'Membering Read online

  The episode in the British Bahamas on that sunny, humid September morning almost dampened my spirit about continuing to Canada to go to university, to study economics and political science. It was, nevertheless, a stain; a spot, similar to the dot of shit that a pigeon drops on your freshly laundered white shirt. You remove it with a Kleenex, or you shake it off, or in disgust, you flick it off with your finger.

  The stain disappears later the same morning, either under the sink or because it is by nature not an enduring assault of nature. I would encounter and experience many more blemishes to my clothes, now, in the fifty years I have been on this journey, which I am deliberately narrating backwards.

  This backwards journey in the narrating of this ’membering, this remembrance, is a lesson I learned from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and which considers how language, in this case, English, the only language I know, is at present of profound interest, when used in a non-traditional manner. I have used this language in The Polished Hoe, and I call it many things, but the most precise definition I have given it is contained in a booklet published by the Giller Prize Foundation, celebrating the tenth anniversary of this literary prize. In that review of the literary problems I faced in the writing of The Polished Hoe in 2002, my main concern was to find a language, or to more strictly use the language I already knew, in such a way that it became, in my manipulation of it, a “new” language. And to explain the result of this experiment, I said that I intended to “creolize Oxford English.”

  What I meant by that was that I wanted to show, through the narrative of the novel’s heroine, Mary-Mathilda, her deliberate claim of ownership of the English language, ironically and coincidentally, the language of her own colonization. But I feel that English has been used so unrelentingly to describe Mary-Mathilda, in ways that were more derogatory than complimenting, that as the object of that narrative she has at least an equal right in deciding what kind of descriptive language ought to be used to describe her life. She has a claim to that language. And with no feeling of inferiority that seems to have been in the minds of French-speaking, French-colonized African poets who invented the literary term “Negritude.” But Negritude was nothing more than the “creolization” of French, which in turn was approved by the French Academy. It seems as if they were asking the French Academy for permission to use the language of their colonization, whereas, like Mary-Mathilda, they should have claimed ownership of the French language, and should have used the language as a weapon, as the justification of their anger against such a system of colonialism.

  Writing about Mary-Mathilda has released from within me a literary and cultural anger against Europe, so much so that I am disposed to taking a second look at the Europeanization of my thoughts, percolated like coffee through the mechanism of English Colonialism. It is not only Mary-Mathilda who rejects European supremacy — so-called! — as it manifests itself in culture, in diplomacy and in art, but as the creator of the portrayal of her character. But getting back to Chaucer, and the advice he gives in constructing narrative — narrative in fiction and narrative in autobiography, although ’Membering is not autobiography. It is not intended to be. Nor is it biography. It is memoir.

  I am controlling, through choice and selection, the things about myself that would become public knowledge the moment you have taken this book from the shelf or from the table in a bookstore.

  It is a Friday morning on Shuter Street, in 2004, and there is mist and white long-beaked birds whose names I never learned to remember, and pigeons struggling with the white unknown birds for bits of bread thrown on the grass by a man who drives a limousine. This man parks the automobile illegally, thinking that a traffic cop would not bother him as he is performing this human act of kindness to birds who cannot use words and tell him thanks for his startling generosity. And to show his appreciation, the limousine driver drops the two large white plastic bags on the ground, in the gutter, and they blow up and down the gutter, and add to the garbage that the homeless men contribute to, dropping paper cups, pizza shells eaten down to the rim and crust, condoms whose lifespan is as short as their pleasure in the dark back alley behind the townhouses built in the years and architecture of former graciousness — Georgian and Victorian ages — when this dalliance with sex was certainly not tolerated; was not the done thing. But the man driving the limousine does not look back, and the white plastic bags that contained the late breakfast that the pigeons and the white birds that live in lakes, picked over in a multicultural accommodation with the white-feathered cranes … sea gulls!… (remembering their names) … men with grocery carts but with no intention and hope of going and coming from Loblaws or Dominion or the No Frills grocery stores; men with bundles hoping for someone, limousine driver or traffic cop, to bring some slices of hardened white bread and throw them to relieve their homelessness and hunger … this happens every morning, not only on Fridays.

