Eltonsbrody

Edgar Mittelholzer's Eltonsbrody is a strange novel. It's not quite as enjoyable or moving as his earlier work in the horror genre, but it does feature Barbados rather brilliantly. Each aspect of Barbadian geography, climate, and topography is vividly depicted, often with human-like attributes. Besides the actual Eltonsbrody home of Mrs. Scaife, where most of the story takes place, the various characters in the novel also highlight the nuances and contradictions of late colonial Barbados. Mrs. Scaife, a product of the Redlegs or white poor of the island, married a black doctor who worked his way up to a position of respectability in the colonial order. She cannot stand her Portuguese step-daughter, and despises her son, who cozies up to those in authority and status. Read in this light, the novel would suggest the madness of colonial society, but one cannot help thinking Mittelholzer was speaking more broadly. All the elemental facets of personality, inter-personal relations, social hierarchy, gender roles, or even family are thrown into question. Each causes disdain, horror, confusion, miscommunication or hilarity. By the conclusion of the novel, one does not know if Mrs. Scaife was just a prankster who wanted to go out with a bang or a truly insane person. Mr. Woodsley himself is not certain. 

My Bones and My Flute

Mittelholzer's My Bone and My Flute is a well-written horror story that successfully transfers the reader back to Guyana in the 1930s. The narrator, Milton, bears an uncanny resemblance to Mittelholzer himself, and despite the dark themes and frightening suspense, there are moments when one cannot help but giggle because of the self-deprecating or absurd and self-referential references either made by Milton himself or some of the other characters. As for the horror genre within Caribbean literature, Mittelholzer is the main one who comes to mind for me, although Mayra Montero and a certain novel by the Marcelin brothers from Haiti also employ similar motifs and culturally or historically specific reference points for their mysteries. Mittelholzer did a better job with the genre than the Haitian brothers because his story is solidly within the confines of horror and does not take itself too seriously while The Beast of the Haitian Hills was all over the place. Both stories, to their credit, contain much of social import and reflect upon the rural-urban divides within both Guyana and Haiti (not to mention class and color) with some suggested morals for the reader. Much like Haiti, the slave revolutions of the past, really history in general, is never forgotten. 

A Morning at the Office

Edgar Mittelholzer's social realist novel set in a Port of Spain office in a Trinidad on the cusp of social change offers some useful insights on Trinidadian society and the author's own views on race, class, gender, sexuality, identity, and the human condition. Incorporating himself into A Morning at the Office and "telescopic objectivity," Mittelholzer's novel uses an inventive narrative framework to tie the racially diverse employees of the company into broader trends in Trinidadian society, not to mention objects that trigger memories and futures for the characters while reaffirming the objectification of individuals by their racial, gender, sexual, and class positions. Furthermore, Mittelholzer positions himself in opposition to some of the burgeoning forms of "faddist" nationalism that was evolving in Trinidad and the rest of the British West Indies at the time. Instead of valorizing Caribbean folklore or traditions from the plantation and African past, Arthur, a character presumably representing Mittelholzer as much as Mortimer Barnett, argues for an essentially Western orientation of the West Indian, a sentiment often expressed in his With a Carib Eye. 

But the real emphasis in A Morning at the Office concerns the multiple layers of social stratification in Trinidad and its "caste-like" system of subjugation. Of course, the order so adeptly described and satirized here (not to mention in the works of V.S. Naipaul or the tragicomic moments in Shiva Naipaul's work) is in flux because of growing anti-colonial sentiment, the labor movement, and black and Indian social mobility, but it is seen through the eyes of Portuguese, Spanish, English, black working-class, coloured middle-classes and gendered perspectives in the office of a company that is tied to larger themes of economics and labor in late colonial Trinidad. Each character broadly represents their social groups and the various nuances of the racial categories thrust upon them. And each character is haunted by something they cannot, for reasons of respectability, status, or happiness, attain. Each character likewise must confront their own class and racial biases in the office, with the top positions always given to whites while mixed-race members of the professional and political strata continue to look down on Indians and blacks who in turn have their own nuances (such as the wealthy creolized family of Miss Bisnauth versus the poor Jagabir who is never allowed to forget his origins on the sugar cane estates). 

For Horace Xavier, the poor black office boy hopelessly in love with the mixed-race Miss Hinckson from a respectable and influential family, his ambitious plans for the future, intelligence, and large-scale changes in Trinidadian society in the 1940s and 1950s will only propel him while the others must make sense of their different predicaments that block the road to happiness. For some, it is a question of interracial romance or forbidden love that is unacceptable to their families or society. In the case of others, it is thwarted hopes of success in writing, children, social climbing, or, as in the case of some English living in Trinidad, returning to Europe due to racism against the local population or a feeling of disdain and disgust at how white skin rewards mediocrity in a colonial context. Mittelholzer, with great humor and compassion, explores the minds of each of these characters during a few hours at the office and as much as the racialized class system appears rigid, the assertion of Horace, the career steps of Jagabir, or the promise of West Indian literature as exemplified in Barnett foreshadow the changes in Trinidadian social relations to come. 

With a Carib Eye

Edgar Mittelholzer's With a Carib Eye was published in 1958, a fateful year in the British West Indies, but also only 4 years before V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America. While Naipaul's text is more ambitious and travels beyond the confines of the British colonies of the Caribbean, there are some rather fascinating parallels in how both Mittelholzer and Naipaul approach their region as "natives." Naipaul, coming from the Indian community of Trinidad, for example, does not depict Indo-Trinidadians as entirely creolized as Mittelholzer's text seeks to do. 

Both, however, linger on the Western character of Caribbean society, but for Mittelholzer there is no problem with "mimicry" of British or European cultures and norms. Thus, in a very surprising way, Naipaul's actually "right" in a sense that in the West Indies, the tragedy of the black man is to be recast in so many European moulds, but Mittelholzer accepts this as proof that the West Indies is "modern" and not primitive. One sees their ideological and biases play out in Naipaul's praise for calypso as a Trinidadian art form while Mittelholzer looks down on calypso, preferring to praise the accomplishments of West Indian artists, poets, and writers hampered only by economic conditions. 

This continues in their differing approaches to "modern" as defined in Trinidad, where Naipaul criticizes the notion that modernity in Trinidad's middle and upper classes equals consumption of overpriced Northern products while excellent Trinidadian coffee or furniture is cast aside and equated with the poor. One suspects that Mittelholzer is framing his travelogue in the tradition of J.J. Thomas's Froudacity (both are quick to distance themselves from Haiti and its alleged voodoo, not to mention Mittelholzer's eagerness to identify Barbados as an extension of England or brush aside the African and local influences in Saint Lucia's Creole-speaking population)) just as Naipaul embraces Froude and Trollope as a foundation for his self-distancing from the lack of wholly original or "new" societies legitimately rooted among the people. 

Of course, both Mittelholzer and Naipaul offer problematic views of the Caribbean culturally and historically, but how the two intersect and depart from each other and relate to their respective 19th century ideological forebears provide some interesting contrast on how two well-known writers of Trinidad and Guyana approached region, race, culture, and their sense of themselves in the world. A fine synthesis of Naipaul and Mittelholzer is likely to lead to a more holistic view of the West Indies and its people, one in which creolization and even, God forbid, African influences, are not incompatible with Caribbean modernity and the development of national cultures. Perhaps one could even suggest that time has sided with such a perspective as scholarship and Caribbean literatures point to a much needed nuance of complicated concepts such as  modernization, creolization, colonialism, and racial identity.