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28th
January 2012
The World
of Anderson Reynolds
Presented in celebration
of Nobel Laureate Week
Born
and raised in Vieux Fort, the southernmost town
on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, home to
Nobel Laureates, Derek Walcott and Sir Arthur
Lewis, Anderson Reynolds who spent the second
twenty years of his life in America attending
college and then working in corporate America,
has, since his return home, quickly become one
of the country’s most prolific and significant
writers.
In the world of Anderson Reynolds, be it his
fictional or nonfictional world, a great drama
unfolds in which history, geography, nature,
culture, the supernatural, and socioeconomic
factors all combine to seal the fate of his
characters. In this crucible of a world, readers
are provided with deep insights into where St.
Lucians come from, who they are as a people,
and how they became who they are.
Death By Fire
Anderson Reynolds first book, the novel Death
by Fire (2001), was the winner of the 2001 M&C
Main Literature Prize. Against the backdrop
of slavery, indentureship, catastrophic landslides,
devastating fires, racial animosities, occupational
hazards, and the fictional “gods of the
land” reaping havoc on the land and its
people, Death by Fire presents a story about
two mothers, Felina and Christine, and their
sons, Robert and Trevor.
In interviews, the author has revealed that
the writing of Death by Fire was a ploy to present
as much St. Lucian history and culture as possible,
but in an entertaining and dramatic fashion.
Apparently, this was achieved by intertwining
the story with the history and culture of St.
Lucia in a non-chronological manner.
In Death by Fire, Felina’s childhood is
plagued by disaster, yet as a teenager she is
betrayed by her first love for whom she is pregnant
with Robert. Unable to come to terms with love
betrayed, she transfers the hatred meant for
her absent lover onto her son.
On the other hand, Christine, who is said to
be blessed with an unsurpassed beauty, refuses
to allow her misfortunes to interfere with her
carefree and glamorous life in which she has
little time for her son, Trevor. The two women’s
paths rarely crossed, but their sons become
bosom friends, and as it turned out parental
neglect produced nearly the same fate as parental
hatred.
As the book follows the boys’ lives of
misdemeanor, rape and murder, the question is
posed what causes such social decay or what
leads to a life of crime? Is it fate, obeah,
dysfunctional families, poverty, governmental
neglect, or the confluence of history, nature,
culture and manmade disasters? As such, Death
by Fire presents “a profound statement
on the nature of fate and the forces that shape
society.”
The Struggle For Survival
Anderson Reynolds second book, The Struggle
For Survival: an historical, political, and
socioeconomic perspective of St. Lucia, can
be regarded as creative nonfiction. In fact,
as played out in the book, the author has admitted
that his goal was to “write history that
reads like a novel.” He also said that
when he was conducting research for Death by
Fire he was angered to discover that there were
books on St. Lucian history, yet such books
were not made available to him at primary and
secondary schools. Therefore, part of his motivation
for writing the Struggle For Survival was to
write the kind of book on St. Lucian history
that he would have loved to read as a teenager.
The book achieves the feel of a novel by employing
the narration of the 1993 banana farmers’
strike that culminated in the shooting death
of two striking farmers as the thread that knits
the book together while interjecting the striking
farmers’ narration with chapters on the
history and importance of the banana industry,
the history of the island (including political
history) from pre-slavery to modern times, the
manufacturing and tourism sectors, the socioeconomic
future of the island, and even a chapter on
the unintended negative consequences of the
banana industry.
One of the tenets of the book is that woe be
onto those who neglect or are ignorant of history.
Farmers, for example, thinking they were in
control of their fate, went on a strike that
ended in disaster. Yet, according to The Struggle
For Survival, if they had known or heeded their
history, they would have realized that “be
it the early demise of the Amerindians, the
establishment of sugar as the dominant crop
in the 18th century, the importation of Africans
for slave labor, the subsequent abolition of
slavery in the 19th century, the importation
of inden¬tured labor as a substitute for
slave labor, the transfor¬mation of Castries
into a coal refueling station, or the establishment
of military bases in the 20th century, or even
the initial establishment of the banana industry
in St. Lucia, most of the inhabitants of the
island never had a say in any of the major events
that have determined the very nature and composition
of their island. But refusing to take a page
from history, farmers went on a strike and history
repeated itself.” Again Anderson Reynolds
great fascination with history and its power
to explain or condition human drama comes through.
Yet, on another level, by going beyond the tragedy
of the strike and delving into the island’s
history, farmers’ struggles against droughts,
hurricanes, falling prices, corrupt institutions,
and multinational corporations the book is presented
as a microcosm of, or metaphor for, the struggles
of a people against slavery, colonialism, imperialism,
and natural calamities. As such, The Struggle
for Survival can be viewed as a story about
the birth of a nation, and, by portrayal, the
birth of West Indian Civilization.
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The
Stall Keeper
Anderson Reynolds’ forthcoming novel,
The Stall Keeper, is set for the most part in
his hometown of Vieux Fort, and uses the American
World War II occupation of the town as backdrop.