  On other Fridays, in the strangulating humidity that drains all energy and intellectual alertness from the body, and which seems purposeful as if it is inflicted upon us boys at Combermere School, in the slow-paced afternoons, we came into adolescence disguised thinly as manhood; and we faced the first frightening demands and the meaning of this tricky growing up circumscribed by strict discipline. Combermere School trained us to enter the teaching profession at elementary level; and as middle-ranked civil servants; sanitary inspectors, and we took this declaration of manhood, as it was imposed upon us, not in our stride as more egoistical young men would declare our daily escape from mother and father, household, and coterie of friends, not to mention our Latin master, our French master and the master who was a captain in the Cadet Corps — to say nothing of the Scout Troop leader, the 3rd Barbados Scouts … but we accepted this singling out by Latin master, Cadet Captain, Scout Troop leader, as the privilege that rightfully was ours, being “Cawmere boys” who “could smell our pee, and see it foaming while we peed,” becoming men in the process, men who would in short time be leaders in the Island. We were being trained to be leaders. Either as test cricketers, as barristers-at-law, doctors, politicians, reverends in the Anglican Church, secondary school teachers just like our own Latin and French masters … or, we might become senior sanitary inspectors looking into closet pits and stagnant water collected in pools around chattel house, after the rains, looking for “larvees,” carrying out these tests with a white enamel ladle with a long handle, making it look like a soup spoon for Gulliver, or Robinson Crusoe, or for the one-eyed giant.

  We picked our models from amongst our masters. The term “mentor” had not entered our puny vocabulary, and even if it had, we would not, being of a different culture and myth from Americans who invented this term, we would not have understood what it really meant, when it was used in the context of North American foreign culture. “Mentor” was a clumsy word, that had no meaning to us. We chose “example” instead. My mother never tired of telling me, “Boy! Take a’ example from Mr. Smith. And grow up to be a teacher like him. You hear me?” At other times, when she had just left the surgery of her doctor, Dr. Massiah, who would in turn become my doctor, searching my body for mumps, appendicitis, problems with groins, colds and coughs that lingered too long for his liking, and testing to see if I had “pulled” muscles from too much running, my mother would change her mind and shake her finger in my face, and say, “Boy, take the example from Dr. Massiah. And you grow up to be a doctor like him. You hear me?”

  But on those Friday afternoons, ambition did not spread its wings to embrace the study of medicine. We all wanted to be masters like our teachers. Their life appeared to be so enjoyable. All they had to do was learn the lessons set, by heart, and sit and hear boys repeat them by rote. And they had almost three months’ vacation a year!

  We boys listened to their voices coming from the Masters’ Room. Noisy and sometimes boisterous, these men, now lordly in the Masters’ Room, had come through the same alleys and backyards as us Fifth Formers; and had climbed that same ladder o
f ambition, had become the “examples” that mothers swore by; and these same men who had first introduced us through experiment and “example,” to try our hands at “running the school,” while they gloried in their absence playing dominoes or bridge on Friday lazy afternoons, who had put us in charge of discipline, laid down in laws of no talking, “keeping silence,” making certain that the level of noise and vulgarities and mild delinquency, the slamming of the lids of our desks. The desks were arranged individually, “one desk per boy: one boy per desk,” from one to thirty-one, in three rows. We called the desks “desses.” These desks bore the slight, one-line histories of our ancestry: the names of fathers and uncles, older brothers, distant cousins and claimed cousins, when he was an important man like a barrister-at-law, or a cricketer; and we gouged these histories into the wood that was sometimes too tough to receive the gouge of letter, or initial cut into it, by razor blade, pen knife, or piece of broken bottle. With this love of the annals, we wanted to herald forever, to bear the dignity forever, and to show forever the proof of this patrimony, to all the generations to come.

