CHAPTER-II QUEST FOR MANHOOD AND SELF-AWARENESS FOR IDENTITY
Quest for Manhood and Self-Awareness for Identity
The peasant novels A Brighter Sum (1952) Turn Again Tiger (1958) deal with the private and public lives of the Indo-Trinidadian peasantry, with special emphasis on the indentured labourers. The characters usually work on sugar plantations, or on private gardens producing a wide range of vegetables.
Samuel Selvon started his career with the peasant novel, A Brighter Sun (1952). This novel is a bildungsroman, like George Lamming’s “In the Castle of My Skin” that deals with the social, racial and personal coming-of-age of the principal protagonist, Tiger, a young man who settles in Barataria with his wife, Urmilla. How they come to terms with the creolized society, Barataria that forms the rest of the story. Tiger’s constant urge to prove his manhood and partly due to this, a quest for knowledge also form an important part of the novel. The couple’s Creole neighbours Joe Martin and Rita help them in the process of adjustment. Their stories are set against the broader background of the political situation in Trinidad. The building of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway is described through the eyes of Tiger. The novel covers the period of the Word War II and is larger than just the personal lives of Tiger and co. He has apprehensions about helping coolies, but become good friends with Tiger through the course of the novel.
The peasant novels are a very important set of novels and a characteristic West Indian genre, according to Kenneth Ramchand in The West Indian Novel and its Background, he quotes George Lamming who says,
Unlike the previous governments and departments of educators,
unlike
the businessman importing commodities, the West Indian novelist did not look out across the sea to another source. He looked in and down at what had been traditionally ignored. For the first time, the West India peasant becomes other than a cheap source of labour.
He became through the
novelist’s eye a living existence, living in silence and joy and fear, involved in riot and carnival. It is the West Indian novel that has restored the West Indian peasant to his true and original status of personality.1
A Brighter Sun (1952) is Sam Selvon,1952:’s first novel that catapulted him to fame. This novel has its origin in a short story titled “The Baby” which appeared in the Barbados-based journal BIM some three years before. The novel was initially conceived as “Soul and Soil”. “Highway in the Sun” was the title given to the radio version of the novel, done fifteen years after the publication of the novel. “A Brighter Sun”, is an appropriate title, locating the narrative in the sundrenched Caribbean, in Trinidad. There is also a suggestion of the sun as a controlling symbol in the novel, ‘underscoring the sense of growing optimism and
confidence that impels the narrative’.2 At the end of the novel, a chastened and humble Tiger looks forward to a brighter sun that sheds its light of knowledge and racial harmony.
Roydon Salick is of the opinion that the mature and socially responsible Tiger is also ‘a brighter sun of his homeland.3
Salick also says that Tiger’s
journey from darkness to light is not just a universal archetype but also a reworking of literary journeys of epic heroes such as Ulysses in the Divine Comedy and the Solitary in William Wordsworth’s The Excursion who reiterate that they have followed the sun and will continue to do so.
This is a novel set in the multiracial society of Barataria in Trinidad and Tobago. The novel deals with the lives of the people of Barataria. It is a study of the rapid semi-urbanisation of the village of Barataria, during the years of the World War II and the corresponding emergence of the Indian peasant in a Creolised culture.
The protagonist of the novel is a young Indian, Tiger. The novel begins with the account of his marriage. Tiger is just sixteen, but is married young according to the Indian system. His wife is Urmilla, who is of the same age. Both are from the cane community of Chaguanas, but are given a plot of land along with a cow in Barataria. The couple go to Barataria, naive and inexperienced,
with no clue what to expect, of both their independent life and of each other. They get to know each other gradually. Tiger works in the fields while Urmilla sells milk.
Their friends, mentors and neighbours are the Creole couple Joe and Rita. They are from Port of Spain, but Joe comes to Barataria for work in the American naval base. Both of them live with Henry, Rita sister’s son and grow to love him like a son, as Rita cannot have children. Tiger’s sparse hut with almost no amenities is a contrast to Joe’s living abode that is a proper house, with electricity. Rita becomes Urmilla’s best friend and looks after her like an elder sister. Joe does not have such an uncomplicated relationship with the Tiger family. He has apprehensions about helping ‘coolies’, but becomes good friend with Tiger through the course of the novel.
Urmilla is pregnant and Rita takes care of her. She even brings the bed from her own house to make Urmilla comfortable. Urmilla has a girl child, Chandra. Both Tiger and Urmilla’s parents and relatives visit them. Tiger takes a tour of Port of Spain with another Indian, Boysie, where he is discriminated against and learns the hard truths of life.
Meanwhile, the government decides to build a road that passes through the town of Barataria and wants to acquire the lands of the residents for the purpose.
This road is the Churchill-Roosevelt highway that actually exists. Tiger gets a job at the site and is elated as he thinks he would be helping in the building of a historical road that would open up frontiers.
Tiger learns to read and write. He wants to gain more knowledge. He neglects his family in the process. He is away from home most of the time; he is grumpy and irritable. Urmilla conceives again, but tells Tiger a few days after she gets to know. Tiger is upset and kicks up a row. Tiger impresses the higher officials by his earnestness and his literacy. He invites two American officers to dinner. Helped by Rita, Urmilla spruces up the place and herself. However, when the officers actually arrive, there is a lot of unease in the air. The Americans are indifferent to Indian customs and want to show themselves liberal. After they leave, a drunken Tiger admonishes Urmilla for putting on make-up and borrowing things and beats her, leaving her unwell.
This ruins Tiger completely and he starts drinking regularly. Her delivery time approaching, Urmilla is in acute pain on a rainy night and Tiger goes to fetch a doctor. He asks a Creole doctor and an Indian doctor for help, but they refuse. A white doctor obliges and lessens Urmilla’s pain. Urmilla delivers a stillborn child. Tiger sends Urmilla away to her parents’ place and builds a house. The war gets over and Urmilla returns, refreshed with her holiday. The war ends and
there is hope in the air.
