In the space of a couple of months, two works of distinctly post-modern fiction, based in Trinidad (and to a lesser extent Tobago), have been launched. First came Amanda Smyth's Black Rock, set in the pre-Independence 1950s. Synergistically, the second book The Island Quintet, was written by Smyth's former classmate in Wayne Brown's Creative Writing class of 1997, former journalist and one of the island's most trenchant commentators, Dr Raymond Ramcharitar.
On Friday, another long novel, which covers much of the same temporal territory as the first two books, will be launched at the Readers Bookshop in St James. Monique Roffey's The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, published by the heavyweight house of Simon & Schuster, has already garnered glowing reviews both sides of the Atlantic. Roffey, a born Trinidadian educated in the UK, stunned the literary world with her debut novel Sun Dog in 2002 and White Woman can only add to her reputation.
Without giving too much away for prospective readers of all three of these fictional analyses of Trinidada (sic), they all move literary awareness and focus of this conflicted Creole space firmly into its bewildering contemporary state of fear, loathing, and dark beauty. They come as a welcome and refreshing relief from the stereotypical exotica which for far too long, some metropolitan publishers have expected from Caribbean authors. For Trinis these works of fiction will provide guides (whether from the perspective of an insider/outsider-Ramcharitar, or outsider/insider: Smyth and Roffey) to the history and development of this pre-modern society, plunged into the post-modern world of 2020 Vision and blinded by "bling" and exhaust fumes, its vision impaired by skyscrapers, corruption, greed and blood. Readers on the periphery will have some revisioning to do, of this Paradise now lost.
Crazy, wounded space
Roffey's long novel is prefaced with the Dominican writer Phyllis Shand Allfrey's poem Love for An Island: Love for an island is the sternest passion and the prologue Hurricane, which follows, details in nauseatingly gruesome machismo, the beating administered by a group of bad police on a little "bad bwoy," setting the tone for a novel which grapples in unsentimental and often irreverent fashion with much of the historical ground covered by Lovelace in Salt. Roffey uses four watershed years in Trini modern history as her structure: she begins in 2006, the year the Soca Warriors took on the world, with the same hubris we are now hearing from Manning ("We're not the best in the world...yet").
Then readers are taken back, first to 1956, when entirely uncoincidentally the book's protagonists, expat couple English George Harwood and his French wife Sabine, arrive in Trinidad within weeks of Eric Williams' launching the PNM. The third section is set in 1963, in the afterglow of Independence, the halcyon days of "Massa Day Done" rhetoric and the final section occurs during the Black Power rebellion of 1970. The Age of Innocence in West Indian fiction is over. The romanticised community, whether in Selvon's early work or even Naipaul in his Miguel Street mode, has finally been subsumed into a gritty and appropriate Creole metafiction, apparent in all three works discussed in this review. Yet all three fictions are animated by a love of this crazy, wounded space.
Trinidad...the other woman
For George Harwood, husband of the white woman on the green bicycle, Trinidad becomes "the other woman": "he preferred the wild emerald hills, the brash forests, the riotous and unpredictable landscape of Trinidad to the prim hazy pastures of his own country England" (p51). Roffey captures Trini irreverence perfectly, not only making an epistolary affair between Eric Williams and Sabine a central narrative and thematic thread but introducing him, Brian Lara, Mighty Sparrow and even Patrick "the supreme leader" Manning as cameo characters.
There will be catharsis for some, reading the section where George, in his capacity as Guardian reporter, interviews Manning and the simmering racial tensions embedded in this society spill out onto the page. Manning echoes the words of Williams dismissing his hostile and drunk interviewer: "We've all seen your type. White man in the West Indies. Second-rate, eh? Never management material in the UK. Stayed here too long eh? Too long in the sun. Drank too much rum. Came here years ago to build and take. Take, take, Take... You are the past and you can stick your critique of my government, elected by the people, for the people, up your pathetic white arse." (p166).
Ras Levi I
The writer formerly
known as Simon Lee
Book launch
Monique Roffey's 'The White Woman on the Green Bicycle' will be launched on Friday at the Readers Bookshop in St James.