  We indulged in games, shouting in imitation of the voices and antics and eccentricities of our masters. We were the new leaders: boys being turned into men. We knew that each of us would be in the vanguard to lead the Island, a Crown Colony into independence, would be the constitutional lawyer to trade intricacies with the colonizing English up in Westminster, would be the permanent secretary to guide the files in the right direction to keep their secrets confidential, would be the headmaster to guide the coming generation following our “example.” Or, with that choice and cockiness of ambition, could, if we wanted to, become the most notorious murderer, thief, criminal, gambler throwing dice under a tamarind tree, in any neighbourhood; or be a seaman, or stoking furnaces in a boiler room on a merchant ship, roaring like the fires of hell, but making “good money” from it; or, going to America and Panama; and becoming a stowaway when faced with the majesty and promise of the Statue of Liberty.

  Our possibilities began at the top of the scaffold of ambitiousness. And these possibilities swarmed over each step in the ladder of social and moral decorum in the Island.

  The Island is the Island of Barbados. A Crown Colony. “Bimshire.” Little England.

  The irony in the last two names, “Bimshire” and “Little England,” stamped us, for life, and made us act like black Englishmen: in our upbringing, in our attitude towards one another, and toward other West Indians. And other West Indians smiled with amusement and with a tinge of taunt, to our face, called us “little black Englishmen”; and behind our back, “black bastards suffering with a’ inferiority complex.” But we had the education. And the literacy measured in the numbers, 99.9 percent. Never mind the education was placed in a syllabus patterned, patented and exported from the English public school system. Latin and Greek, and ancient history and mathematics and religious knowledge and English literature, with no regard for American literature … (“What is that?”) … and less regard for the Spanish language, whose tongue surrounded us just like the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean; and none at all for French. The Battle of Trafalgar was memorized; and we fought that battle over and over, each morning as we passed the magnificent statue in green bronze of Lord Horatio Nelson, making him look as if his face was breaking out in some West Indian disease. Yes, the French language was not for us. Our tongues were too heavy from drink and with glory. It seemed as if Lord Nelson’s words, “England expects every man to do his duty,” were his avowal to us not to learn the French language. We were English. British. Britannia ruled the waves. This was our virtue. And it became, through our indoctrination, our ideological and moral liability. We were loved and disliked in equal proportion of intensity, by other West Indians, because of these two “virtues.”

  Especially were we despised by Jamaicans and Trinidadians.

  Combermere School for Boys, beloved by us, was in 1948 situated in the crowded business section on Roebuck Street, in Bridgetown, the capital, where small- and medium-sized merchants sold bags of sugar, flour, salt fish and rum in various strengths to sting the throat, where there were handcarts and donkey carts and mule carts; and there were people, women with bags and bundles on their heads padded with cloths that looked like turbans worn by Muslims and Indians, neither of which groups lived in Barbados in significant number in those days. Muslims and Indians, whom we lumped together as one race, came in droves in the sixties, piled one on top the other, animals and people, just like a city in India; and in the midst of this river of people, moving like water manouevring through the obstacles of stones in its path, along Roebuck Street, and Baxters Road, bustling with other fortune-making, fortune-telling, men and women swept over the land from Saint Lucia, from Saint Vincent, and Martinique and Montserrat.

