Scott Witchbroom

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9931086-9-3
Verlag: Papillote Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Witchbroom is a visionary history of a Caribbean Spanish/French Creole family and an island over four centuries - to 20th-century independence. With an innovative tone and content, its carnival tales of crime and passion are told by the narrator Lavren, who is both male and female. First published in 1992, Witchbroom is a Caribbean classic. The following year it became a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, broadcast over eight nights and read by the author. It was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book. A pioneering work, it heralded a new generation of modernist Caribbean writers who, like Scott, broke away from a predominantly realist literary tradition; Witchbroom identifies more with magic realism. A richly entertaining and many layered read, its hermaphrodite narrator brings a contemporary flavour to the novel. The title Witchbroom refers to a fungus that attacks cocoa trees, and is also used as a metaphor for the decline of the island's plantocracy.

Lawrence Scott is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer from Trinidad & Tobago. He was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 2019. He was awarded a Lifetime Literary Award in 2012 by the National Library of Trinidad & Tobago for his significant contribution to the Literature of Trinidad & Tobago. His first novel, Witchbroom (1992) was read as a BBC Book at Bedtime, and republished by Papillote Press (2017). His most recent book, the collection of stories, Leaving by Plane Swimming Back Underwater, 2015, was longlisted for The Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2016, the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Association des Ecrivains de la Caraïbe from the Congrès des Ecrivains de la Caraïbe, Guadeloupe, 2017 and the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award, 2015. His other novels are Light Falling on Bamboo (2012), Night Calpyso (2004) and Aelred's Sin (1998). He lives in London and Trinidad.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scott, Lawrence

Leseproben

AN OVERTURE - FUGUES, FRAGMENTS OF TALE

THAT MORNING he noticed that the lime trees were dead. It was the same day that he found the small mountains of dust on the floor in front of the press in which his mother had neatly packed away the remaining things of his father’s life. The woodlice again. He remembered them as a child. Now that he had returned they were here again. The evidence of their work, the decay, as in the doors, which were now paper-thin. He could put his fingers through them, almost, like the thin pages of a book; folding them back, there were the same rooms, musty and damp. The rains were here again. He had returned in the month of August. ‘Rainy season, you come back rainy season,’ Antoinetta, his old nurse, his mother’s housekeeper, had said. ‘So you come back? Well, I still here. You find me where you leave me, keeping your mother house, Madam house.’

On these mornings there would be no Antoinetta.

He hardly saw anyone nowadays, particularly on days like these, when the rains had been hammering all night on the galvanize roof. The ravine beyond the savannah would be flooded. He was sure of that. Maybe even the river on the plain might have broken its banks and overflowed its bridge. The Indian boys who still came to cut the lawns like when his father was alive would be stranded in the villages along the ‘old road’. In the rainy season they came on brighter days to mow the lawns and keep back the wild growth of the alamanda from the gate to the yard. Long ago they would have spoken Hindi. ‘Salaam, baas, salaam.’ He could hear the ancestral strain. Other voices said, ‘Coolie people.’

The morning on which he noticed that the lime trees were dead and that woodlice had attacked his father’s press and the doors to the bedrooms, he discovered an old cracked artist’s portfolio. It belonged to his aunt. It had been tucked away under some of his mother’s old suitcases. As he flicked through the watercolours and sketches it seemed both an extraordinary discovery and something more than coincidence. That he should find these now! Was this to be part of the story?

What story? The story I had returned to this old family house to tell.

I had once started it in this fashion: neat, clipped and distanced, until after much more of that, which I beg your permission to omit, it seemed impossible for the story to hold; for me, or him or her - how did I see my alter ego? - to hold it at that distance or in sentences so always balanced like the prose of another land, the one we were taught in schools in order to write good compositions in our royal-blue exercise books with the picture of the king on the front in an oval frame and then when he died, the queen... it could not hold. Now neither king nor queen, but ibises, cocricos, and the red wound in the green of the forest which is the chaconia. It could not hold.

I chose Lavren, or did he choose me, did she choose me, or did we choose each other, or was he or she chosen for me out of the bric-a-brac of history? Maybe you can tell. Maybe you can decipher, divine whether it is tragic schizophrenia or miraculous coupling or something else I tell you here, at times confusing and fusing my pronouns. I allowed Lavren his fragments of tale, his fugues, his first tales. I allowed him his way of telling the story. Lavren tells these tales with the help of his beloved Marie Elena, his mother and muse, and with the help of black Josephine: cook, housekeeper, servant, nanny, nurse, doer of all tasks, comforter in the darkness and in the hot stillness of noon. She it is who speaks first.

‘Cric,’ she says, teaching Lavren to tell stories. Not once upon a time, in the olden days, in a fine castle, but like an African story-teller telling anancy stories, she invites him to listen and to respond. ‘Cric,’ she says.

