April 15, 2009 issue
Arts & Entertainment
As a result, I have great respect for the broomstick and especially the pointer broom. Old higues (suck your blood) and witches like to ride around on their broomsticks to attend meetings. According to superstition, a new broom must first be used by a woman and especially an old woman and not a “good fuh nuttin’ man!
To bring good luck, a broomstick (broom) should always be left standing and not lying down. It should never be lent out to anyone as it takes with it the happiness of your house and transfers it to another. Remember a new house always needs a new broom. In that way, it doesn’t bring the sorrows and worries of the old home.
If you have a visitor who has overstayed his welcome, especially a late night visitor, and you want to go to bed, turn the broom upside down and place it by the door. That was a favourite trick of my father, especially after food and drinks had run out when he was entertaining.
When a broom is worn out, it must be burnt and not thrown away with the garbage. That would bring sorrows and bad luck to the family. If you do throw out your old broom, your only hope is that somebody will see it in the garbage and take it away - a garbage picker. They will then get the bad luck!
They say a dead body dries out better when it is beaten by a broomstick. Some parents also used the broom to beat their offspring or an intruder. My father used to tease my mother and tell her not to let the broom touch his feet when she was sweeping as he wanted to get married again. Remember to sweep your house clean on New Year’s Eve for it will bring good luck in the New Year. Sweep vigorously to get evil spirits out of a house and then sprinkle the rooms generously with a newly opened bottle of rum (for the spirits).
There is the traditional “jumping the broom” in African wedding ceremonies. You may describe a person who is tall and skinny as a toothpick or a broom stick. If you want to have money, never let your broomstick lie down flat. If you want to bring bad luck to a neighbour, throw a half burnt broomstick over the fence. The broomstick must be entirely burnt and the ashes buried to nullify the spell.
I remember the PNC political party in Guyana had the broom as their symbol during election time in the 1950’s and 60’s. Their supporters walked around shouting “We gun sweep dem out!” They were swept out of power in free elections.
I don’t know how far the spell of brooms extends from the pointer brooms to other brooms such as straw brooms and bristle brooms. In Trinidad and Tobago, I believe the pointer broom is called the cocoyea broom, coming from the shaft of the coconut leaves on a branch. The dried fronds are used in handicrafts, bird cages and carnival costumes. The cocoyea brooms are used for sweeping and in certain rituals. As children, we also depleted our pointer broom at home at Easter time by making the frames for light kites like bird and box kites.
It’s hard to find a pointer broom around here where I am living. I could certainly use some good luck. Although new broom sweeps clean, remember that old broom know all dem corners, as old people say. Have respect for your elders; they know the corners and angles of life from experience. In life, there should be a blend between the old and the new.
Ah got tuh go. My wife shouting saying that I have to sweep up the mess I made in the kitchen. Ah gun grab a broom and hopefully do the right thing so that I don’t offend her or the spirits. If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines I’ll be talking to you.
Kevyn Alan Arthur, The View From Belmont, Leeds, Peepal Tree Press, First published 1997. Reprinted 2008.
A review by Frank Birbalsingh
The View From Belmont recommends itself by its historical subject alone: ordinary, everyday social events and the routine business activities of Trinidadians, during the early 1820s, when their island was a British colony bedecked with coffee and cocoa plantations that relied on the labour of African slaves. The author of the novel, Kevyn Arthur, was born in Barbados, and grew up in Barbados and Trinidad before studying in the US where he now lives.
The main narrative of The View From Belmont comes through letters from Clara Bayley, English mistress of a coffee and cocoa plantation in Trinidad. Clara’s letters, written to her friend Alice in England between December, 1822 and January, 1824, provide fascinating insights into the social, cultural and economic conditions in Trinidad immediately after the British conquest of the island in 1797. At the time, what made Trinidad different from most other British Caribbean colonies was the presence of French-speaking people who had flocked to the island in response to two “Cedula de Poblacion” or population declarations issued by the Spanish Government of Trinidad in 1763 and 1783 in order to attract non-Spanish Catholic immigrants.