Tiger sends an account of the road-building to a
newspaper.
There are other characters who appear in the novel, such as Tall Boy the Chinese grocery shop owner and Sookdeo the lazy Indian farmer. Much like the Guyanan Edgar Mittelholzer’s (1909-1965) Corentyne Thunder (1941), A Brighter Sun is a novel that has as its focal point, the lives of the Indo-Caribbean peasants, who establish an intimate relationship with nature and the land. But the similarity ends there. Although Selvon,1952: romanticizes his hero, he does not idealise him to the point that he becomes unrecognizable. That is to say, Selvon puts into his novel, the element of verisimilitude, a quality universally lauded. V.S. Naipaul had this to say about A Brighter Sun, “If a stranger read A Brighter Sun and went to Trinidad expecting to meet people like Tiger and Urmilla and Rita, he would not be disappointed” (Naipaul V.S. Finding the Centre, Two Narratives,1989: 34). Tiger is a recognizable Indo-Trinidadian peasant, who finds joy in working the land; he experiences confusion, regret and finally come to terms with his arranged marriage; he faces an inner toil in ‘his struggle out of a prescriptive Indian tradition towards acceptance and active participation in a creolized society’.4
Selvon’s forte has been experiments with language. Even in his first novel, traces of his literary genius can be seen, when it comes to language. Selvon faced
the problem of conveying a story and message to a double audience. He was writing for both his fellow Trinidadians as well as for the wider European public. For this, he had to create a literary language that was identifiable by the Trinidadian as it was culturally specific, and at the same time, was sympathetic to the foreign reader to whom the culture was alien.
The distinctive features of each sub-group’s language are highlighted in the hilarious episode of Sookdeo’s selling Ramdin a half-blind donkey.
When
Ramdin compaints, Sookdeo retorts, ‘But me tellam, me say him fat but him don’t “look” well. Yuh don’t understand when me takam good English give yuh?’ (Selvon,1952: 72). The narrative voice is in Standard English, but the characters speak different kinds of English, depending on their nationality, age and level of knowledge. Tiger’s father, Ramdeen’s language is different from the Creole that Tiger would use later: “Yuh foot! Could have gettam plenty more thing! Yuh eatam too quick, stupid boy!” (Selvon,1952: 6).
Ramal, the old Indian peasant’s language is a cryptic and functional. He maps out Tiger’s destiny in three cryptic sentences “You gettam house which side Barataria, gettam land, cow-well, you go live date side. Haveam plenty boy chilegirl chile no good, only bring trouble on yuh head. Yuh live dat side, plantam garden, live good” (Selvon,1952: 7).
Tiger’s early speech resembles Ramlal’s ; it shifts to the free-flowing Trinidad dialect later. Tiger is always plagued by doubts about his manhood and his maturity, doubts that are always linked with his yearning for learning. He undergoes a painstaking process of reading, by creating a language of polysyllabic words culled from a dictionary, by means of which he thinks he can assert his manhood.
Selvon does not just use Standard English for narration and Creole for the characters; he also blends the two wonderfully in the character’s thoughts. Third person seamlessly blends into first person; Standard English becomes a customized Creole. The following passage from the novel reveals the idea of learning.
[…] He could say it was a pretty book, or the pages were thick or they might be able to count them all, one by one, but all the knowledge written down there-thousands and thousands of words, answering all his questions, and he could only stare. What sort of books would he read when he learned? Well, first it would be hard-you know-I can’t read at all. I know the alphabet-when I was small we used to say a,b,c, […] Man, if I tell you ‘bout things I want to find out! What I doing here now? Why I living? What all of we doing here? Why some people black and some people white? […] What it have behind the sky? Why some
people rich and some people poor? But is what they fighting a war for? Man, I can’t tell you about everything.
He imagined himself coming to the garden to
read […] (Selvon,1952: 100-01). A Brighter Sun deals with various themes, such as the quest for knowledge, the life of the Indian peasant in Trinidad and others. But there are two inter related themes in the novels that are very important. One is issue of racism, which is relevant in the multi-cultural society that Barataria is. The other is Creolisation, which is the positive assimilation of all races. Both stem from the fabric of the society of Trinidad. With a multicultural society like Barataria, there is bound to be some racism. But reader can understand it properly by looking at the folk roots. Race and racism were staple features of calypsos, especially in the nineteen forties, the period covered in A Brighter Sun. Some critics viewed the calypsos as a sign of emerging nationhood. The political Albert Gomes, for instance, has this to say in one of his articles on the Calypso:
While so much of us are oblivious of the fact, the calypso singer has begun to announce in his songs that our ethnic ‘potpourrie’ is a reality, and that is many pots have begun to pour one onto the other. The welding of our polyglot community is taking place before our eyes in the ‘tents’ and the wedding of our culture are being celebrated right there.
Indian and Chinese tunes are being woven into the fabric of our calypso, and as though to give formal acceptance to yet another fact that should be obvious, the jumping jive, the samba, the conga and the rhumba are becoming part of the music of the tent.5 The Calypsos reflected the harsh process of acculturation. Calypsonians made fun of Indians, Chinese, Baptists and Barbadians; they made songs about the lack of morals in white society; they castigated Trinidad women for going out with American soldiers, even when they sometimes lived on the earnings of such women. Calypsonians, “the extremest products of the process of urbanization, provided a sounding board by which all ‘intruders’ on the urban scene were placed”.6
The Calypsonians, who were eccentric themselves, mocked at what they thought was eccentric in others. This mockery takes the form of ‘picong’, a kind of wit based on caricature, reductive sarcasm and sometimes good humour. This was a rite of passage that made sure that creolisation took place ‘on the basis approved by the urban-Creole themselves.
Therefore, reference to Indians and Chinese were reductive, in order to reinforce existing stereotypes. Hindi and ‘Indian’ songs were mocked in the Calypso. The processes of urbanization and acculturation seemed to merge for the
Indian peasant. This bred scorn in the Calypsonians. A Calypsonian of the nineteen forties says this about Indians who change their names:
What’s wrong with these Indian people As though their intention is for trouble Long ago you’d meet an Indian by the road With his capra waiting to take people load But I notice there is no Indian again Since the women and them taking Creole name Long ago was Sumintra, Ramnaliwia, Bullbasia and Oosankilia, But now is Emily, Jean and Dinah And Doris and Dorothy.7
Prostitution, which was rampant once the Americans occupied Trinidad, was noted with the same kind of detachment. Here too, the success of the Indian girls was spoken about:
Long ago you hadn’t a chance To meet an Indian girl in a dance But nowadays it is big confusion Big fighting in the road for their Yankee man
And you see them in the market, they ain’t making joke Pushing down nigger people to buy their port And you see them in dances in Port-of-Spain They wouldn’t watch if you call an Indian name.8
The Calypsonian sees Port-of-Spain as the centre of all activity, to which the Indian is a new centre, who must be leveled. He ridicules the loss of name and custom among the Indians, but he has no problems referring to his own people as ‘nigger people’. This reveals the Calypsonian’s own self-contempt and a lack of a self-image. This is exactly what happens to Tiger in A Brighter Sun.
The calypsos of the nineteen forties, i.e. of the time when A Brighter Sun is set, reflect the social and racial conditions of the time. Creolisation and race relations are highlighted.
For instance, in the calypso called ‘Moonia’, the
courtship between an Indian girl and a Creole is spoken about. The mother of the girl is aghast and points out that an Indian suitor she has in mind can offer a house, cattle and other things. But the father points out that the Creole can only offer sexual pleasure, which his daughter seems to value above everything. In this calypso, the Indian accent is mocked at, when ‘Kirwal’ is put in place of ‘Creole’. The calypsonian has no illusions about the process of racial contact.
Like the calypsonian, Selvon too is clear about the implications of Tiger’s ‘advance’ from ‘Indian’ to ‘citizen’. He maintains a fair level of detachment throughout the novel, but he would have shared Tiger’s contempt of the city slickers in Port-of-Spain. At the same time, he does not completely reject the process of Creolisation. Selvon seems to think that history and change are things that one must accept. Tiger arrives at a solution for his existential problems: “You don’t start over things in life, he [Tiger] said wisely, “You just have to go on from where you stop. It is not as if you born all over again. Is the same life” (Selvon,1952: 209).
Selvon captures the spirit of the language of Port-of-Spain and the ‘ole talk’ (gossip) in the passage about taxi-drivers:
Boy, dese taximen does have tings their own way too much. Some of dem does tell you dey leaving right away, and wen yuh get in de car, is because dey making round all Charotte Street for more passengers, and wat yuh cud do? Nothing, because yuh in the car already. As weh dey going down South! Boy, dat is trouble self. All dem touts by de railway station, from de time dey see yuh wid a grip in yuh hand, dey start husting. ‘South, Master?’ ‘Yuh going South? Look ah nice care here – it have radio-Leaving right away. South
Direct. An dis time, de smart driver have ‘bout three tout sitting down quiet as if dey is passengers (Selvon,1952: 86).
This passage is comparable to calypsos such as Panther’s ‘Taxi-Drivers’ and Melody’s ‘Peddlars’.
The references to Racism in the novel involve the attitudes shared by the characters and the narrator towards races, their own and others. The qualities ascribed to each race by others are also highlighted. The community of Barataria has people from a number of nationalities: Indian, Creole (Negro), Chinese, British and American.
It is to be remembered that racism not just means
stereotypes about other races by Europeans, but basically by any race about the other.
The passage from the novel introduces the racial differences in the community in Barataria:
In Trinidad there is a short-cut to identity. All Americans, for instance, are known as “Joes”. East Indians are hailed as “Ram” or “Singh” or some other common name until an association is formed and introductions made. […] In the same way, all Chinese are “Chins” (Selvon,1952: 50).
Whether it is called racism, or just name-calling, the element is present in the society of Barataria to such a large extent that even children are aware of it and use it. Henry, Rita’s sister’s son, the bully of the school, stops Tall Boy’s son, Ling and mocks him. Ling mocks him back and before knowing it, there is a full fledged name-calling session in the school that does not exclude any race:
[…] When it was recess – a midmorning break of ten or fifteen minutes – they gathered around the Chinese [children] and sang: “Chinese, Chinese, never die, Flat nose and chinky eye!” But Ling was no coward […]. He put his hands to his ears to shut out their voices and he sang: “Nigger is ah nation, Dey full of bodderation, Meet them by de station, Dey stink with perspiration!” Then he turned to the Indians. “Everybody know allyyuh does use ah bottle of water in de w.c. Ha ha!” “Chenese does eat cat an’ dog!” “Nigger does smell of perspiration!”
“Coolie people does eat with dey hands!” […] “Whitey-cockroach!” […] “Back tar-baby!” (Selvon,1952: 55-56). This experience is not a fabricated one. This is something that Selvon himself experienced. In an interview to Frank Birbalsingh, Selvon says that he was through such experiences himself.
Not always is this stereotyping negative. For instance, taking the dialogue between Rita and Urmilla at the beginning of the novel:
“Ah never see ah man so in me born days”, she [Rita] said, “ah fuss he bad! He like to drink rum too bad. Why we creole can’t live like Indian, quiet and nice?” Urmilla was embarrassed. She knew from experience that Indians fought and quarrelled just as much. Didn’t she have a mark on her shoulder where an empty tin had struck her when her own father and mother were fighting? It was the same thing all over. Only white people! If they could only be like white people! (Selvon,1952: 31).