Again, in this latest work, history and geography
combine to decide the fate of human drama. As
one of the largest stretches of flat, coastal
land on the island, the result of a geological
freak (a mudslide) of nature, Vieux Fort was
selected as the site of an American World War
II military base. Overnight the American presence
turned Vieux Fort into a boomtown with serious
housing shortages, prostitution gone amok, and
with money so easy to come by that some of the
town’s residents, calling themselves one-day
millionaires, took to lighting their cigarettes
with dollar bills and making sure that all money
made in a day was spent that same day.
But the good times were short-lived, lasting
only eighteen months, and coming to an abrupt
end when, after the war, the Americans packed
up and left, following which Vieux Fort fell
into a state of despair and disintegration,
forcing a commentator to ask: “After the
Americans, what?” Historians have posited
that the Americans inculcated a dependency syndrome
that Vieux Fortians have been unable to completely
shake off. Thus for the longest while it was
said that Vieux Fortians were just sitting around
as if waiting for the Americans to return and
bring back the good times.
Accordingly, in the novel, the odds are against
Vieux Fortians from making something of themselves.
“Even when one tried, when one scratched
and fought, when one gave it one’s all,
when it appeared that one was going to make
it, someone or a force beyond one’s control
would just come and snatch it all away. If it
wasn’t the French, it was the English;
if it wasn’t the English, it was slavery;
if it wasn’t slavery, it was the plantation
owners; if it wasn’t the plantation owners,
it was the Americans; if it wasn’t the
Americans, it was the government; if it wasn’t
the government, it was Castries folks; if it
wasn’t Castries folks, it was someone
putting obeah on them; and if it wasn’t
obeah, it was some fire or some hurricane or
some other act of God or of Satan or of both.
So why even try?”
To play out this drama the narration employs
the characters of Eugene and Ruben. Eugene,
who is a stall keeper, is described as “the
town’s most free-spirited and colorful
character, a woman living in a man’s body,
and a man living in a woman’s world.”
We see him overcoming his father’s physical
and verbal abuses, his mother’s premature
death, and ridicule from the community to rise
from a stall keeper selling street-side to owning
the most successful store in Vieux Fort, but
only for the store to completely burn down and
him returning to selling from a stall, never
to rise up again, as if fate had deemed that
a stall keeper was all he was meant to be and
that the store had been just a temporary escape.
The question then becomes, was Eugene’s
destruction the cause of an accidental fire,
or the work of obeah sent his way by jealous
competitors, or was there blight or a curse
on Vieux Fort so nothing good could come out
of there.
Ruben, we are told, is a favourite son, an intellectual,
a famous cricketer, the darling of Vieux Fort,
one of its most accomplished citizens, and a
staunch Roman Catholic. His downfall began when
he falls madly in love with Eunice, a staunch
Seventh Day Adventist with the gift of foretelling
the future. In order to marry Eunice, who would
not be unequally yoked, Ruben has no choice
but to forsake his Roman Catholic faith and
join the Seventh Adventist Church. But it turns
out, try as Ruben may, he cannot bring himself
to stop playing cricket on Saturdays and miss
his cricket matches. Observance of the Saturday
Sabbath, however, is the single most important
practice that separates Adventism from most
other faiths, so, understandably, the church
had no choice but to disfellowship Ruben for
continually breaking the Sabbath, and since
Eunice would not be unequally yoked, she in
turn had no choice but to break the engagement,
and so began Ruben’s downfall from the
most celebrated citizen of Vieux Fort to a wonmyé,
a drunkard, the island’s lowest ranked
citizen.
Again, the question is what forces were responsible
for Ruben’s downfall. If you were to ask
Father Pierre, the Roman Catholic priest, he
would answer that Ruben’s childhood deprivation
imbued him with an inferiority complex and a
loser mentality and so by choosing the Adventist
woman Ruben had subconsciously set himself up
for a downfall. If you were to ask most of the
town’s residents, they would answer that
this was the work of obeah for sure, and would
list many other examples of obeah at work to
prove their case. And if you were to ask Daddy
Mano, the town’s great humanitarian, he
would answer that it was because Ruben was born
in the wrong time, in the wrong town, and had
fallen in love with the wrong woman.
All three narrations present a world in which
the characters are victims of their circumstances.
History, geography, the supernatural, love denied
or love betrayed, parental neglect, adverse
socioeconomic conditions all come together to
seal the fate of individuals, communities, or
for that matter the fate of a whole nation or
a civilization. Is there any escape or any hope
of rising above circumstances of birth and geography?
Well, maybe. A hint of an answer is provided
in The Struggle for Survival, where the narrator
says, “But refusing to take a page from
history, farmers went on a strike and history
repeated itself.” So in the world of Anderson
Reynolds, knowledge and understanding of one’s
history and culture represent the only possible
means of escape from one’s fate. In other
words, “Man know thyself and do thyself
no harm.” But even so, there are no guarantees,
for in The Stall Keeper Ruben was well equipped
with a knowledge of his history and culture,
yet this did not prevent his downfall.
Please
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Discuss
Story
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