These French creole immigrants who accounted for eighty percent of the population of Trinidad, consisted of Whites as well as mulattoes, free Africans and their African or mulatto slaves, and according to Clara, suffered snobbery and injustice from the new British rulers in Trinidad. Coloured immigrants, in particular, resented the British Order-in-Council: “which they see as the final abrogation of that equality under the law which had been their privilege under the [former] Spanish administration [in Trinidad].” Clara indicts her English countrymen in Trinidad of being: “a bigoted and supercilious lot. The French and even the Irish are more humanitarian in their outlook.” And she cites as “the extreme example” of English bigotry the Governor Sir Ralph Woodford who, ironically, is today honoured by the name of Woodford Square, a park in the
The basis of bigotry which taints Clara herself is a racist belief, almost universally accepted in British Caribbean colonies, at least among Whites, in the inherent superiority of Europeans over all other people and cultures. Clara’s letters contain frequent references to the: “savage blood” of Africans or: “the natural inferiority of the negro and the deleterious nature of negro blood;” and she regularly sneers at pronouncements about African humanity or equality by William Wilberforce and Thomas Buxton, leaders of the anti-slavery movement which was at its height in England at the time. Her difference with Sir Ralph is that she believes that alleged (black) savagery can be redeemed by contact with (white) civilisation which, after all, is not all that different from Sir Ralph’s own notion of a struggle by the white blood in mixed race people: “to antidote and disenvenom the ‘vile contagion’ [of their black blood.]”
In practical, everyday terms of plantation life, this perverse creed creates racial stereotypes of Whites as intelligent, civilised, rich and powerful, and Blacks as childish, simpleminded, cunning, deceptive, thieving and inefficient and, inevitably, it breeds multiple contradictions and anomalies. Bellah, for example, is an intelligent, enterprising and efficient slave woman who runs an huckstering business that is prosperous enough to allow her to lend money to her mistress Clara when she needs it to make up for the uncertainty of her crops and plantation finances.
But the novel’s most spectacular exposure of slavery as “an execrable villainy,” an expression first applied by the evangelist John Wesley, is Clara’s own scandalous affairs as an English (white) female plantation owner. Forced into the responsibility of running her plantation because of the untimely death of her husband, Clara relies principally on help from her French creole manager, Pierre Pinchet, whose proposal of marriage she rejects before loneliness draws her into more intimate sexual encounters with lieutenant Thorpe, an Englishman, and Andre des Vignes, a French creole mulatto and plantation proprietor.
More importantly, Clara seduces a slave Kano who is her cook. Although she recognises Kano’s culinary and artistic abilities, relies on him: “for his assistance in the management of my household affairs, ” and regards him as: “a wise and resourceful man,” she also realises that she has total power over him when she reflects: “he [Kano] is in fact my chattel, my property! The man is mine to do with as I will.” There’s the rub: she exercises her “droit de la Madame” over Kano, that is to say, her legal rights as his Mistress, in the same way that, for centuries, slave masters used to exercise their “droit du Seigneur” over their female slaves, thereby introducing an entirely new, mixed blood, creole population into the Caribbean.
Yet slavery or Clara’s story is only part of the narrative of The View From Belmont. Clara’s letters are found in an “old dutty clay jar” after a house is broken down. Groups of her letters are then presented, sandwiched between periodic comments from the novel’s unnamed narrator and his friends - contemporary Trinidadians who, at the time of Abu Bakr’s failed Muslimeen coup in 1990, read and discuss Clara’s epistolary confessions. Their comments in their own racy, raunchy and raffish Trinidadian idiom, are neither simply coarse nor only bawdy. They serve the function of the chorus in Greek drama and expose, for example, a feminist motive in Clara’s predatory and erotic manoeuvres that somehow seems altogether too modern for the 1820s.
It’s as if Arthur endows Clara with contemporary feminist attitudes. No doubt Clara is writing privately to a female friend, but her letters are publicly displayed by the author. They also depict Kano as a mere object. Even nowadays, a similar account of his female heroine’s erotic exploits by a male author would likely risk danger of being considered pornographic. A system that allows absolute control of one individual by another is not only an execrable villainy, but display of its sexual aspects risk being pornographic as well.