by Petamber Persaud
Sugar in Guyana is writing another chapter in its history, another sordid chapter but hopefully not the final chapter nor a chapter in finality in its bitter sweet history. For almost all of its two hundred years history, sugar was a dominant factor in the social, economic and political arenas of this country. Now sugar is a grave concern for all, as per Martin Carter all are involved! all are consumed! Historians, academics and commentators have adumbrated the basic facts. The creative writers are filling in the gaps. Here are some novels, dated from 1877 to present, speaking to the issue.
Lutchmee and Dilloo by John Edward Jenkins, 1877.
‘Begun in India, Dilloo and Hunoomaun’s rivalry over Dilloo’s wife, Lutchmee, is continued on a sugar estate in Guyana, where it leads to the planning of an armed rebellion among the indentured labourers and a tragic denouement.’ This novel published in 1877 sets a number of landmarks, chief among those landmarks was the fact that for the first time in English literature ‘coolies’ were made a subject for fiction. Jenkins, in the preface, admitted ‘the field is a new one for fiction, but human nature still bears out the wisdom of the poet who declared that it does not change with clime’.
The Counting House by David Dabydeen, 2005
Set in the early nineteenth century The Counting House follows the lives of Rohini and Vidia, a young married couple struggling for survival in a small, caste-ridden Indian village who are seduced by the recruiter’s talk of easy work and plentiful land if they sign up as indentured labourers to go to British Guiana… There, however, they discover a harsh fate as ‘bound coolies’ in a country barely emerging from the savage brutalities of slavery. Having abandoned their families and a country that seems increasingly like a paradise, they must come to terms with their problematic encounters with an Afro-Guyanese population hostile to immigrant labour, with rebels such as Kampta who has made an early abandonment of Indian village culture, and confront the truths of their uprooted condition. (PTP**)
Those that be in Bondage by ARF Webber, 1917
Set in Guyana, Tobago and Trinidad between 1890 and 1913, it traces two generations of the Walton family wherein the protagonist always seems to be on the run – he runs from Guyana to Tobago, from Tobago to Trinidad and back to Guyana. And the book ends with him contemplating running to London after it was suggested that he was responsible for the destruction by fire of the Brickdam Cathedral. The ‘run’ was designed to focus on the issue of various types of bondage.
The story opens on a sugar plantation in Guyana where the brother-in-law John James Walton, Edwin Hamilton, marries Bibi – ‘that smooth-skinned, bare-toed East Indian young lady’. The union produces a daughter, Marjorie, ‘and the rest of the text is taken up with the romantic love that develops between Harold Walton and Marjorie on the idyllic island of Tobago’. Harold eventually becomes a priest but had to free himself of that yoke when he becomes romantically involved with Marjorie.
The Mudheads by Jack Bayley, 1990
‘The main events in The Mudheads occur between 1936 and 1938, largely in Georgetown, in colonial Guyana, although some events spread further out to sugar estates as far away as Springlands, in the county of Berbice. At the beginning of the novel, the twenty-two-year-old narrator, Allan Miller returns home to his native Guyana after studies in England. As son of the Assistant Colonial Secretary, Miller belongs an elite corps of Guyanese – people of European (chiefly British) descent who serve as government officials like his father, professionals, businessmen and administrative personnel on the sugar estates [this is] probably the most reliable fictional account that we have of the role of sugar in the history of European exploitation, in Guyana and the Caribbean (Frank Birbalsingh).
Drums of my Flesh by Cyril Dabydeen, 2005
Boyo, a seven/eight boy, growing up in a sugar plantation setting in British Guiana, a country about to become an independent state, traumatised by racial friction and labour unrest… escapes into flights of imagination with frequent and swift changes in scene, tone and rhythm, in order to deal with trauma.
The Last English Plantation by Jan Lowe Shinebourne, 1988
June has to confront her mixed Indian-Chinese background in a situation of heightened racial tensions, the loss of her former friends when she wins a scholarship to the local high school, the upheaval of the industrial struggle on the sugar estate where she lives, and the arrival of British troops as Guyana explodes into political turmoil. (PTP)
Guyana Boy by Peter Kempadoo, 1960
The 1940s British Guiana, sugar estate life is still ‘too slavish’. Under the iron rule of the white manager and with work practices little changed since the days of slavery and indenture, the workers’ children are expected to follow their parents into a life of unremitting toil. This, though, is not to be the fate of Lilboy. His access to education, limited though it is, takes him inexorably away from the world of his parent. (PTP)
*Title borrowed from the novel of the same name by Cynthia McLeod
** PTP – Peepal Tree Press
Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com (Guyana Times Sunday Magazine)
