Although the main characters in her five novels are of Chinese ancestry, Jan Lowe Shinebourne, is writing about a Guyanese reality, a Guyanese experience/evolution, a Guyanese sensibility of race and class conflicts, miscegenation, internal and external migration not unlike Roy Heath’s treatment of the urban black reality, not unlike Christopher Nicole’s treatment of the elite white reality, not unlike Sasenarine Persaud’s treatment of the Indian reality, or not unlike Basil Rodrigues’ treatment of the Indigenous sensibility, the ancestors of those peopling our literature having all come to this land by way of the Bering Strait or by way of ships, evolving into a Guyanese sensibility. Shinebourne has taken umbrage with labels depicting her writing as focusing on the Chinese sensibility only because she was born part Chinese.
But it is useful to take into account other parts** of her sensibility/identity – she is also part Indian, born and grew up on a sugar plantation during the colonial days when society was divided by class and race and her early novels focused on ‘the effects of colonialism on Guyana’.
Her first novel, Timepiece, was a first step in this direction, in exploring this theme. In Timepiece, she writes about a young woman, Sandra Yansen, who has grown up in a rural village where she felt rooted in her rural community which she loves. When she leaves school, she moves to the capital Georgetown. In Georgetown, she feels uprooted and adrift because she has no friends and family there. She does not like the cynicism in people she meets. They have no sense of community, they are not strongly connected to each other like the people in her village, and their relationships are casual and shallow. She cannot root herself in Georgetown. She meets a young man she likes who tells her that Georgetown is dominated by class; his father has suffered because of it. They try but fail to make a strong connection to each other and when he visits her village, he realises they are not compatible. It is a period when people are beginning to emigrate, to escape the political, social and economic instability that is a consequence of the political upheavals the country has been through, which are only hinted at in the novel. All the young people she has met in Georgetown are emigrating but the end of the novel indicates she has no plans to leave, it ends with her strong sense of the unchanging strengths of the rural community she is from.
In her second novel, The Last English Plantation, Shinebourne sets her story in 1956 when the political fractures of the 1960s began to show. This time, she chooses a much younger female protagonist, a 12 year old, June Lehall, as she prepares to venture out of her rural community to go to an urban secondary school. Like Sandra Yansen in Timepiece, she also experiences the culture shock of confronting the intense race and class conflicts that colonialism bred in the country. We see June enter school and getting swept up in the race and class conflicts between her classmates.
Shinebourne’s third novel Chinese Women, deals more openly with the race and class conflict created by colonialism which the narrator, Albert Aziz, a young Muslim Indian, has had to fight against all his life from when he grew up, the son of an Indian overseer, living in the exclusive living quarters among the white expatriates.. He describes how racial segregation and prejudice was maintained by the expatriate overseers to keep non-whites in their place on the sugar estate. It was a form of apartheid that he feels caused all his suffering So racialised was this system, he has internalised it so deeply he can only see people in racial terms of superiority and inferiority. He falls in love with two Chinese women who he idealises in terms of their race. He believes that Chinese people are better by virtue of being Chinese especially the Chinese girl he meets at school, Alice Wong. He falls in love with her and long after they leave school and he has emigrated to Canada, he continues to carry a torch for her and at the age of 60, he tracks her down to England to propose to her, but she rejects him. The colonial system of a kind of racial apartheid in British Guiana was so extreme and had such a profound impact on the young Muslim, he can only see people’s worth and his in terms of race and in the end, living in a post 9/11 world, he identifies with the Muslim cause and finally turns against the developed First World which he views as the creation of the imperialism and colonialism that cursed his early life growing up on a colonial sugar estate in British Guiana.For Shinebourne, Albert Aziz stands for what happened to Guyana, when it became negatively racialized and stratified.
Shineboune’s fourth novel, The Last Ship, portrays life on a rural colonial sugar estate, this time, in the context of the arrival of Chinese indentured workers. She portrays the arrival of a first generation Chinese woman, Clarice Chung who at the age of 5, travels from Hong Kong to British Guiana on the last ship to bring the Chinese to the colony. The novel takes us through her life until she dies when she is 65 on the sugar estate where she eventually settled and raised three generations of her family. This novel is not just about Chinese people, it is about the struggle of three generations of a family to find a secure footing in Guyana on a sugar estate, and the price they paid for it, especially the women who struggle to rise above the hardship and humiliation of Indentureship and racism in colonial British Guiana. Clarice Chung is a fiercely strong and ambitious woman who exerts her influence mercilessly over her family. Her female descendants find it difficult to follow her example about which they are ambivalent, especially her granddaughter, Joan Wong, who fights against her legacy and tries to escape from it by fleeing to England where she settles down.
The Starapple Tree is Shinebourne’s fifth novel ( soon to be out). It is about an English priest, Father John Martin, who goes to British Guiana in 1964, to become a vicar at Canefield, a remote sugar estate in Berbice. He is a northerner, from Lancashire, an earthy, plain-spoken man and a deeply committed priest but he arrives at a very difficult time in the country’s history. The country, once a British colony, has embraced socialism and is turning its back on Britain and its colonial influence. The British are leaving and the infrastructure they created is collapsing. Father John is not fully aware of the implications of this for his mission. In this sense, he is an innocent abroad. He has come to Canefield to promote Christian love and community but discovers that the population is partly Hindu Indian and African whose preference is for ecstatic religions with its roots in African dance traditions. They present him with difficult challenges he struggles to overcome. The best reception he gets is from a group of boys who like to visit him by climbing up the starapple tree that grows against his veranda. He struggles to find friendship and acceptance in the wider community and eventually, this leads to misunderstanding and disaster for him when they seem to reject him, and cause him to return to England with a sense of failure and disappointment.
And there is more flowing from her pen….
*The above information supplied by Shinebourne.
**Shinebourne won the Guyana Prize for Literature in its inaugural year, 1987. All her novels are set in Guyana. She is also a writer of short fiction. Her other book is ‘The Godmother and Other Stories’. While in Guyana, she was a part of a rich literary tradition that included a magazine, ‘Expression’, many libraries, many bookstores, and other writers/enablers like Brian Chan, John Agard, Mark McWatt, Terence Roberts, Milton Drepaul, N. D. Williams, Victor Ramraj.
(Guyana Times Sunday Magazine)
