September 6, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
Protecting their eyes from showers of rice, rose-petals and coins thrown by the wedding guests lining the banquet hall’s entrance, Ingrid and Desmond laughed and waved in their rush to a limo for the ride to the airport. They had a plane to catch for their honeymoon in paradise.
Their hearts pounded when they arrived at the all-inclusive resort. Their special time together had finally arrived. The facility’s beauty took their breath away.
On the second day, they awoke around noon and ventured out for short spells to enjoy the pools and sunbathe under the cloudless blue tropical sky. The third day provided increased outdoor pleasures. They frolicked in the ocean and strolled hand-in-hand on the mile-long beach, taking time-out to snack and drink at the five multi-themed restaurants and bars scattered throughout the resort.
They approached the front desk on the fourth day to find out about package tours around the island. The clerk gave them an information sheet. Desmond refused to pay for the overpriced excursions and gave it back.
Brushing off Ingrid’s misgivings, suspicion of the hotel’s greed made Desmond ignore the sign in the lobby warning guests about the dangers of entering the roadways unescorted or hiring non-recommended tour operators.
After negotiating a price with a taxi operator a block away, Desmond and Ingrid climbed into the back seat of the rust covered car for a leisurely drive through several neighborhoods and souvenir stores.
On their return trip, the car overheated and stalled a few blocks away from the resort.
Ingrid touched Desmond’s hand and pointed to a narrow unpaved laneway that intersected with their street. Small zinc shacks lined both sides of the narrow gravel roadway.
Naked children and adults in torn and patched clothing approached them with desperate eyes and menacing grimaces.
The overweight taxi driver abandoned his auto and passengers with a lumbering sprint to escape the approaching horde.
The marauding adults ripped open the doors and pulled Desmond out of the vehicle, leaving Ingrid defenseless and vulnerable.
Dirt filled fingers ripped the honeymooners’ clothing from their bodies. Several men pushed Ingrid onto her back and groped her naked body.
Ingrid’s screams curdled Desmond’s blood. He exploded into an adrenalin fueled frenzy, firing wild kicks and punches at the plunderers.
A powerful kick to the stomach of a pregnant woman ended the assault when the woman stumbled backward and fell to the ground.
The mob retreated to assist one of their own. Desmond scampered into the driver’s seat. He had no time to shut the doors. Ingrid’s loud sobs drowned out his prayers when he turned the key in the ignition. The car chugged but refused to start.
Heart pounding, Desmond glanced at the woman on the ground. A pool of blood spread under her body. He turned the key again. The car denied his attempt to flee once more. Precious life saving moments ticked away.
Another desperate glance at the crowd made him gasp. A silver haired old man glared at him with the white eyeballs of the blind. He shook with rage and pointed a bony finger at Desmond. With his face distorted by anger, he hissed mumbled words through lips stretched back in a vengeful snarl. He spat his two blood-covered upper front teeth onto the road. Blood oozed from his eyes, nose and the the corners of his mouth
Desmond used every ounce of will power to tear his gaze away from the man. His fingers hurt on his third forceful turn of the ignition key. The car chugged again but this time it started with a shuddering rattle. The doors slammed shut when he floored the accelerator.
Naked and bruised, they parked the car a short distance from the hotel’s lobby and hid behind bushes on the way to their room. With no keys to let themselves in, they sought the assistance of a housemaid. She opened their door after a curious glance and a roll of her eyes at their unclothed bodies.
Once inside, they showered together with little communication. Ingrid’s body shook with shock. She sobbed softly.
They slept for the remainder of the day with no appetites or romantic thoughts.
At midnight, a baby’s sudden wails from the bathroom shattered their sleep and rattled their nerves. Ingrid slammed her trembling body against Desmond’s. He hugged her. The abrupt stop of the baby’s incessant bawls brought dead silence in the room.
The baby howled below the bed! Desmond’s heart leaped to his throat. The infant’s ear piercing screams raised every hair on his body. Ingrid pressed her palms against her ears.
Ingrid’s flat midsection started to swell. She rolled onto her back with her eyes rolled up into her forehead, revealing only white eyeballs. Her lips stretched thin. She gurgled to keep a mouthful of blood from entering her throat. Her two upper front teeth floated in the bloody foam trickling to the pillow from the corners of her mouth. A pool of blood grew under pregnant midsection.
Before Desmond had time to react, she used superhuman force to swat him aside and lunged toward the window. Her body shattered the glass and she fell to the concrete walkway below.
Desmond sat with hunched shoulders and head hung low in the witness stand. He had related the story as it had happened. His relatives sat on one side of the courtroom and Ingrid’s family occupied the other side. Everyone avoided eye contact on an island where bribery ruled justice.
The trial by judge without jury left Desmond no options. His lawyer, hired by his parents, had hinted at greasing the judge’s palms with a relatively large sum of money.
Certain of Desmond’s innocence, his father had ignored the pleadings of Desmond’s mother to bribe the judge. He had refused to partake in corruption.
Desmond’s fate hung on the decision of a local law official who furnished his lavish lifestyle with payoffs for verdicts of innocence, regardless of guilt. The sum of money had to be large enough for the judge to pay-off the police and defense lawyer.
The judge cleared his throat and delivered harsh words of reprimand. He found Desmond guilty of flying into a jealous rage and killing his wife because she had cheated on him. An autopsy on the dead woman’s body showed evidence of semen from a source other than Desmond.
Desmond’s death sentence evoked loud sobs from the gallery. His version of the supernatural events sounded like a fantasy fairy tale.
