Edward Baugh and Claude McKay - FileThe Calabash International Literary Festival will this year commemorate the works of celebrated West Indian author Claude McKay, among others. One of his most endearing works is the novel Banana Bottom (1933) which will be featured at the festival. Published 75 years ago, it tells the story of the social and personal conflicts that arise in a rural Jamaican village when 22-year-old Bita Plant returns there to live after spending most of her teenage years in England.
"This celebration of Banana Bottom is a natural for Calabash," says Colin Channer, the festival's founder and artistic director. "We're committed to creating the future of Caribbean literature while keeping in touch with its past."
important voice
In 1912, at the age of 23, Claude McKay left Jamaica never to return. But as he became one of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance with novels like Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1930) in the United States, and as his publishing slowly established him as one of Jamaica's first internationally successful writers, he would return to Jamaican settings in his later novels, short stories and poems. He would return with a combination of nostalgia and clear-eyed memory to the hill villages of northern Clarendon where he was raised.
Here, Kwame Dawes, programming director of Calabash, speaks to Professor Edward Baugh Baugh about the novel, McKay, and Baugh's 'game day' preparation for important readings.
It is often presumed that the 'golden age' of West Indian literature falls somewhere between 1950 and 1970, yet it is hard to ignore the pioneering work of writers like Claude McKay. Do you see a clear path connecting McKay to the writers of the '50s and '60s?
I wouldn't say a clear path in the sense of McKay's having influenced the writers of the '50s and '60s, or of their having written with a consciousness of McKay behind them. I don't know that there is much evidence of that, but there is a clear path in terms of continuity of themes and concerns.
The issues of class, colour, culture and identity, the issues of education and religion, and the connections among all of these, were to be major concerns of the writers of the '50s and '60s. The truth is that they have remained major concerns of West Indian literature, and these concerns are central to Banana Bottom. Lamming argued, in The Pleasures of Exile, that the West Indian novel, as it had flowered in the '50s, had its roots in peasant life and sensibility. He cited Mais and Mittelholzer, Reid and Selvon. Well, we couldn't have asked for a more striking illustration of Lamming's claim that the West Indian novel had "restored the West Indian peasant to his true and original status of personality" than Banana Bottom. We should also note that McKay, in his early dialect poems, was a precursor of Louise Bennett and those poets of the West Indian vernacular who came after her.
Banana Bottom is one of a cluster of early West Indian novels that place a female protagonist at the centre of the narrative. We never quite return to this pattern until the explosion of women writers in the '70s and '80s. What can we learn about the female protagonist in West Indian literature from McKay's novel?
One thing we learn is that the female protagonist was strongly established from as early as Banana Bottom as a considerable agent and role model for West Indian, and more particularly black liberation, from the shackles of colonialism and its various effects. What is more, in McKay's novel she fills this role without being idealised, and while being nothing less than full woman, with all the self-respect that this entails. So, in any comprehensive study of the female protagonist in West Indian literature, McKay's Bita Plant has to figure as a seminal paradigm, so to speak.
My suspicion (and I could be wrong) is that McKay did not intend for his novel to be read primarily as a text for academic study (and interviews).
So how would you describe the 'readerly' appeal of the novel?
First of all, it is a story that should hold the reader's attention simply as a story, engaging us from the outset in Bita's situation and holding our attention all the way. There's also the humour that runs discreetly through the narrative: sometimes life-delighting, at other times satirical, cleverly making points of social criticism. Some of the humour is in the portrayal of some of the characters, and the lively variety of these also has an immediate appeal. Then there are the vivid, spirited descriptions of the countryside, the vegetation, and of village activities, whether church services or tea-meetings or communal work sessions. I think these all contribute to the novel's 'readerly' appeal.
Are there insights about Jamaica of the early 1900s that McKay's novel can teach us?
I think so, yes. For instance, the novel makes us aware, or deepens our awareness, of how our socially divisive attitudes and value systems reach back to the early 1900s and beyond. Even if we knew these things in an abstract way, this knowledge is made real in the lived experience of the novel. It provides a bridging point between what we know of the situation in the slavery period and today's situation as it derives from the time of slavery. Or again, for instance - and this may be connected with the previous point - one sees how the deep-seated suspicion of the early Chinese immigrants and indentured Indian field labourers developed from the beginning and how it was partly determined by the economic context of the time.
There are all sorts of historical details that I would not have guessed, such as the fact that, despite the general animosity to the Indians, Indian shawls became choice decorative items of dress among the African-Jamaican peasant women. Anyway, McKay is of path-finding importance, but the importance is more than just historical. A work like Banana Bottom is of continuing, immediate interest, an ever-engaging work.
McKay left Jamaica in 1912 as a young man, and though he seemed to intend to, he never returned. How do you think that absence may have affected his portrayal of Jamaican life in Banana Bottom?
Two ways come to mind. For one thing, some of the descriptions of the remembered rural setting, of the bounty of nature, for instance, have an idyllic glow about them, a heightening of colour which may be the product of nostalgia. At the same time, the sharpness of the exposure of social ills, like class and colour prejudice, may well have owed something to the fact that McKay had experienced, and had become actively involved in the African-American struggle for equal rights and self-determination. No doubt he was able to see the Jamaican situation as clearly as he did then from the vantage point of that struggle and from the vantage point of distance.
Banana Bottom is the fourth 'classic' Caribbean novel to be read at Calabash. Can you talk about the value of this exercise?
A necessity for the well-being of any literature is that its 'classics' should be kept alive as far as possible, otherwise they become mere names and vague notions. However, as the number of new books to read and study increases, this keeping alive of some of the classics becomes increasingly difficult, a situation not helped by the constraints, and sometimes the short-sightedness of the publishing industry.
So, this reintroduction of the 'classics' is an invaluable feature of Calabash, and a particular value is in having them read publicly. The reading helps to make some persons who hear them become aware of them and, more important, want to read them, where otherwise they might have turned a blind eye to them.
You must now be used to being described as the 'great voice', but what I have never read is how you prepare for readings like this. What is your 'game day' routine?
The routine may vary a little, depending on the kind of thing I have to read, whether a speech or a citation or poetry or a bit from a novel, as the case may be. But the basic preparation remains the same. What I try to do is familiarise myself as much as possible with the script, and to do that before 'game day'.
As I go over and over it, I decide on things like pacing - where I will speed up, where I will slow down, where I will linger on a word or a phrase, where I will pause even if there is no punctuation mark requiring a pause. I decide on how I will manipulate the inflection of my voice, where I will increase the volume, where I will lower it. I will make notations on the script to remind me of some of these intentions.
Incidentally, I prefer not to read from a printed book, even my own book, but to have the pages photocopied or typed separately, usually in 14-point font, double-spaced. All of this is with a view to trying to convey as effectively as possible in sound the meaning of what I am reading, and to 'reach' the audience.
All that I do is determined by my sense of the audience. Another thing is that I don't prepare by reading the stuff aloud, before a mirror or into a tape recorder. All of that I do inside my head, where a lot of performance goes on.
