spot. The book’s title, ‘The Game of Death’, spooked her. The laptop slammed shut and her cell phone vanished. Every hair on her body stood on end.
In the dimming light of dusk, the book’s cover flipped open. A moment later, the first page followed the cover. An orange glow of light emanated from the edges of the hardcover’s hollowed out pages. The light shone on the open page, suggesting that the writing on that page held relevance to the book’s actions. The text, written in a foreign language, made no sense to Jasmin.
The book quivered, causing three wooden dice in its rectangular cavity to roll around and bounce off each other and the side walls of the hollow.
The book slammed shut and rose into the air. Jasmin jumped back with a scream of terror. It moved with increased energy, rattling the dice trapped in its middle. The cover flew open and the dice tumbled to the floor. When they settled, three sixes appeared on each upper surface.
“Six-six-six to tie and three points to win.” The book spoke in an adolescent male voice. “Your turn.” The dice jumped back into the book and the cover locked them in. The book slid along the floor to Jasmin. “Pick it up and play!” The book screamed at her in anger after she hesitated.
Her shaking hands obeyed the voice. She snatched it up and followed its actions. She opened the cover to let the dice fall to the floor. She held her breath while waiting for them to stop spinning. She breathed a sigh of relief when she matched the book’s sixes.
“You’ve reached level two. Three points to win!” The book repeated its actions. The dice revealed three ones. “Hah, try to top that.” It taunted. “Your turn.”
When Jasmin picked up the book with the dice inside, the book’s juvenile voice issued another rule of the game.
“Triangular points to tie and a loss means you die!” The books voice sounded pleased.
Jasmin’s palms sweated and her mouth dried, her throat hurt when she swallowed with no saliva. She shuffled the dice for an extended period, to hold off the inevitable. With the odds in favor of the book, she did not have much of a chance.
“Drop them!” The book shouted its demand.
She jumped and dropped the book. The dice tumbled out and settled once again at six-six-six. The devil’s number sealed her faith!
“Your loss of life is my redemption! Chuckles at her defeat sent her into despair. “You will replace me as the next devil-child until some other cheater comes into these halls to spend the night!”
The light from the book lifted off and zoomed away, leaving loud haunting laughter echoing in it wake.
Jasmin’s body collapsed when the book sucked the soul out of her body. The cover closed, imprisoning her and the dice. The books in the stack made space for it to slip back to its original position.
Jasmin had to endure her incarceration with uncertainty. ‘The Game of Chance’, did not offer any guarantees of a win. Agony kept her company!
Guyana’s interior
By Romeo Kaseram
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris was born on March 24, 1921 in New Amsterdam in what was then British Guiana, of a heritage mixed with African, Scottish, Amerindian and possibly East Indian. According to Maya Jaggi, writing in The Guardian in 2006, Harris lost his father when he was two years old, “a well-off insurance businessman with a chauffeur-driven car”. Following the passing of his father, Harris’ mother moved to Georgetown were she remarried. However, six years later, when he was eight years old, Harris lost his stepfather, who disappeared into the interior and was later presumed dead.
Jaggi quotes Harris as saying, “My mother never discovered what had happened” to his stepfather. Perhaps it was at this time when the light first shone on the young boy that would guide him to his larger life as an artist. Quoting Harris, Jaggi notes: “At almost the same time, I saw a beggar on a street corner, with holes in his face. I came home and couldn’t eat – I never forgot that man.” As Jaggi points out, noting the parallels in Harris’ novel to his life, In The Mask of the Beggar (2003), “a boy imagines a disfigured beggar to be his lost father, marking the child’s birth as an artist.” Harris adds, Odysseus “returned to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, and, though the beggar I saw could never have conceived of himself as Odysseus, I used him in a Homeric way to represent all the peoples of Guyana.”