He kept his eyes on the floor when they placed the shackles on him. The two families shuffled out of the courtroom in confused silence as two separate groups
Desmond jumped when the large steel-barred gate banged shut behind him. His heart dropped to his feet at the clank of the lock that ended his trip to heaven on earth. His decision against Ingrid’s wishes had bought him a one-way ticket to hell on earth.
By Romeo Kaseram
Jan (Janice Lowe) Shinebourne was born on June 23, 1947, the second of five children, to parents Charles and Marion Lowe in Rosehall, in the Canje River area of Guyana, then British Guiana; she is of East Indian and Chinese descent. She attended Berbice High School, and later studied at the University of Guyana. Shinebourne grew up during the period of political and social unrest Guyana was then undergoing, and it is from these early experiences where her political consciousness took root. She began writing early in her school years, which included plays, some of which made it onto the stage; other writings were descriptive pieces about the forested area making up the rural landscape of her childhood home.
It was only natural then, following her incomplete BA in English, that in the mid-1960s she joined the Guyana Graphic in the capital city of Georgetown, where she worked as a reporter while also writing for the literary magazine, Expression. By 1974 she was already being recognised as a writer with promise, winning a prize in the National History and Arts Council Literary Competition.
That she was recognised early for her writerly talent is evident in the quality of her prose, notable, for example, in her signature story in the collection, "The Godmother and Other Stories" for its gratifying mix of the quotidian with a haunting lyricism:
“We rarely had occasion for dressing up, only for births, marriages and deaths. Then our Sunday best came out of the trunk, out of the mothballs. Special occasions smelt of mothballs, of best soap, talcum, perfumes and new dresses. We always cleaned and washed ourselves – and everything else besides – for the new born, the newly wed and the dead.
“The smell of ripe plantain is strongest in the pot of boiling cassava, yam, plantain and sweet potatoes. For the curry, I have to blend fresh pepper and jeera very lightly. The gravy has to be extremely thin. I must use only one fresh tomato and a leaf of thyme. Add water at the very last. I can see my mother dip a spoon into a karahi of boiling curry, trickle the gravy from a height so it cools in the air in its passage to the palm of her hand. I am in her kitchen again. She would never taste from the spoon, only from her palm. I trickle metagee into my palm but taste from hers. I am cooking for ghosts, spirits. The smell of my food is attracting them. For this very reason, there is no cooked food on the day of a funeral. The rituals of cooking, the opening of trunks smelling of mothballs, soap, perfume and talcum powder were part of the christening.”
It is out of such daily Guyanese life where Shinebourne set her novels, this happening despite her moving away from a childhood in the rural Canje spaces to Georgetown, and then later to London, England, in the 1970s following marriage to husband John. It was in London where Shinebourne completed her Bachelor of Arts degree, and later, a Postgraduate Certificate of Education qualifying her to teach English in Further Education. She taught in several London colleges, was a civil rights activist campaigning against racism and fascism, and pursued a Master’s degree in English at the University of London. She also wrote book reviews for journals, among them Race Today, and was an associate editor for Southall Review and Everywoman. However, despite the transplantation away from Guyana, Shinebourne turned to the homeland when it came to writing her novels, Timepiece (1986), The Last English Plantation (1988), Chinese Women (2010), The Last Ship (2015); and her collection of short stories, The Godmother and Other Stories (2004). In 1987 Shinebourne was recognised for her achievement with Timepiece, winning the Guyana Prize for Literature in the Best First Book of Fiction category; she was the first woman then to win this award.
As Susheila Nasta writes in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, along with “many Caribbean women writers, Shinebourne's work explores new forms and discourses in an attempt to represent the politics of gender and race”. Nasta adds Shinebourne’s gaze remained on Guyana, noting Timepiece “was begun early in Shinebourne’s writing career and, like many first novels, incorporates a great deal of autobiographical material. It concerns the conflicts between a rural and an urban identity in the consciousness of her main character, Sandra, who moves away from the traditional values of her cane community to the new young generation of educated Guyanese in the city”.
With Shinebourne’s second novel, Nasta adds, “The Last English Plantation (1988) examines a different aspect of cultural and religious conflict, focusing on the life of a twelve-year-old girl torn between deep affection for a Hindu neighbour and her Christianised Hindu mother’s desire to de-Hinduise her Chinese father. The background to the novel is British Guiana in the 1950s, during a period of immense political turmoil, and Shinebourne simultaneously captures the interior experience of her child protagonist coming of age and evokes the heart of the New Dam community.”
According to Wikipedia, Shinebourne’s third novel, Chinese Women, “deals even more openly with the race and class conflict created by colonialism”. In this novel, the narrator, Albert Aziz, a young Muslim Indian, has had to fight against this conflicting “all his life from when he grew up, the son of an Indian overseer, living in the exclusive living quarters among the white expatriates”. In her fourth novel, The Last Ship, Shinebourne’s narrative explores life on a rural colonial sugar estate through the arrival of Chinese indentured workers to Guyana. As Wikipedia notes, Shinebourne explores “the arrival of a first-generation Chinese woman, Clarice Chung who at the age of five, travels from Hong Kong to British Guiana on the last ship to bring the Chinese to the colony”, with the novel examining her life until she dies at age 65, after settling and raising three generations on the sugar estate.
Shinebourne was a visiting fellow at New York University in 1994. Mother to two children, in 2006 she moved to West Sussex, England, where she currently resides.
Sources for this exploration are: Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Peepal Tree Press, and Wikipedia.
Sources for this exploration: Richard Charan – Trinidad Express, January 26, 2014; Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Second Edition; Daryl Cumber Dance (ed.), Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook.