Title: The Polished Hoe

By: Austin Clarke

Reviewed by: Laura Riley

Yes, 'hoe' is a pun, which is clever, but not meant to be funny. Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe has a sense of humour, but its title is serious, deliberately describing both the farm tool and the protagonist of the novel. The entire story takes place over one day, with Mary-Mathilda Gertrude Bellfeels confessing to an act that starts with a walk in the night with her hoe.

Except that what she tells the policeman (referred to as Sargeant or familiarly Percy) in her Statement, has roots older and far deeper than the previous night.

Mary's 'Statement' is capitalised to emphasise the importance of the tangential but relevant tales that it comprises. The Polished Hoe is set in the years after WWII and Mary's Statement is a collection of histories, her history as well as that of her family, others before her, the country, and beyond.

Instead of having Mary as a protagonist in the strict sense of the role, Clarke uses Mary as a mouthpiece; she embodies and voices histories perhaps too long forgotten by us, the readers, and reveals suppressed secrets and suspicions to Percy that justice longs to come out. Percy notes at the beginning of Mary's Statement that her "voice keeps following a path that is more fixed than his own dream, a path to another kind of life lived in this Village, but which he knew nothing of before tonight. It is a life he could not see from his distance down the hill." Her stories of rape, torture and class divisions are definite and almost obvious, if Percy had allowed himself to dwell on his suspicions. But, he didn't, because the blinders that routine life induces can obscure everyday atrocities.

Mary lives in Bimshire, or Barbados, where Clarke is originally from, and where although slavery was abolished in 1838, plantation owners and merchants of British descent maintained economic and political control well into the 20th century. Mr. Bellfeels is one such man of power. We quickly learn that he is in charge of a great house and takes Mary as his recognized mistress.

"It was common practice on

plantations in Bimshire for a plantation manager to breed any woman he rested his two eyes on. As many as he could climb." Mr.

Bellfeels starts with Ma, Mary's mother and then continues with Mary, when she is thirteen years old. Mary explains that Mr. Bellfeels robs her of her right to become a woman on her own, calling into the present the heart-rending history of white masters abusing black women. She connects Mr. Bellfeels to a time 'far-far-far back' when women 'get-back on the ships leaving Africa, sailing on the high seas, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, trying to reach Amurca, before more rape and suicide and deceit and betrayal, and desperation overtake them. And they decide to jump overboard, and face the broiling green waves of the Deep; and God; taking suicides, which was better. Wishing that the Atlantic storms and hurricanes would have no mercy on us!"

Mary's grandmother is African, and so we're reminded that this 'far-far-far back' time of the transatlantic slave trade (during which it was common occurrence for women to be beaten and raped during the journey) was still recent in the 1950s and still is now. Clarke, rightly so, is not shy, about reminding us that slavery isn't an abstraction but involves people, who suffered immensely, long after slavery was abolished in Barbados in 1838.

Mary's person and consciousness is affected by being many things: witnessing her mother being raped, being lighter-skinned than her classmates, having an even lighter-skinned son who claims Europe is the civilized center of the world, hearing her grandmother pray to a different, African God and more. So her confession cannot just address what happened that one night while she walked with her polished hoe in hand.

Mr. Bellfeel's legacy is of rape, of theft; Mary's is a legacy of survival and hard work. The hoe is a tool that is associated with 'hard honest labour' but it has a potential for violence. Her hoe's blades, she reads from an inscription, are made in England. The colonizing country provides the sharpened steel that turns the honest tool into a potential weapon. This is one example of the details Clarke employs to shape Mary's Statement to serve a greater purpose of re-exposing history's ironies and evils.

Clarke carries us through a day as though it could be a century, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera. A conscious slow-down of a story makes each piece of Mary's Statement thoughtful, and intensifies reality. Clarke allows Mary to tell her story, which details truths that are too hard to be written down as is in a history book. She needs a day to tell her story because she is not apologizing in her confession; she is simply, and beautifully, issuing her Statement for all of us to listen to. Clarke is calling us to pay attention to the truth.