  We changed “Saint” when referring to Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent, to “Sin,” to suggest suspicion of their “different ways” and our reservation about “small-island people.” But we especially fell in love with these beautiful, sweet-talking women who wore gold bangles and rings on almost every finger, and whose “patois” lulled us into indolent, slow-walking “mannish-boys” always looking to see the seam of the panties that marked their bodies, to catch the lucky glance of their breasts when they laughed, looking-back boys “smelling our pee.” So, we watched these “foreigner” women selling things and selling themselves, and the middle-class matrons who lived in the spacious, airy but dark apartments above the small-merchant stores, were more plentiful than the flies that buzzed over the uncovered cakes and coconut bread, rock cakes and coconut turnovers, in the cases that showed off these confectioneries, made from glass and wood, delicate as white coffins for children. But the flies got into the glass-cased cases, and travelled slowly over the barrel with chunks of pigs’ tails in them, and over the tastiest salted mackerel that could decorate a bowl of corn meal cou-cou, slobbered in steamed fresh okra, snapping in their green freshness. Corn meal cou-cou, eaten in the humid afternoons, with a mackerel sauce and with enough small tomatoes in the sauce … in this environment, in this place, in that Island of Barbados, we boys in the Fifth Form, 5-A, to be distinguished from 5-B (boys older and not so bright); from 5-C (boys who were not taught Latin, but had to settle for Spanish, regarded as a commercial language); and from 5-D (boys who were not expected to pass the Senior Cambridge School Certificate Examination, set in England, the Mother Country). We the 5-A boys, would one day run the affairs of the Island, as we ran the working of the entire school, on the Friday afternoons when the Masters were engrossed in their games of dominoes, and chess, and poker, and bridge, in the cool Masters’ Room freshened by the cross breeze — wind coming over the playing field, wind coming from the fish heads and mango peels in the gutters.

  “5-A boys, man! The A-form boys, man! I am not talking about 5-B! Or 5-C … and don’t mention 5-D, where they only learn Spanish! Spanish? Where in Barbados are you going to use Spanish when you finish school, when you matriculate? If, at all, you do matriculate? Are you thinking of going to Venezuela? Or, Brazil? … Or … Panama?”

  “Canada!”

  So, with this attitude of superiority, cultivated through the curriculum itself, we the 5-A boys, patterned like Siamese twins with the English public school system, changed our way of talking, of walking, of dressing, custom vouchsafed over generations, in neighbourhood and in ancestry, from birth and practised until the grave; adopted a new posture of sauntering and not walking, in the thickness of the afternoon humidity that clutched us around one o’clock, by the throat, as we endured this new education, like English boys in this imported English school called “Cawmere” by us. But in spite of our new status, we remained tied to the cries of the congested Roebuck Street and Baxters Road, close enough to the rawness and the stagnant gutters which flowed like tributaries of rivers filled with molten lead. Along Roebuck Street and Baxters Road we were exposed to the shouts of warring of bargains and demands for settling debts, and pleas
to enter into more debt; we were close enough that we could hear the details and the venom in the arguments, some of them using the logic we had just been taught about at Cawmere, but did not ourselves employ in our littler arguments. We could hear the victory of a man, a debtor most likely, as he exulted in his escape from the clutches of the money lender; or the police; and sometimes, in the gloominess of skies turning mauve with the threat of rain, while our teachers, lingered in the Masters’ Room, and were still playing rummy, and whist, and bridge, or were slamming dominoes, we in the classrooms liberated from their supervision, remained unattended, and in our freedom, instead of slamming the seeds of dominoes — it was forbidden to play games in classrooms — we slammed the lids of our wooden desks, instead; in a loud, destructive peal that was like thunder. And we did not even wonder at the stupidity of these clamouring desks.

  In the clap of a lid of a desk, similar in sharpness and noise, to the clap of thunder that announces rain or storm or hurricane, equal almost to the clap of victory in the slamming of the last domino seed that announces a “six-love,” we shouted in our illegal freedom and smug licence, as we noisily ate our “roly-poly” candies, left over from our lunch; or tried to hide and eat the leavings of a “bread-and-fish,” because we did not wish to share it with our best friend. A bread-and-fish, certainly with hot pepper sauce and perhaps a fresh leaf of lettuce, and cod fish cakes fried to a golden crispiness, in a freshly baked loaf, called a “salt bread,” this “bread-and-fish” is a more substantial and sophisticated lunch for a boy than a fish sandwich sold in Toronto.

  So, as we ate our “bread-and-fish” in the classroom, knowing it was prohibited; and as we slammed the lids of our “desses,” we ignored what was happening around us. We were privileged boys. We knew and we felt that we were assured a place of importance in status, in job and in calling, in the society that was being built around us. And the builders of this society were Barbadians like ourselves, many of whom were black like us.