It is this representation of “all the peoples of Guyana” and its setting that contributes to the main body of Harris’ literary output. After his studies were completed at Queen’s College in Georgetown, Harris became a government surveyor. It is this intimate knowledge of the savannas and rainforests that became the setting for many of his books. The Guyanese interior and its landscape dominate most of his fiction. As he indicates in The Guardian, he led many crews deep into the Amazonian rainforest where they mapped out what was then British Guiana. It was during these journeys into the heart of Guyana where he made many discoveries “with the spiritual wonder of an astronaut spying Earth from outer space”. Added Harris: “The interior of Guyana came alive to me, and seemed like another planet. The great waterfalls and trees – so different from the coast where I was born.” According to Jaggi, Harris “was haunted both by a landscape that ‘seemed alive’ and by mysterious signs of pre-Columbian civilisations that had imploded even before the Spanish conquest”.
Harris began his writing career as a poet, before becoming well-known and respected as a novelist and essayist. Writing from the years 1945 to 1961, he became a regular contributor of essays, poetry, and short stories to the well-known Guyanese literary publication, Kyk-over-Al. According to Stabroek News, one of his earliest publications was Eternity to Season, which appeared in the 1950s. In it was a play using as its main metaphor ‘The Beggar as King’ from Greek mythology. In 1959 he traveled to England, where he published his first novel Palace of the Peacock in 1960. This novel was the first of a quartet, now known as The Guyana Quartet. The others are: The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). According to Jaggi, it took Harris three attempts before he was satisfied with how he captured his journey into the South American interior and its soul. So it was with in the Palace of the Peacock where the spirit of a conquistador leads a crew upriver to bring back Amerindian labour, in a journey that becomes a voyage towards redemption.
The English poet of American origin, T.S. Eliot, who was then at the publishing house Faber, approved Palace of the Peacock for publication. It was the start of a relationship with this publisher that would continue throughout the years for all 25 of Harris’ novels. Among his other notable works are The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). Also, The Carnival Trilogy – Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). He also wrote Jonestown (1996), The Dark Jester (2001), and his semi-autobiographical novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and The Ghost of Memory (2006).
Reception of Harris’ writing by readers and critics has always indicated his style to be abstract and a challenging read. His writing has also been described as experimental, difficult to read, dense, complex, and even opaque. Others have said his essays push the envelope of what is traditional literary criticism. Also, his fiction pushes at the boundaries of the genre of the novel. Critics have used different lens of literary criticism in an attempt to grasp, understand, and appreciate his work, including modernism, surrealism, magic realism, and even mysticism.
Perhaps this explains why he remains little known to a wider readership, and does not reside in a more recognisable place within the post-colonial canon. As Jaggi, writes, “His fiction, dense with symbolism and sensuous imagery, has little in the way of conventional plot or character. Drawing on dream, myth and archetype, it can be dazzling yet enigmatic.” Turning to the Guyanese-born novelist and poet David Dabydeen, Maggi quotes him as saying Harris is heir to a “tradition of mystical and visionary writing, from the Gnostics to William Blake”. Dabydeen adds, that “Wordsworth, thought Blake ‘mad, obscure and incoherent’. Harris is trying to explore the language of the unconscious – dream states and parallel universes that are only partially glimpsed.” Jaggi adds Harris is regarded by some “more akin to Gabriel García Márquez or Alejo Carpentier than to writers of the anglophone West Indies”.
Says Harris about his own work: “All my novels are instalments in one work. I have a sense that the work writes itself with another self beneath myself that can rise suddenly and push me into a new novel. I'm not a realist; I always look deeper than realism. There's a half physical, half metaphysical life to my novels – and there are some terrifying things in them.”
Harris has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies in 1984, and the University of Liège in 2001. He also twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature. He was knighted in 2010 during the Queen Elizabeth II Birthday Honours, and in 2014 won a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
Sources for this exploration are Wikipedia, The Guardian, and Stabroek News.
(Sources for this exploration are Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English; Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History; Freedom of Press in the time of War and Imperialism: The Trial of Roger Mais and Public Opinion in Jamaica, Conference Papers – International Communication Association, 2011 Annual Meeting; Wikipedia; and encyclopedia.com.)
(Sources for this exploration were Britannica, Wikipedia, The Independent, and Caribbean Literary Review.)