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"In the colonies," Frantz Fanon pointed out some forty years ago, "the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich."1 Undeniably, the white West Indian's burden involves grappling with such stereotypes. On the other hand, the burden also involves struggling with a sense of marginalisation as a dwindling minority in an environment of increasing Afro- and/or Indo-centricity. In such an atmosphere of polarisation, how have white West Indian writers negotiated their identities - or more specifically, how have they conveyed such a negotiation in their depictions of the blacks who make up the majority of the population?
Charles Mills has suggested: "Being white in the Caribbean cannot mean the same thing as being white in Europe, for being white in the Caribbean means, above all, not being black. Thus the ideas and values that develop in this so-called 'cultural section' will be permeated by the necessity of defining itself against its despised and feared opposite."2
Mills' use of the words 'despised and feared opposite' brings to mind Kenneth Ramchand's observation, in his seminal 1970 work on the West Indian novel, of a 'terrified consciousness' as a feature permeating a selection of works written by white West Indians in the middle of the last century: two novels by Barbadian men, Brown Sugar (1966) and Christopher (1959) written respectively by J. B. Emtage and Geoffrey Drayton, and two by Dominican women - Phyllis Shand Allfrey's The Orchid House (1953), and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).3
Ramchand suggests that
Adapting from Fanon we might use the phrase 'terrified consciousness' to suggest the White minority's sensations of shock and disorientation as a massive and smouldering Black population is released into an awareness of its power.4
The existence of a terrified consciousness in these novels is indisputable. Wide Sargasso Sea most vividly, and hauntingly, portrays such terror with this theme being established from the very first lines: "They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did" (5). Antoinette and her mother, white plantocrats reduced to penury after Emancipation, live in fear of the resentful black masses who surround them - a fear realised when the great house at Coulibri is burnt down by the ex-slaves, resulting in the death of Antoinette's younger brother. Neither Antoinette nor her mother ever recovers from this horror, Antoinette's mother retreating immediately into madness while Antoinette herself clings tenuously to sanity and eventually disintegrates.
The Orchid House and Christopher also portray white plantocrat families that are in a state of decay. Christopher, alienated from his planter father who is preoccupied with the economic woes caused by the collapse of the plantocracy, and from his weak and ailing mother, is a lonely frightened child, terrorised by the sinister sound of drums from the surrounding black communities and retreating into the safe world of his garden with its flora and fauna. The Orchid House again speaks of decay, the decline of one planter family reflecting the decline of a class, with illness in the foreground (specifically, the Master's drug addiction and Andrew's tuberculosis) against a background of hatred and destruction.
The insecurity of a class that realises it has lost, is losing, or is about to lose its power, translates to vulnerability, and vulnerability to fear. This fear is of course especially compelling if the power that one is losing is derived from oppression of those who are now taking control. Hence in the decades immediately preceding Emancipation a terrified consciousness was clearly evident in the writings of the white West Indian population - a terror predictably magnified by the recent experience of Ste Domingue, which haunted the white West Indian consciousness, but a terror which had long been developing out of a history of violent slave rebellions. While this fear was experienced by white people throughout the West Indies, it was manifested in an extreme form in Jamaica, perhaps at least partly because of its physical closeness to Ste Domingue.
Wide Sargasso Sea accurately portrays the actual fear-filled environment of post-Emancipation Jamaica. Here the subtext seems to read as the author's own fears based on her childhood in Dominica - a reading supported by Rhys's autobiographical reflections in Smile Please:5 "There's no doubt that a certain wariness did creep in when I thought about the black people who surrounded me . . . . Did they like us as much as all that? Did they like us at all? . . . . This was hatred, and if you think that a child cannot recognise hatred and remember it for life, you are most damnably mistaken. . . . They hate us. We are hated. /Not possible. / Yes it is possible and it is so" (49).
So a hundred years after the societal upheavals of Emancipation, the terrified consciousness remains, in the experience of young Rhys.
Ramchand in the same 1970 study of four novels by white West Indians mentioned earlier noted that the depiction of blacks in these works was usually of a comforting-nanny and/or ominous-obeahwoman stereotype. The former possibly reflected the limitations of whites' encounters with blacks, given an environment of social exclusivity where the white person's closest contact with a black person may traditionally have been with his or her nurse; and the latter, the precariousness of the white person's position in a black hate-filled environment (so that there would always be the possibility that the faithful trusted nanny was not really to be trusted).
As Ramchand points out, in The Orchid House the sinister undercurrent is personified principally in the obeahwoman Majolie, who tries to poison the child Hel. The obeahwoman, symbol of black evil and source of terror, appears also, as Ramchand notes, in Christopher in the figure of Old Rose, and in Wide Sargasso Sea as Christophine - though the view of this latter figure as negative is mostly from the eyes of the foreign English 'othered' husband of Antoinette and less from Antoinette herself. Nevertheless, not only for Antoinette's husband but also for Allfrey's and Drayton's characters, obeah is evidence of black barbarity, as well as being the unknown quantity - unpredictable, irrational, uncontrollable, terrifying. Inevitably, obeah is viewed as an index of the sinister threat that blacks represent. Obeah is mysterious, unfathomable, inexplicably powerful.
In The Orchid House and Christopher, Allfrey and Drayton give sympathetic portrayals of unshaking devotion in their nanny figures of Lally and Gip respectively, but the portrayals read as somewhat stereotypical in an Aunt-Jemima way. Here one is reminded of the picture painstakingly painted by Mrs Carmichael6 a century previously of the 'good negro', who is "industrious, civil, with some sense of his own dignity, and a wish to retain a place in the good opinion of his master and all around him . . ." (Vol. II 31) - as opposed to the more commonly encountered (Vol. II 272) 'bad negro' who is dishonest, deceitful, mischievous, wasteful, lazy and, most disturbing of all, treacherous (Vol. II 302). Rhys's Christophine is stereotypical to some extent as both types: unshakingly loyal to Annette and Antoinette, but also an unfathomable, sinister, unpredictable obeahwoman - possibly based on Rhys's own memories of her own terrifying, sadistic nurse, Meta (mentioned in Smile Please). The characterization is stereotypical, even if in opposing ways, only to some extent, however: with her penetrating understanding of Antoinette's mind and situation with all their fragility and ambivalence, with her fierce pride and morality, impatience, compassion, strength of conviction and willfulness, Christophine emerges as the novel's most complex, and most powerful, figure.
Indeed, a number of white West Indian writers over the last century have experimented with black protagonists in ways which transcend the good negro/bad negro stereotypes, albeit as one-off efforts. For example, 'Alice Spinner' (the pen name for Augusta Zelia Fraser, an Englishwoman resident in Jamaica), focuses (with a combination of curiosity and detachment) on the life of the black servant Justina in her first novel A Study in Colour (1894); however, her second novel, Lucilla: An Experiment (1896) reverts to a white protagonist. The Jamaican 'Tom Redcam' (Thomas Macdermot's pseudonym) devotes some energy to giving a sympathetic portrayal of the black child Becka and her family in Becka's Buckra Baby7 (1907), but only sporadic attention to the black Fidelia in One Brown Girl And -8 (1909); otherwise in that second work the principal characters are various shades of brown as well as white, while the blacks are caricatured and marginalised. The first novel of the Jamaican 'white creole' writer H. G. De Lisser, Jane's Career9 (1914), is centred around the life of the black servant Jane, and, as Ramchand observes, is "the first [West Indian novel] in which the central character, the one whose feelings and thoughts are explored in depth, is a Negro".10 De Lisser's second novel, Susan Proudleigh11 (1915), again explores a black character. De Lisser's subsequent novels, however, discard a socialist agenda and relax into portrayals of the (brown and white) middle and upper classes, often lapsing into reactionary (not to mention lurid and sensationalist) perspectives. Alice Durie's sole work One Jamaica Gal12 (1939) follows the line of Jane's Career and to a lesser extent A Study in Colour by tracing the life story of the black protagonist Icilda. Here, like the others, the author's tone seems sympathetic but detached, slightly condescending, interested mainly from an ethnographic point of view: here is one Jamaica gal, and here is the story to answer the question asked on the very last line, "Lawd, how she come here?" (80).
