We were now on the other side of the theatre. Half the width of the plaza away, the flashing lights of cars and other traffic marked the street on the edge of the neighbourhood where Paul lived. The plaza was darker. The skater offered me his hand. I took it, in the spirit of our game, and this time, the force of the electric shock almost lifted me off the ground.
Even as I felt that unexpected jolt I heard Peggy scream. Dazed, I turned and saw her struggling, no longer screaming, a gloved hand over her mouth. I started towards her and, out of the corner of an eye, saw a hand-held skate coming towards the side of my head. I fell to the ground, and caught a glimpse of a skated foot just before my head seemed to explode. I did not see the next blow. The world seemed to have fallen about my head and to have annihilated me.
*
One night, much, much later, on my bed in my single room in the hospital, I felt suddenly that I was alive again. I remembered Peggy telling me that her book had won the National Book Award. I saw clearly that she was not crying as she told me so. Every memory from the jumbled, unfocused period that preceded this moment of lucidity was suddenly clear and ordered and logical again. Each memory was separate and I did not confuse one with another. I saw Peggy crying and knew that it was because she was telling me she could not honourably marry me, not after what had happened. And I knew she had told me this after she told me that her father was dead. I could figure now that she must have thought that the news of her father’s death would give me something to want to live for. I heard Selwyn tell me again, this time clearly and without background noise of any kind in my head, as I forced myself to listen to what he said, that I was very lucky to be alive. Lying alone now in my bed, I contradicted him as I had wanted to then, but had felt too tired at the time to do so.
My head began to ache. I put off calling the nurse as she had instructed me to do. I remembered Frederick. It was his death that had screamed out at me from the papers when Peggy and I were walking home after the party. Paul, wanting to encourage me to fight for my life, had stressed how much Frederick had fought for his. When they found his body next to his wallet, empty except for the pictures he had shown us, and next to the split tire he had stopped to change, his clothes were torn and there were bits of flesh and clotted blood beneath his fingernails.
I wanted them killed, those murderers, whoever they were. And I wanted killed, too, those who had abandoned them like dogs to become wild and dangerous. And it all seemed so absurd that I began to cry.
The nurse came in. She wanted to comfort and encourage me. She told me I shouldn’t cry and reminded me of how much progress I had made. She said that I should celebrate instead. I was out of danger now. She told me I was safe.
I didn’t contradict her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Garth St Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia in 1931. During the earlier 1950s, he was part of a group of artists in St Lucia including Roderick and Derek Walcott and the artist Dunstan St Omer. In 1956 he went to study French and Spanish at UWI in Jamaica. During the 1960s he travelled widely, including years spent teaching in Ghana. His first publication, the novella, Syrop, appeared in 1964, followed by A Room on the Hill (1968), Shades of Grey (1968), Nor Any Country (1969) and J—, Black Bam and the Masqueraders in 1972. In the 1970s he moved to the USA, where he completed a doctoral thesis at Princeton University in 1975. Until his retirement as Emeritus Professor, he taught at the University of Santa Barbara in California. The writing of Prisnms (Prisons/Prisms) began at some point in the mid 1970s, went through a number of substantial structural revisions in the 1980s, to take the form it is currently published in by c. 1990, though Garth St Omer’s continuing engagement with the novel is shown by his making of a significant number of textual revisions after the novel was accepted by Peepal Tree in 2014.
ALSO BY GARTH ST OMER
A Room on the Hill
ISBN: 9781845230937; pp. 162; pub. 2012
A Room on the Hill is a devastating portrayal of an island society (much resembling St Lucia in the early 1950s) suffocating in its smallness, its colonial hierarchies of race and class and firmly in the grip of a then reactionary Catholic church – which insisted, for instance, on different school uniforms for the children of the married and unmarried, and three grades of funeral. The novel focuses on a small circle of the educated middle class, whose response to colonial society ranges from acquiescence, finding cynical self-advantage in the new anti-colonial politics, suicidal despair and various shades of rebellion. Its astringent realism in questioning the direction of West Indian nationhood is finely balanced by metaphors of as yet untapped potential.