Rita thinks, may be like most Creoles, that Indian couples don’t quarrel, while that is not the case. The last two sentences emphasise the attitude of awe for
the ‘whites’. Urmilla debunks the myth that Rita believes in, only to put forward a far stronger myth, which is derogatory to all the ‘black’ races. Both Rita and Urmilla are, therefore, in a trap. Urmilla and Rita are good friends and have no problems with the difference in races. Joe doesn’t have a problem in practice. But the ingrained racism towards the ‘coolies’ is with him in theory. When Rita gives their bed to the pregnant Urmilla, Joe bursts out, “[…] who the arse tell yuh to interfere in de coolie people business?” (Selvon,1952: 39).
The prejudice against ‘Niggers’ is held by Tiger and Urmilla’s relatives. They do not approve of the couple’s friendship with Joe and Rita.
“Is only nigger friend you makeam since you come?” his [Tiger’s] bap asked. “Plenty Indian liveam dis side. Is true them is good neighbour, but you must look for Indian friend, like you and you wife. Indian must keep together.” “Is I who pinch him, that is why he [Henry] cry,” Urmilla’s mother said. “Nigger boy put he black hand in my betah baby face! He too fast again!” “But, mai, these people good to us; we is friends. I does get little things from she, and sometimes she does borrow little things from me. They is not bad people.”
[…]. “What you bap say is right thing, though,” his uncle said. “Nigger people all right, but you must let creole keep they distance. You too young to know about these things, but I older than you. Allyuh better make Indian friend.” (Selvon,1952: 4748).
If this is the case in hamlets like Barataria and villages like Chaguanas, how is it in the big city, Port-of-Spain, then? In a junction in the city, this is the comment that the author makes ‘In five minutes, standing in one spot, Tiger could have seen representatives of all the races under the sun’ (Selvon,1952: 90).
However, there is more racial tension in the big city. The Negro girl behind the counter in the garment shop, who is, incidentally, Spanish from her father’s side, asks Tiger, “Wait nar. Yuh is ah Russian? Yuh can’t see I am busy doing something” (Selvon,1952: 91)? Racial prejudices come through in conversations very easily here.
In the shop, Tiger is discriminated against, in favour of a white woman. The Creole shop girl ignores him and attends to a white woman. This is not just racism against a fellow-Trinidadian, but also indicates the attitude of servility towards the white. The feeling that the white are supreme was reflected in the dialogue between Urmilla and Rita. Similarly, the Creole girl attends to the white woman, as she is more important than the native ‘coolie’ Tiger.
When Tiger tells Boysie about the incident, Boysie tells him this: “Listen, is one ting yuh have to learn quick, and dat is dat wite people is God in dis country, boy. Was de same ting wen I uses to work in de grocery. Was always wite people first. Black people like we don’t stand ah chance.” “But man, I ain’t black. I is a Indian.” “Don’t mind! As long as yuh ain’t white, dey does call you black, wedder yuh coolie or nigger or chinee. […]”(Selvon,1952: 94-95).
While the first part of the conversation is about how the ‘white’ people are superior to the ‘blacks’, the second part expresses Tiger’s genuine confusion about the usage of the term ‘black’. Boysie tells him all the natives, i.e. all the nonwhites, are ‘blacks’ and are inferior to the whites.
One of the shortcomings of Post colonial literary theory has been, as it is understood, the tendency to dump together all post colonial nations without any regard to the differences between them. This was a colonial hangover where, for the colonial rulers, all were simply ‘natives’. This is illustrated in the above passage.
Racism hits its peak in what may be called the climax of the novel, i.e. the doctor episode. One stormy night, Urmilla is unwell and Tiger goes in search of a doctor. He first approaches an Indian doctor who dismisses Urmilla’s ache as an upset belly, advising ‘pot-soda’. He then goes to a Creole doctor who sends Tiger off, when he learns that he isn’t a regular patient. The doctor says the patient would wait till morning and goes back into the house. All the while, Tiger keeps wondering how someone who calls himself a doctor would not treat a patient. He is still naïve, not understanding that money and class are important in society.
When he has given up all hope, a British doctor treats Urmilla and saves her life. Here, the Creole doctor does not treat Urmilla because she is an Indian. But what about the Indian doctor? He is ashamed of his own identity and now is only after money and white patients whom he thinks will give him respectability. So both doctors, who are nationals of Trinidad, refuse to help Tiger, another Trinidad, refuse to help Tiger, another Trinidad national.
The next day, Tiger confronts both doctors and rebukes them for not taking his wife’s case up. Finally, he tells the people assembled there: “[…] You don’t see how is a shame? You mean, you don’t see how wite man must always laugh at we coloured people, because we so stupid? You don’t see why it is that black people can’t get on in this country at all at all? (Selvon,1952: 188-189).
The typical response to this situation is again a racist one. The people assembled in the Creole doctor’s clinic are mostly Creoles and one of them says, “He own people let him down! Yuh went and curse de coolie doctor too?” (Selvon,1952: 189). They do not get the point about discrimination and only want to prove that no fingers are to be pointed towards their Creole doctor, as the Indian doctor did the same.
Somewhere in the middle of this long episode, Tiger confronts the Negro doctor and rebukes him and the Indian doctor. This passage is interesting for a number of reasons. First, the passage: “[…] It is a Trinidadian like yourself, and it was a white man who had to come to poor Tiger hut to see he wife, while you and that nasty coolie man who say he is a doctor too didn’t want to come” (Selvon,1952: 188). First of all, Tiger himself has caused his wife’s illness by beating her up brutally. This itself is a ‘West Indian’ practice picked up from Joe and others. This leads to the brutal indifference of the West Indian doctor.
Secondly, Tiger does not say Indian, but uses the word ‘nasty coolie man’, a derogatory phrase that would have been used by a Negro to describe an Indian. In fact, Joe uses the word ‘coolie’ early in the novel to express his disapproval of Rita’s help to his neighbours. Tiger either forgets that he is also a nasty ‘coolie man’, or he is beyond national boundaries and is ‘Trinidadian like yourself”. This
indicates that the “Creolisation process is ‘partly an exercise in colonial selfcontempt, even when one is in the act of claiming one’s rights as a full citizen”.9
Incidentally, violence is deeply embedded in West Indian culture. This is not a racist remark, but a fact. It is, most probably, one of the many problem offspring of colonialism which inflicted incredible violence upon indigenous people, slaves and indentured labourers.
Violence in the West Indies is not
restricted to a particular ethnic group, but is more prevalent in the lower socioeconomic classes, where poverty and ignorance are present.
This violence is depicted in A Brighter Sun as well. The relationship between ma Lambie and Joe, her adopted son is full of violence that is shocking but in no way exaggerated. A bleeding Joe retaliates and hits his grandmother. Significant is the third person narrator who says that because of the retaliation, ‘Joe suddenly became a man’. The omniscient narrator, who is clearly not the author himself, is giving voice to the widely held Caribbean belief that violence is ‘the quickest, most effective, sometimes the only way of asserting one’s authority’. Joe and Rita’s relationship is also punctuated by constant physical violence on both sides.
Tiger is always on the side of equality, for treating every race, Indian, Chinese, Creole or English the same way. He believes, unlike others in the
community, that everyone is the same. Very early in the novel, after his parents have a problem with his choice of friends, the Creole couple Joe and Rita, he thinks: Why I should look only for Indian friend? What wrong with Joe and Rita? Is true I used to play with Indian friend in the estate, but that ain’t no reason why I must shut my heart to other people. Ain’t a man is a man, don’t mind if he skin not white, or if he hair curl? (Selvon,1952: 48).
He is pondering over the same problem at the end of the novel, as he doesn’t seem to have found a solution. So he has this conversation with Joe while he is waiting for his second child to be born:
“Joe, you know, is a funny thing, but I never grow up as Indian, […]” (italics mine) “And, Joe, ain’t all of we does live good? live good with nigger?
Ain’t coolie does
Is only wite man who want to keep
we down, and even so it have some good one among them. You know something Joe, they have good and bad all about, don’t matter if you wite or black.” […] “I mean, it look to me as if every body is the same, it have so many different kinds of people in Trinidad, boy! You
think I should try to wear dhoti?
Or I should dress as
everybody else, and not worry about Indian so much, but think of all of we as a whole, living in one country, fighting for we rights?” “Man, Ah don’t know about dat, nar. Trinidadian?
Ain’t you creolized?
Ain’t yuh is ah
Wat yuh worrying bout?”
(Selvon,1952: 194-5).
Tiger is confused as to his identity.
To him, being Indian and being
Trinidadian are at odds with each other. He wants to fight for the rights of the people of the whole country, and be a true citizen of Trinidad. He has no problem with the ‘whites’ as well. All he wants is to live in harmony.
Joe’s answer seems to provide a solution to the problem. He seems to say that as long as one believes in one’s identity and interacts with everyone, there isn’t a problem. An escapist route, may be, but a peaceful one.
There are however, problems with this passage and what Selvon wants to project through this. The confession, “I never grow up as Indian”, coming late in the novel as it does, creates a curious esthetic discrepancy, that is normally missed by every critic, but observed by Roydon Salick.
Salick says that there is a
discrepancy between ‘the artistic donnee and the historical, cultural reality’.10
Selvon’s creolisation at a young age could be understood, as his family was urban middle-class Presbytarian. But this is not the case with Tiger. He is very clearly a recognizable peasant from the Indian area of Trinidad with orthodox and traditional parents and relatives.
Selvon seems to suggest that Tiger had a
creolized upbringing. But there is nothing to suggest this, and much to contradict it.
This artistic anomaly springs, according to Salick, from Selvon’s urge to ‘make art conform to autobiography’.11 That is to say, Selvon to present a cogent illustration of his central theme of creolisation, has given Tiger a character that is very much at odds with his traditional upbringing.
Let the reader takes food for instance, Selvon himself says that in his parents’ house, food consisted of creole food, souse and black pudding on Saturday night, stew beef or chicken and calaloo for Sunday lunch” (Selvon (Three into one can’t go, 1987: 14). This would definitely not be what Tiger and his family ate. They would have eaten, if they had eaten meat at all, chicken or goat, a particular favourite of Indo-Trinidadians. Most of the instances of Creolisation in the novel are happy ones, by the supposed creolisation exercise that the American officers attempt goes wrong. The dinner party at Tiger’s house, with The Americans invited as guests, is an
example of Creoisation taken too far, and therefore, gone wrong. There is a subtle line between integration of cultures and being over-enthusiastic, ruining things. The Americans err on the side of the latter.
First of all, they keep calling, Tiger ‘John’ without respecting his identity. That should have told Tiger how less they regard him as an individual and more as an Indian ‘type’.
While leaving after dinner, they wish Tiger would sing a
calypso. They do not know that West Indian natives sing calypsos. As mentioned earlier, to them, the natives are all ‘blacks’.
They do not acknowledge the
difference in cultures.
They come to Tiger’s house to taste ‘Indian’ cooking, to savour ‘Oriental’ dishes. Tiger, with his newfound penchant for learning, tries to impress them with his English. They insist on Urmilla joining them for a drink, although they can see that it is making her uncomfortable just to lift her eyes and speak with them. Larry, one of the officers, keeps going to the kitchen on the pretext of inviting her to join them. They finally depart, leaving behind a lot of unease. It is the visit that sparks off the quarrel between Tiger and Urmilla and the subsequent beating that leaves her unwell and finally leads to problems with pregnancy. A solution to this problem of racism is perhaps Creolisation. If Racism is the belittling of other races, Creolisation is the process of assimilation; of harmony with all races.
Like all his novels, Selvon’s A Brighter Sun too speaks of
creolisation. Basically, in his novels, creolisation is how different races assimilate aspects of each other despite the existing stereotypes and racism in society.
Cane is the most ubiquitous existential symbol of the racial history of the Caribbean.
The tradition-bound and hard-working Indians were brought as
indentured labourers to work the cane-fields abandoned by the manumitted slaves. Thus, cane is a very racial symbol. To the older generation, cane meant survival and hope; but the younger generation, represented by Tiger, Cane represents pain and humiliation. This is evident in Tiger’s resolution at the end of A Brighter Sun never to return to Chaguanas again. The move to Barataria, thus, is a move against racism and towards Creoisation.
Creoisation often results in the losing of one’s identity in the process of embarrassing another. This is the case with Boysie, who does not like his identity of an Indian but wants to be cosmopolitan, like the city of Port-of-Spain.
[…] He (Boysie) didn’t like Indian girls, he said they were too passive in their love-making, that the best woman he ever had was a creole.
[…] he used to say that all this
business about colour and nationality was balls and, that as long as a man was happy that was all that mattered. He got a delight out of seeing the stares of deep-rooted Indians when
he walked around the Queen’s Park Savannah with Stella [his Creole friend] holding on to his arm.
“Look at dem,”
he used to say, “dey so stupid, is as if Ah committing ah crime.
Girl, yuh happy?” and when Stella nodded- “Well, I
happy too.
Is why everyone can’t live god together?”
[…]
and whenever he saw a couple of different nationalities he used to hail out to them and tell Stella that was the way to live, especially in Trinidad (Selvon,1952: 79).
To Boysie, creolisation means not just the denial but also the despising of his ethnicity, his Indianness, that instinctive inexpressible racial link one individual shares with the other.
On the opposite end of the spectrum lies Tall Boy, the Chinese shopkeeper. His shop is the confluence of all nations, with everyone in the town buying from him and drinking in his shop. But Tall Boy himself does not consider himself a part of Trinidad. He is not concerned about what happens in Trinidad. His mind is always in China. He [Sookdeo] always read the Trinidad Guardian for Tall Boy, who wanted to find out what was happening in China. Customers shortage
were in
always
Laventille,
talking or
how
about the
the
acute
government
water was
tightening up restrictions on the waterfront, or something which did not interest him greatly.
With all that he felt he
did not properly belong: it was only when Sookdeo read the news about China that he sat down and leaned over the counter. “Plenty trouble in China now, Sookeo?” (Selvon,1952: 69).
Tiger has a different kind of problem that arises due to creoilization. Despite his father’s intolerance of ‘nigger’ friends, his childhood home hasn’t exactly been the hotbed of Indian traditions.
The strong religiosity that is
sometimes ascribed to Indians is not present in his home.
This leads to a
conversation like this with Sookdeo, another Indian, who know a bit more about Hinduism.
“[…] Sookdeo, tell me something- you believe it have a God” “But how? You fadder and modder never tell you about that?” “Well, is a funny thing, but when I did small I never used to pay attention to all the ceremonies and meetings and prayers they have. I know it had a time when a wite minister used to come, and preach in the village, and he tell we it have a
God, and he tell about a man named Joes, or something so.
He say how when everybody dead, if they live good life,
they go in a nice country behind the sky, which part mild and honey does flow in the rivers!
He say we must pray to
this God and ask Him to help, but plenty time we pray, and nothing happen. Plenty people turn into Christian though.” Sookdeo said, “Well, how? Don’t you know Indian people havean own God?
Don’t know about Bhagwan?
Kali for rain wen dry season too long?
To pray
Yuh growam chupid
or wat?” “Man, I tell you I never used to pay attention to all of that.” “Yuh don’t know right dis side we haveam meeting, play drum, sing Indian song, right my ninth street corner?
Don’t
know one Roodal dat side, teacham Hindi?” “I never grow up in too much Indian custom.
All different
kinds of people in Trinidad, you have to mix up with all of them” (Selvon,1952: 117). To Tiger, God only means Jesus, or ‘Jees’ as he calls him. Religion means nothing to him. Sookdeo is shocked that Tiger does not know about ‘Bhagwan’ or ‘Kali’. But Tiger, who belongs to the next generation, is more concerned about knowledge and about interacting with the different races that religion holds no significance to him.
As he tells Sookdeo, he “[…] does out and look all about, at the hills, and the trees, and the sky, and them. And [he] does get a funny feeling as if strength coming inside [him]. That must be God” (Selvon,1952: 118). and he goes on to speak about the great man who must have made the moon and so on. Tiger is a pagan.
In the novel A Brighter Sun, nothing is a better example of inter-racial friendship than that of Tiger and Joe’s family. Tiger and Joe are almost from two different spectrums – the houses of both are a study in contrast. This is how Tiger’s hut looks like:
There were two chairs, a small table, and some cooking utensils.
The hut was one room.
were smooth mud.
The floor and the walls
The roof was thatched with palm leaves.
The kitchen was behind and separated from the hut.
It was,
in fact, a miniature of the hut, except that there was an earthen fireplace, dug in the ground.
And it was in a
dilapidated condition, leaning to one side (Selvon,1952: 11).
And then there is Joe Martin’s house: Tiger’s neighbors were the Martins. and
brown
windows.
house
built
of
They lived in a yellow
concrete
bricks,
with
glass
They had running water and a septic tank.
They
used an electric stove in the kitchen (Selvon,1952: 30). This does not matter to Urmilla or Rita. Rita helps Urmilla with her furniture, when Urmilla is pregnant and when the Tigers have American guests dining. Joe and Tiger become good friends through the course of the novel.
Tiger has to keep his wits about between two racial polarities. One racial polarity is the attitude held by the relatives of Tiger and Urmilla and by the old Indian man, Jaggernauth. The relatives as reader has seen, are very much against Tiger and Urmilla getting too close to Joe and Rita. Jaggernauth, in a conversation with Tiger, affirms this. He says, “Indian must come first”.
The anti-Indian attitude is represented, to some extent, by Rita and Joe, by the prostitute who demands too much money, by the old ‘negro’ woman with a basket of fish in the taxi, and by the store clerk, who, as reader has seen, ignores Tiger and further jokes about him to her colleagues, calling him a “real country bookie” and “a stupid coolie”. She, like many others, depreciates an entire ethnic group.
Tiger has to build his road of racial tolerance and understanding with the help of his Afro-Trinidadian neighbors, Joe and Rita. Tiger succeeds in going this.
Readers come to the question of whether A Brighter Sun is autobiographical. A Brighter Sun is autobiographical to some extent. Selvon is not like Boysie, but like Tiger, who accepts his ethnicity and comes to terms with it within a plural society. But this process is far more difficult for Tiger than it was for Selvon.
Another theme of A Brighter Sun is knowledge.
Tiger’s journey is a
courageous quest for knowledge. This makes him a typical, unique peasant hero. Selvon puts in Tiger, his own keen desire for greater knowledge. A Brighter Sun is thus an epistemological novel, not because it illustrates a well-articulated theory of knowledge, but because it concentrates on Tiger’s all-consuming desire for knowledge. This quest of Tigers is inclusive of his quest for independence, for creolisation, for self-actuaisation.
It is natural and instinctive for him to question everybody and everything. Salick points out how Tiger’s first words to his wife (5), to Ramalal (7), to the men in the rum shop (14), to Sookdeo (75) and to Boysie (78) are diffident questions, revealing his independence, while, at the same time, also indicating his need to know more and more. His final words in the novel are a statement of
confident affirmation and wisdom (215) and the journey from initial questioning to final affirmation is an index of Tiger’s acquisition of self knowledge, confidence and maturity.
Tiger’s heroism can be seen in his epic struggle to understand and go beyond the lot that colonial history thrusts upon him and his ethnic group as destiny. Knowledge distances him from his land, but increases his appreciation for it. It brings him a confidence and self-assurance that he has never experienced before. It is the magic weapon, through which he can overcome the darkness of the ages along with poverty and ignorance.
The knowledge that Tiger has acquired will serve the heroic, epic purpose of founding a politically independent and racially integrated Trinidad. Although Tiger is Indo-Trinidadian, he is Selvon’s creolized man, who struggles to express himself against barriers such as ignorance, racial prejudice, violence and widespread complacency. A Brighter Sun recreates rural Trinidad of the 1940s. The descriptions seem very vivid and fresh to the readers’ minds. This might be because the novel was written at a time when Selvon’s memories of people, places, the sea, the building of roads in Trinidad – were all fresh.
Some space has to be devoted to the sequel of A Brighter Sun i.e. Turn Again Tiger (1958). Turn Again Tiger is a study of the further maturing of the protagonist Tiger and his wife. In A Brighter Sun, Tiger’s creolisation is speeded by his newly acquired literacy and growing social consciousness that acknowledges interrelationship of groups within the larger multiracial society of Trinidad.
This creolisation and the process of self-education put a distance
between Tiger and his roots. Tiger declares, at the end of A Brighter Sun, that he will not go back to his village.
However, Turn Again Tiger explains how one’s roots are important for Creolisation. As Sandra Pouchet Paquet puts it in her introduction to Turn Again Tiger, the novel ‘emphasises Tiger’s need to reconcile himself with his peasant roots in the cane community, as a vital and necessary grounding, if the process of creoisation is not to lead to a crisis of disconnection and directionlessness’ (Selvon Turn Again Tiger, viii). The community of Chaguanas is multi-racial in its own way; it has a white supervisor, the Chinese shopkeeper, Indian foreman and labourers.
This is, in Paquet’s words, the ‘traditional sugar estate village
structure’ (Selvon Turn Again Tiger, ix). Finally, Tiger is forced to deal with the social tensions between his origins in a traditional Indian cane community, and his emerging ambitions as a literate, self-educated member of the Barataria community.
Turn Again Tiger was the first sequel that Selvon wrote. Selvon saw the need to continue the story of an extraordinary and exemplary peasant, a story that sufficiently gripped the imagination of readers. Selvon had two choices. The first was to continue in a linear fashion, the narrative of A Brighter Sun, in which Tiger sees and secures political office and develops his skills as a writer. The second option was to take Tiger back to the beginning of the history of his ethnic group in West Indies. Selvon chose the second option, the most attractive and challenging of the two. He attempted a compromise between realism and historical fiction in Turn Again Tiger. A sequel was necessary to A Brighter Sun to fill certain gaps in the narrative. Although Tiger was become more knowledgeable and more certain of himself, the readers realise that he has a long way to go. When Tiger moves eastward from Barataria to Chaguanas, it signifies a return to the sun, in more senses than one, a sequel to A Brighter Sun.
Tiger needs to put aside the enormous strides that he has made in A Brighter Sun in terms of experience, knowledge and wisdom, and shelve his political ambitions as well. He has to pay the price for his hard-won knowledge and wisdom by going where they impel him. Tiger must take part in a process of deconstruction and reconstruction; he must return to the beginning to understand the present so that he can plan for the future. If the struggle in A Brighter Sun is hard, the struggle in Turn Again Tiger is harder.
Tiger is Selvon’s epic hero who must found a politically independent, racially integrated Trinidad, and who must fashion an idiom that is flexible enough to ‘absorb and express creolized experience’.12 The struggle of Tiger is reflected in a series of physical confrontations and fights. Tiger fights with Baboolal and also with Singh. His relationship with Doreen is also a fight of sorts.
The burning of books is ample evidence of the depth of confusion and emotional turmoil that Tiger experiences.
This precipitate act of Tiger’s
represents the destruction of that which prevents him from being self-assured and decisive. Tiger has to achieve that very important blend of wisdom that comes from experience and book learning, a very happy marriage that underpins civilized living at its most intelligent.
The burning of his books is then, an admission on Tiger’s part that the head no longer ought to be trusted, something both Baboolal and Joe keep reminding of very often. To burn his books is to become a creature driven by instinct and possession. It amounts to the rejection of all that has made man civilized. Tiger rejects Western notions of knowledge, i.e. reading and writing and embraces the Occidental notions of impulse and instincts.