"Here", incidentally, is death, a fate shared by Redcam's Becka; and the fates of the other black women in these novels may not be as tragic but are certainly not idyllic. For example, Justina in A Study in Colour and Jane in Jane's Career achieve material success and societal advancement, but in both cases the authors imply that they may have compromised their integrity.
All of these (usually short-lived) efforts at portraying black protagonists focus on female characters. One cannot help but wonder whether black maleness is too threatening, too overwhelming, to be considered by these white writers.
The second novel of the Portuguese Trinidadian writer Alfred Mendes, Black Fauns13 (1935), follows this pattern. While his first novel, Pitch Lake14 (1934), is clearly semi-autobiographical and focuses on the Portuguese Trinidadian element, Black Fauns examines in great detail the lives of the black inhabitants - all female - of a barrack-yard. Mendes's desire for verisimilitude led him to live for an extended period in a barrack-yard; and his work is similar to Durie's in terms of its ethnographic leanings. However, there is no trace of condescension here; on the contrary, one finds a humble respect for the resilient working-class women that are featured. Black Fauns and Mendes's short stories demonstrate an ideological commitment to foregrounding the black experience, a realisation by Mendes that "We were faced with the task of writing stories . . . which would have to be new and to be recognised, to some extent, as being Negro stories."15
This conscious political decision by Mendes and his Beacon partners to foreground blackness presages the development, some thirty years later, of a body of thinking which privileges those works which themselves privilege the black masses in the construction of a West Indian canon. Such a decision was clearly made a few years later by Roger Mais - who although he was not white was nevertheless a member of the ruling class, a "gentleman", an "aristocrat", as John Hearne16 termed it. According to Hearne, Mais realised during the 1938 riots in Jamaica "that his position, the position of any contemporary man whose work might endure, was with the working class of the world, and with their desires and with their present agony".17 Hearne relates elsewhere that this decision was greeted with concern by his peers: "he was a sort of renegade . . . what he had already begun to write did not fit into the expected pattern. It . . . questioned the values which everyone in his class had been taught to accept. . . ."18 Mais's interest in the poor black Jamaican may have coincided with the birth in the 1930s of a cultural movement led by Edna Manley and others which, in its promotion of a new nationalist pride of identity, encouraged a romanticisation of the Jamaican peasantry and working class in creative work.19 Mais's three novels, The Hills Were Joyful Together20 (1953), Brother Man21 (1954) and Black Lightning22 (1955), were all concerned with the plight of the poor black Jamaican, male as well as female. As Sylvia Wynter said, "Mais . . . was near-white but he became perhaps, the Caribbean writer most closely identified with those who walked with hunger and destitution - the people of the shantytown jungles."23
Fifty years later, we ask: How do contemporary white West Indian writers address these issues? The faithful nurse/obeahwoman appears again as the only developed black character in a number of recent works by white West Indians. In the first novel by Trinidadian writer Lawrence Scott, Witchbroom24 (1992), she appears as Josephine/Antoinetta, and in the first novel by Trinidadian/Bahamian writer Robert Antoni, Divina Trace25 (1992), as nurse-cum-obeahwoman Evelina. In the novel by Robert Antoni's brother Brian, Paradise Overdose26 (1994), she appears as one of two black characters, as Evalina. In Witchbroom, the stereotype proves to be that of both the good and the bad negro: Josephine/Antoinetta is revealed to have a love-hate relationship with her mistress. And in Divina Trace, the faithful nurse stereotype is given a twist: Evelina is revealed to be the daughter of her hated master.
In Robert Antoni's second novel, Blessed is the Fruit27 (1997) the faithful nurse is once again featured, as one of two first-person narrators. Here, very interestingly, the author seems more comfortable in his rendering of the black character, Vel, than that of the white character, Vel's white mistress Lilla. Lilla's half of the novel reads as contrived, self-conscious, stilted prose, and the character of Lilla seems unclearly defined and inconsistently portrayed, and unengaging in consequence. In contrast, Vel's narrative engages the reader from the beginning; it flows smoothly, develops naturally, reads realistically; and her character, unlike Lilla's, is three-dimensional, convincing in that we understand her motivation and purpose, compelling and likable.