At the heart of the novel are two characters, John Lestrade, who feels trapped between his desire to lead an authentic life and his despair that this may be impossible on his island, and Anne-Marie D’aubain, who unremarked by the other characters, shows the possibility of a courageous existential revolt against the absurdity of circumstance.
First published in 1968, St Omer’s novel is distinguished by its sensitivity to issues of gender, its elegant concision and, in its existential questioning, its intensive focus on the inner person. If the world it describes has gone, A Room on the Hill lives on as a major attempt to bring modernity to the aesthetics of the Caribbean novel.
Shades of Grey
ISBN: 9781845230920; pp. 194; pub. 2013
As Stephenson comes closer to his girlfriend Thea, with her easy talk of three generations in her family, he has to acknowledge that his past is a blank. He has never known his father, not lived with his mother, and cannot remember what his grandparents looked like. He knows, too, that his failure to come clean about a disreputable episode in his life threatens their relationship. The Lights on the Hill, the first of two interdependent short novels in Shades of Grey, is a moving and inward portrait of a man, blown along by circumstance, trying in his halting way to construct his own story.
Another Place, Another Time goes back to the character of Derek Charles, who appears as a returning islander in St Omer’s first novel, A Room on the Hill. Here, almost a decade earlier, St Omer explores the circumstances in which the scholarship boy makes the decision to separate himself from his family and friends and conclude that “He had no cause nor any country now other than himself.” As in all St Omer’s fiction, there is a sharp focus on the inequalities of gender, and a compassionate but unwavering judgement of the failings of his male characters.
Nor Any Country
ISBN: 9781845232291; pp. 126; pub. 2013
Education has taken Peter Breville away from his native St Lucia for the past eight years. Now, appointed to a university post in Jamaica, he decides he must see his family on his way from England. There is his mother, whom he loves, his father with whom he has never got on, and his brother, with whom boyhood competition turned sour. And there is Phyllis, his wife, who, though he has not once contacted her since he left, has waited patiently for his return, determined to be a wife to him. Once a desirable catch for a black boy because of her light brownness, Phyllis is now divided from Peter through his access to education and metropolitan experience.
In the week he spends with his family and meeting old friends, he discovers a St Lucia that, in the early 1960s, is on the point of emerging into the modern capitalist world, but where the disparities between the new middle class and the impoverished black majority has become ever wider. In the midst of this, he must decide what he owes Phyllis.
Nor Any Country, first published in 1968, is a profound and elegantly written exploration of the complexities of individual moral choice and an acutely insightful study of a society in the process of change.
J—, Black Bam and the Masqueraders
ISBN: 9781845232436; pp. 128; pub. 2015
This is the final instalment in a quartet of novels that explores the lives of the small St Lucian middle class in the 1960s. In it the reader re-encounters the brothers, Peter and Paul Breville. Peter, after years abroad, has resumed his marriage with his long abandone
d wife Phyllis (the subject of Nor Any Country), and is now working as a lecturer in Jamaica. His brother Paul remains in St Lucia, disgraced and sacked from professional employment in a society still dominated by a censorious Catholic church, by his refusal to marry his pregnant girlfriend. He has acquired a reputation for madness, though whether this is a contrived mask or an actual breakdown is left uncertain.
J—, Black Bam and the Masqueraders intercuts Paul’s confessional letters to Peter about his destructive relationship with the girl he abandons with the narrative of Peter’s marital relationship with Phyllis, his affairs and descent into despair, drunkenness and domestic violence. In the contrast between Paul’s self-lacerating honesty and Peter’s self-deceptions, St Omer offers a bracingly bleak portrayal of a middle class beset with hypocrisies over race, sexism and class privilege. If sanity is at some level marked by truthful perceptions, St Omer invites us to question which of the brothers is actually sane. It is also a novel where St Omer portrays a black woman quite literally fighting back.
There is no Caribbean novelist who exposes the realities behind the masks people wear or the gaps between postcolonial rhetoric and the actuality of minds that remain deeply colonised with greater economy or elegance. Though first published in 1972, St Omer’s novel has lost none of its uncomfortable truth-telling power.
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