‘Crac,’ he replies, eager for her story.

‘Cric,’ Lavren, storyteller himself now, says, breaking his story.

‘Crac.’ Lavren hears you respond to his story and ask for more.

This was no ordinary place. Is a piece of the New World.

Where it began did not announce itself. There was no grand flourish to say this was where it had all started. The grassy fringes of the verge merely petered out down by the dairy and the black galvanize barrack-rooms in the gully. The pitch road carried on to Princes Town, where the two English princes had planted a yellow poui tree on either side of the heretical Anglican church before they dined in Coblentz House in town, and then went back to England, where one of them died. ‘One yellow poui died at the very same hour as the prince who planted it died,’ Marie Elena said. She travelled to Princes Town every Friday to the market: not in a racatang Princes Town bus or in a maroon taxi fluted with silver chrome driven by a coolie man, but in a convertible Chevrolet which her sister Immaculata’s daughter, Giaconda, drove like a film star, scarf flying in the breeze and lips the colour of carmine, pretending that she was still in Philadelphia. When Lavren went with Marie Elena, sitting next to her in the Chevrolet, close to her silky legs, rubbing the hem of her soft cotton dress with his thumb and index finger of his right hand and sucking the thumb of his left hand, he daydreamed as he looked out of the window, but knew exactly when they were passing the secret garden with the pond, the poisonous lilies and the staircase which led nowhere, but which he liked to climb, and pretend when he got to the top that he could see the whole world.

Yes, there could be at this point another prologue, a prologue to a swelling act and an imperial theme. This would be if you told the tales another way, if you came by another route, if you came by the Boca de la Sierpe as did Columbus and his caravels; or from the north which brought the ghost ship through the Bouche du Dragon where the isthmus is broken for the fourth time: that narrow broken-back spine of sundrenched, windblown peaks encrusted with wild forests and white orchids, the archipelago that connects the island of Kairi to the continent of Bolivar.

Cric

Crac

Bear with him, bear with Lavren, his high-flown words, his love of geography and the magic in the names of places. He will ransack the carnival for the writing of his Carnival Tales. He will dissemble: he will be man, he will be woman. He will be Pierrot, discoursing in similes, arguing in metaphor and pun, flowery extravagances. He will be Robberman: storyteller extraordinaire holding you up in the street carnival morning with stories of his origins, his travels through the nether world and the kingdoms below the sea. Lavren will rise to the heights of the Moco Jumbie, balancing on long stilt-legs, will dance the Dragon, twist and wind like the devils’ Jab Jabs, beating their biscuit tins and clanging their chains. Accept it all. Delight in it. It can make you laugh. It can make you cry.

Cric

Crac

This is the one cordillera, the northern range, the Andean foothills. To come this way you would have to brave the current-eddied channels, the destiny of the middle passage between the islands of Monos; the isle of the red monkeys where Marie Elena dangled her feet in the water and went on a picnic with Auguste; Gasparee, the island of centipedes, where Lavren made love for the last time before taking the vow of chastity, an aberration which hardly lasted between one confession and another; Chacachacare, the island of lepers and nuns; Nelson, place of quarantines, where Indian children, sons and daughters of indentured labour, addicted, ate clay.

This was no ordinary place. Is a piece of the New World, boy.

Cric

Crac

Look out for the remous, the black, green vortex of currents that can take you under.

From here, at the centre of the island, where the grassy fringes of the verge merely peter out and the gravel roads are as ordinary as brown string flung down among these other peaks, humped like the back of a green iguana, running diagonally across the centre of the island; from here at the window of the turret room, Lavren, at the sill of the Demerara window, Marie Elena behind him on her deathbed telling the last tales before the end of the world as bachac ants attack the rose bushes in Immaculata’s sunken garden, and woodlice eat their way through the pitchpine floorboards, and Josephine sits by the kitchen door shelling pigeon-peas: from this vantage point, Lavren can listen and write and tell the history of the New World. From here, he can see them coming with their barrels of wine that were stacked in the cellars under the gabled houses which rose from these enamelled forests, painted white and decorated with fretwork as intricate as Breton lace, embroidered with lattice as curly as crochet. From here he can survey the four points of this place of the New World. He can look myopically or can put his hand to his forehead to shade his eyes from the glare to look into the distance of history. There are the ships of Columbus in the harbour at Moruga: the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria as clear as when Miss Redhead, his black schoolteacher, sung their presence under the mango tree in the school yard near the walls of the Church of Notre Dame de Bon Secours, tapping the blackboard with her tamarind switch. There are the burning ships of Apodaca, the Spanish admiral scuttling his fleet to deprive the English Abercromby of the booty of surrender in 1798. There the ships whose bellies are full of black human cargo. There is the Fatel Rozack from Calcutta, dhotied and capraed...