Such a privileging of blackness, whether intentional or unintentional, reminds us, firstly, of the dominance given by Jean Rhys to Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea. In her book Stet,28 Diana Athill, who was Jean Rhys' editor at Andre Deutsch, suggests that "Rhys' creed - so simple to state, so difficult to follow - was that she must tell the truth: must get things down as they really were" (177). Athill relates how she had to discourage the inclusion of one of Rhys's stories, called "The Imperial Road", in the collection Sleep it Off, Lady because of its seemingly racist tone: the burden of the story was how things had fallen apart in Dominica once the colonial government was no longer in power - the specific reference in this case being the construction of the trans-insular Imperial Road which Rhys mistakenly believed to have been completed by the English and whose apparent demise she therefore blamed on the native Dominicans who took over responsibility for its maintenance. Rhys, Athill suggests, was in that story sounding very much like she sounded when she was having conversations with her editor: "she talked - sometimes unselfconsciously, sometimes with a touch of defiance - like any other old member of the Caribbean plantocracy, describing black people she liked as 'loyal'; saying what a mess 'they' had made of things once 'we' were no longer there... and so on.... And it never failed to make me marvel that in Wide Sargasso Sea she had, by adhering to her creed as a writer, transcended her own attitude" (177). Although unaware at the time of the factual inaccuracy of Rhys's story - she would only become aware of this years later when she visited Dominica - Athill did not want Rhys to publish "The Imperial Road" because she "did not want anyone to despise as racist a writer who could, when it mattered, defeat her own limitations with such authority" (179). In Wide Sargasso Sea, and especially in the characterisation of Christophine, Rhys chooses, or perhaps is impelled, intentionally or unintentionally, not to walk the imperial road, but to take instead the road of truth.
A similar road is taken by the Jamaican Anthony Winkler. Winkler has not only featured black protagonists in the majority of his novels, unlike most of the other white West Indian writers discussed above, but has appeared to be more comfortable doing so than in his treatment of his white or brown protagonists - as attested to by the relative stiltedness of the portrayal of most of the characters in The Great Yacht Race,29 who are white or brown, in comparison to the rollicking eccentrics or lovable heroes, all black, of his other works. Indeed, the freshness and spontaneity achieved by Robert Antoni in the voice of Vel is a major characteristic of Winkler's works.
Winkler, in spurning the imperial road, follows in the footsteps of Mendes and Mais. Like Mendes's first novel Pitch Lake, Winkler's first written (though third published) novel, The Great Yacht Race, is semi-autobiographical and deals with a group of brown and white middle- and upper-class people. Even here, though, the long-serving Negro nurse, as seen in the persons of Lally (in The Orchid House), Gip (in Christopher) and Christophine (in Wide Sargasso Sea), appears in The Great Yacht Race in a distorted way. Winkler subverts the figure of the ever loyal, ever faithful, substitute mother-figure nurse to produce an eccentric caricature, the feisty "Mildred with black skin and no teeth" (41) whose functions include clobbering her white master Fritzie on the head with a broom whenever he comes home drunk, and warding off his advances with similar weaponry.
Like Mendes, Winkler thereafter moves away from such subject matter, however, and in his subsequent works chooses to embrace the life of the black poor. Like Mais, Winkler is unafraid of the black male as a protagonist. The fisherman Zachariah in The Painted Canoe30 (1983), the madman Aloysius in The Lunatic31 (1987) and the shopkeeper Baps in The Duppy32 (1997) are Winkler's heroes. Zachariah and Aloysius are both from outside the mainstream of the society, both fighting against great odds to survive. The schoolteacher-turned-shopkeeper Baps is both less marginal and less of a hero, but he too comes out of the world of the black poor. Clearly, rather than being overwhelmed and intimidated by his black male characters, Winkler empathises with them.
The childlike, innocent, trusting Aloysius in The Lunatic ranks easily as one of Winkler's most memorable characters. His purity, goodness and innocence, his sense of decency and propriety, his vulnerability and loneliness, his need for love and family, all make him lovable to the reader. Aloysius, in his refusal to kill the white landowner Busha during a break-in in which he is an unwilling accomplice, his insistence on loving him despite the latter's bigotry, represents compassion.
