Shiv­a­nee Ram­lochan

Light Falling on Bam­boo

Au­thor: Lawrence Scott

Pub­lished by Tin­dal Street Press, 2012

"Don't for­get where you've come from. Don't for­get the ideas of free­dom that have car­ried us this far," Michel Jean Caz­abon's moth­er urges her favourite son from her deathbed. Caz­abon, who has re­turned to his birth­place, Trinidad, af­ter eight years of artis­tic ap­pren­tice­ship and train­ing in Eu­rope, will find this fi­nal wish to be com­plex and frag­ment­ed, like so much else in his life. He is drawn re­peat­ed­ly to the stun­ning nat­ur­al beau­ty of his home­land, and cap­ti­vat­ed by the no­ble el­e­gance of those who have toiled in its fields.

De­spite the plea­sures of be­ing an artist in his nat­ur­al do­main, he is soon re­mind­ed that is­land life goes hand in hand with its own spe­cif­ic set of per­ils. Temp­ta­tions, in­clud­ing the form of his child­hood play­mate Josie, beck­on in Caz­abon's mo­ments of weak­ness, even as he fond­ly awaits the ar­rival of his French wife and chil­dren on Trinida­di­an shores. As a painter and a son of the plan­ta­tion class, he finds him­self di­vid­ed in more ways than he wish­es to be, quick­ly learn­ing that no cre­ative muse comes with­out a past sto­ry.

Lawrence Scott, a prize-win­ning Trinidad and To­ba­go au­thor whose fic­tion has been long-list­ed for the Whit­bread and Book­er prizes, is the au­thor of the nov­els Witch­b­room (short­list­ed for the Com­mon­wealth Writ­ers Prize-Best First Book, in 1993), Aelred's Sin (win­ner, Com­mon­wealth Writ­ers' Prize-Best Book in Cana­da and the Caribbean, in 1999) and Night Ca­lyp­so (short­list­ed for the Com­mon­wealth Writ­ers Prize-Best Book in Cana­da and the Caribbean, in 2005), and the short sto­ry col­lec­tion Bal­lad for the New World. Scott al­so edit­ed the book Gol­con­da-Our Voic­es, Our Lives, based on a pub­lic his­to­ry project about Gol­con­da, a for­mer sug­ar es­tate in south Trinidad.

Scott's lat­est nov­el is noth­ing less than re­mark­able, blend­ing in am­bi­tious de­tail the re­al life of one of Trinidad's found­ing artis­tic fig­ures, with a fic­tion­al ac­count of what his most per­son­al mo­ments might have re­sem­bled. An in­ti­mate bi­og­ra­phy of the ac­tu­al Michel Jean Caz­abon is not a mat­ter of pub­lic record, as the au­thor him­self re­marks in his his­tor­i­cal notes. Light Falling on Bam­boo would prob­a­bly read as seedy con­jec­ture in the hands of a writer less sen­si­tive to char­ac­ter de­vel­op­ment. The re­verse is true here: one is giv­en a por­trait of Caz­abon as he might plau­si­bly have been. The read­er leans to­wards be­liev­ing, rather than dis­cred­it­ing, the artis­tic li­cences that Scott him­self has tak­en-what emerges is the study of a com­plex, haunt­ed fig­ure.

Di­vi­sions run through the nov­el, which be­gins in 1840s Trinidad and spans more than five decades. These rup­tures are not sim­ply ev­i­dent in Caz­abon's con­flicts, but echo through­out the struc­ture of Trinida­di­an so­ci­ety. While cross­ing the greens on his way to the Gov­er­nor's res­i­dence, Caz­abon mus­es that "he could have been some­where in Hert­ford­shire," so strong are the par­al­lels of the lo­cal at­mos­phere with that of a British pas­toral scene. Mon­ey is de­scribed as the province of pow­er; those who pos­sess it are the white landown­ers and dig­ni­taries for whom Caz­abon is com­mis­sioned to paint epic vis­tas. These mem­bers of the elite rul­ing class con­tin­ue to con­sid­er them­selves su­pe­ri­or to the for­mer slaves who built the plan­ta­tion em­pires. As Caz­abon him­self ad­mits with deep guilt, the slave trade is at the heart of his fam­i­ly's fi­nan­cial suc­cess too-a suc­cess he tries to dis­tance him­self from with ded­i­ca­tion to his art.

Light Falling on Bam­boo presents Caz­abon's Trinidad with vivid im­agery; each de­scrip­tion is or­nate, in­fused with the colours the artist favoured in his fa­mous pieces. Michel Jean's ear­li­est day­dreams in the nov­el re­volve around paint­ing, evoked by events as rou­tine as a car­riage ride through Port-of-Spain, where "he no­ticed the light on wa­ter and on the sur­round­ing hills chang­ing all the time from lemon to sub­dued white, plain greys and blues, the pierc­ing fire of the sun light­ing up the greens and ochres. He longed to paint."

It is paint­ing that keeps Caz­abon's demons at bay; it is paint­ing that ce­ments his pur­pose as a hu­man be­ing, caught as he is be­tween rapid­ly chang­ing worlds. As he re­flects to Gov­er­nor "Ping" Har­ris in an in­tense con­ver­sa­tion, "The peo­ple have made this land­scape...I most­ly paint out the hard­ship and keep the dig­ni­ty. Not that I am blind to what has hap­pened here."

No as­pect of Scott's prose feels blink­ered: in the writer's imag­ined por­tray­al of a lu­mi­nary artist, the read­er is giv­en one of the finest ex­am­ples of art re­flect­ing what is best about na­ture, and vice ver­sa. This is a mul­ti-lay­ered, sym­pa­thet­ic char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of Caz­abon as an artist, hus­band, son, and as a fig­ure who ful­ly em­bod­ies both tragedy and tri­umph at dif­fer­ent phas­es of his life. It is im­pos­si­ble to term Light Falling on Bam­boo a bi­og­ra­phy, but one imag­ines that Caz­abon him­self would have been pleased with the re­sult.

Lawrence Scott will read from Light Falling on Bam­boo at Pa­per Based, The Nor­mandie, St Ann's, on No­vem­ber 24 at 4.30 pm.