The meeting with Doreen has a lot of colonial and racial implications. Tiger’s use of the terms “red”, “white” and “blue” in association with the white
supervisor’s wife, Doreen, makes clear his intention of bringing Tiger face to face with a representative of colonialism. The unexpected meeting puts Tiger offguard. Cultural conditioning first immobilizes him, after which he turns his head away and finally runs away.
Selvon’s creolisation of Western myths with Caribbean beliefs can be seen here. Selvon invokes the most persistent of myths in the Western tradition, i.e. the garden narrative. Doreen and the horsewhip snake and are linked imaginistically; both are sunning themselves. Like the bulldozers in A Brighter Sun, Doreen is the intruder who destroys pristine relationships; she is the agent of humiliation and a profound shame that Tiger confesses to. Tiger’s fall is not from grace but from an ‘accustomed commitment’.13
This unexpected meeting releases from Tiger unarticulated responses from his racial memory of keeping off the white man’s land, of not going near the overseer’s house, of turning his head away from the white man’s wife, and of the countless stories of “the white overseer [who] screwed the young Indian girls in the cane, and nobody could do anything about it” (Selvon,1958: 47). Tiger’s act of voyeurism is thus a conscious act of incipient rebellion against and subversion of colonial domination. His desire for Doreen further intensifies his rebellion. His deliberate flouting of rules, his refusal to be obsequious, much to the frightened dismay of Baboolal and Joe, are calculated to only have one end. And then, Tiger
begins to blame the white woman for all his troubles, all his mental tensions. “The Bitch… is she who cause everything” Selvon,1958: 145).
The final impassioned confrontation with Doreen finally rids Tiger of his colonial notions and he comes to terms with life.
Not just for Tiger, but also for Urmilla, the sojourn in Five Rivers is a productive one. Much like her husband Tiger, Urmilla too begins her journey in diffidence and indecision ending it in self-assurance and confidence. Her role in the marriage is now a more participatory and important one. Her growing sense or individuation and independence is suggested by her dream (Selvon,1958: 77). This dream, of course, is a symbol of Urmilla’s repressed desire for creolisation, for breaking away from the narrow, rigid world of her Hindu upbringing.
Lipstick and rouge, which enraged and angered Tiger in A Brighter Sun, driving him to physical brutality, still poses a problem to Tiger. In his prudery, he associates them with not only an alien sensibility, but also with an unarticulated immorality. Lipstick, rouge and high heeled shoes, despite their discomfort, are Urmilla’s offering to creolisation and to the god of fashion, but her sari suggests that she has a healthy sense of the true meaning of creolisation.
Selvon thus depicts a multi-racial peasant society in A Brighter Sun and its sequel Turn Again Tiger. There are slight hints of racism, but they are not enough to ruin the harmony of the community. Tiger is the moral centre of the novel and the model that Selvon advocates for reader to follow. Creolisation is the solution to Racism, and as Joe says, as long as one interacts with everyone and lives in harmony, there should not be a problem.
Selvon seems to opine that Indians just first come to terms with the implications of their Indianness before they can place themselves fully within a national or regional community. “Tiger seems rather to be aiming for a West Indian identity which does not assimilate, but incorporates, his Indian being. This is eventually achieved in Turn Again Tiger, when the prologonist returns to the came field, and symbolically to the historical past of his Indian ancestors, and manages to rid himself of his obsessions and anxieties conditioned by the colonial past”.14 In the fictional world of Samuel Selvon it is possible to hear the distinct accents of the blend of many linguistic traditions, as the creolized man, Tiger, tries to fashion an linguistic idiom that is capable of absorbing, reflecting and articulating creolized experience. Both A Brighter Sun and Turn Again Tiger are in the tradition of novels that show the protagonist’s process of self-discovery along with the development of his society. These processes, very significantly, converge in racial terms. In Selvon’s
work, while racial divisions are not overlooked, the overriding concern is that of unity. Tiger’s mentor in the novel is the Negro couple Joe and Rita, whom Tiger’s parents deplore. Tiger makes use of his newly developing language skills not only for the purpose of self-education, but also to observe racial prejudices.
The
incident of the doctors brings to the fore open commitment, something rare in Selvon’s novels. Tiger is the spokesperson of the class that wants to eschew racism. Tiger makes an unconsciously political statement. “I is Trinidadian”. Selvon believed that Trinidadian, or indeed any national identity, should not be confined to narrow racial borders. A Brighter Sun and Those Who Eat the Cascudura, thus, embody Sam Selvon’s ideas about Creolization and Racism.
REFERENCES 1.
Lamming George, The Pleasures of Exile London: Allison & Busby, 1960, rpt 1984 , p.38-9.
2.
Salick Roydon, The Novels of Sam Selvon – A Critical Study (London: Greenwood Press 2001) p.16.
3.
Ibid. p.16.
4.
Ibid p.17.
5.
Gomes Albert in Baugh Edward, (Ed) Critics on Caribbean Literature London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978, pp 154-5.
6.
Ibid p.155
7.
Ibid p.155
8.
Ibid p.156
9.
Rohlehr Gordon, in Baugh Edward (Ed) Critics on Caribbean Literature London : George Allen and Unwin, 1978, p.154.
10.
Salick Roydon The Novels of Samuel Selvon A Critical Study London: Greenwood Press 2001, p.18
11.
Salick Roydon The Novels of Samuel Selvon A Critical Study London: Greenwood Press 2001, p.18
12.
Salick Roydon The Novels of Samuel Selvon A Critical Study London: Greenwood Press 2001, p.34
13.
Salick Roydon The Novels of Samuel Selvon A Critical Study London: Greenwood Press 2001, p.35
14.
Zehnder, Martin Selected Essays on Sam Selvon Something Rich and Strange Great Britain: Peepal Tree Press, 2003.
