The Arts Forum

Jun 08, 2008 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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The Arts Forum is devoted to raising awareness of the literary, artistic and cultural legacies of Guyanese and the peoples of the Caribbean with whom we share a cultural and historical past. The intention is that readers will come to appreciate the issues raised in art and the profound role that the arts can play in the shaping of our perceptions and in the healing of the society of which we are a part.

Today’s column brings you the first part of an article by Professor Emeritus Kenneth Ramchand. It will be continued next week.

Professor Ramchand first introduced the study of West Indian Literature to the University of the West Indies after his seminal doctoral thesis, The West Indian Novel and its Background (1970).

Professor Ramchand is due to deliver the Roy Heath Memorial lecture initiated by The Arts Forum, in Guyana, at a date to be announced later.

INDIAN EPISODES FOR ARRIVAL DAY
Professor Emeritus Kenneth Ramchand

The present article is made up of eight inter-related ‘slides’ or episodes. Each episode illustrates a particular aspect of the Indian experience, mostly in Trinidad and Tobago. The episodes cover a period of over one hundred and fifty years and they are arranged in such a way as to bring out the theme of Indian arrival or coming of age and certain key issues related to this main topic. The inter-related episodes form a tableau of people of Indian origin in the process of re-making themselves and contributing to the making of Trinidad and Tobago.

The eight episodes are: Episode I: ‘Vashti Deen and The Ties that Bind’, the literary efforts of a woman sugarcane worker; Episode II: ‘The Returning Lawyer’, a speech of 1948 which touches upon Hindu-Muslim relations, the disunity among Trinidad Indians, and the cultural and social challenge facing people of Indian origin in Trinidad; Episode III: ‘Adrian Cola Rienzi and the Right to Vote’, the defeat of a scheme (an English Language test) to deprive the majority of Indians of universal adult suffrage (the vote) in 1943; Episode IV: ‘Bound-Coolie Radical’, fighting words from the 1890’s by an indentured Indian who wrote letters to the Editor of The Daily Chronicle of British Guiana ; Episode V: ‘No Turning Back’, a story about a young Indian woman seeking a place now that the Yankees have gone; Episode VI: ‘Kale Khan, the Shipwrecked Pathan’ (from a novel by Ismith Khan); Episode VII: ‘No House No Biswas: The Gloom of the New Indian Satirists’ (Shiva Naipaul and Neil Bissoondath); Episode VIII: ‘Mirror, Mirror: the Greatest of them All’ (Sir Vidia Naipaul).

EPISODE I: Vashti Deen and The Ties that Bind

This episode is based upon ‘The Signature’, a short story from a collection by Clyde Hosein entitled The Killing of Nelson John and Other Stories (1980) .The story yields up information about rural poverty, Indian family life and values including self-sacrifice just after indenture, and the cultural dilemmas faced by the early generations of Indians who want their children to be part of the new world, but know that this ambition and destiny entails separation and loss.

The working women of the Caribbean (African and Indian) have a tradition of economic independence and of combining effectively the world of work and the world of home and family. Such a one is a mother and an Indian working woman in this story who makes her mark upon the future. The story celebrates determination and pride, and shows a wonderful capacity for self-delight but its poignancy spreads as we glimpse the possibilities her circumstances will never allow her to discover or fulfil.

Vashti Deen is a labourer on a sugar estate. One day she goes to the Warden’s Office where she is called “ignorant coolie” by a recently-schooled clerk because she cannot sign her name on a government form and cannot put her ‘X’ in the right place. She comes home in tears, bruised by disrespect and grieving wordlessly, as is the way of gentle and powerless people. She is unable to put in words her outrage at the use of an alien yardstick to measure her worth as a person.

Her son who is telling the story understands her grievance: “Though she could not write, my mother spoke Bengali and knew the ancient world scriptures. She used to recite poetry to us, and while we did not understand the language she spoke, the sound of it was the most delicate and persuasive beauty”. It is one of the grossest sins of colonial discourse that it inscribes as languageless, cultureless, and subhuman people who were more culturally literate than many of the agents of colonialism (the ones who achieved nothing, built nothing, and created nothing in the West Indies).

Vashti Deen and her husband were “deeply steeped in the ways of the old country”, and held on to their Hindu life. The woman who recited poetry to her children had never made it, never dreamed of making it, to the schools in which English was taught, yet she had chosen the language of the coloniser for her boy-child. She had made sacrifices to get him a place among the readers and learners because she “did not think that the old language would help her children survive in the new ways of the modern world. She knew she had to choose the road to modernisation and in us had given up the old ways for everything English, which was the way of life.” (7-8)

Her Fourth Standard son decides that he will teach her to write. The wonder she feels as she discovers that she has the power of the written word in her hands, the humility with which she accepts the child as her teacher, and the dedication she brings to the task of learning just for the sake of learning are an education to the schoolboy: “Whenever my mother sat down to practice her signature her face became almost angelic. It lit up with a kind of softness; concentration and pride, I suppose.

She tried to sign her name like an old hand at it, effortlessly, and after a while she did, although her fingers were always smeared with ink. She would go over to the rainwater barrel to wash it off and start all over again. Practising her signature and counting became an obsession.”

After six months she astonishes shopkeeper and fish vendor with her arithmetical skills. Her now respectful husband stops being amused at her efforts. But she never put her signature to a government form or a school report. One fore day morning as she is completing her task, a cane stalk penetrates her heel and she bleeds to death in the field. A trail of blood told that she had tried to make her way back.

The young boy reports: “Until the following day, the day of the cremation, I wandered about the village clutching the piece of brown shopping bag paper my mother had left on the kitchen table before she left for the fields.”

The story is called ‘The Signature’ and the title is both literal and symbolic. In memory of the permanent mark his mother’s love and spirit have imprinted on his life, the man cherishes this piece of paper, “I still keep it in my wallet today, even after so many years have passed and I am exiled to a far country. I unfold that square of paper many times. I see the ink-stained, childish hand; Vashti Deen”.

Stories matter because they show us history, heroism and humane qualities through characters that seem alive to us; and because they place value upon the things we neglect in our quest for money, power and fame. Stories does not want us to forget the culture of the feelings, the way people open themselves up to one another and the way they learn to love and trust and have meaning for one another.

This delicate and moving story touches upon themes like education, language, and the issues faced by descendants of Indians and all the immigrant groups in our island: how do you accept change and the benefits of modernisation and still manage to hold on to elements of tradition and sensibility that are your offering to the new world you must belong to.

The full essay entitled INDIAN EPISODES FOR ARRIVAL DAY will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Arts Journal Volume 4 Numbers 1 & 2 to be released shortly.

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