Winkler's black protagonist provides upliftment and cause for hope in a lunatic Jamaican society. And the success of Winkler's depiction disturbs stereotypical perceptions of the exclusivity of the white West Indian identity held by nonwhite West Indians.
Notwithstanding any current trends in Caribbean intellectual thought towards the Utopian notion of creolité, race seems to matter more than ever in our Caribbean society, and the divisions based on ethnicity/race/class widen steadily. Nevertheless, starting tentatively with Rhys and moving with increasing certainty through Mendes, Mais, more recently Antoni, and most especially Winkler, these white West Indian writers break through such divisions and transcend the limitations imposed on them by history, choosing not to take the imperial road; and ultimately these writers give one hope of the eventual possibility of a creole cohesion.
1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; New York: Grove Press, 1968) 40.
2 Charles Mills, "Race and Class: Conflicting or Reconcilable Paradigms?", Social and Economic Studies, 36.2 (1987): 100.
3 Kenneth Ramchand, "Terrified Consciousness", The West Indian Novel and its Background (London: Faber and Faber, 1970).
5 Jean Rhys, Smile Please (1979; London: Penguin Books, 1981).
6 Mrs Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies, 2 vols. (1833; New York: Negro Universities Press, Greenwood Publishing Corp., 1969).
7 Tom Redcam, Becka's Buckra Baby (Kingston: Times Printery, 1907).
8 Tom Redcam, One Brown Girl And - (Kingston: Jamaica Times Printery, 1909).
9 H. G. de Lisser, Jane's Career (1913; New York: Africana Publishing, 1971).
10 Kenneth Ramchand, Introduction to Jane's Career (New York: Africana Publishing, 1971) ix. A similar observation is made by Ramchand in The West Indian Novel and its Background 57.
1111 H. G. de Lisser, Susan Proudleigh (London: Methuen, 1915).
12 Alice Durie, One Jamaica Gal (Kingston: The Jamaica Times, Ltd, 1939).
13 Alfred Mendes, Black Fauns (1935; London/Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1984).
14 Alfred Mendes, Pitch Lake (1934; London/Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1980).
15 Alfred Mendes, quoted by Michele Levy in her introduction to Mendes' collection of short stories Pablo's Fandango (Harlow: Longman/ Kingston: Carlong/ Port of Spain: Lexicon, 1997) vi.
16 John Hearne, "Roger Mais: Part of a Life", unpublished, incomplete manuscript, no date, accessed courtesy of the Hearne family.
17 John Hearne, "Roger Mais: A Personal Memoir" Bim 6. 23 (195): 147-8.
18 John Hearne, "Roger Mais: Part of a Life" 8.
19 In fact, this romanticisation of the underprivileged was part of an international movement and, as Petrine Archer-Straw notes in her essay "Vision and Design: Where Nationalism Meets Art and Crafts", Edna Manley herself may well have been influenced by the British art theorist Roger Fry (Fifty Years - Fifty Artists, ed. Petrine Archer-Straw [Kingston: Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts-Ian Randle Publishers, 2000]).
20 Roger Mais, The Hills Were Joyful Together (London: Cape, 1953).
21 Roger Mais, Brother Man (London: Cape, 1954).
22 Roger Mais, Black Lightning (London: J. Cape, 1955).
23 Sylvia Wynter, "Strangers at the Gate: Caribbean Novelists in Search of Identity", Sunday Gleaner, 18 January 18 1959: 14.
24 Lawrence Scott, Witchbroom (1992; Oxford: Heinemann Educational Books, 1993).
25 Robert Antoni, Divina Trace (New York: The Overlook Press, 1992).
26 Brian Antoni, Paradise Overdose (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
27 Robert Antoni, Blessed Is the Fruit (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
28 Diana Athill, Stet (London:
29 Anthony C. Winkler, The Great Yacht Race (Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1992).
30 Anthony C. Winkler, The Painted Canoe (Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1983).
31 Anthony C. Winkler, The Lunatic (Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1987).
32 Anthony C. Winkler, The Duppy (Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1997).
© Kim Robinson Walcott, 2004.
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