A Brighter Sun

"He used to say that all this business about colour and nationality was balls, that as long as a man was happy that was all that mattered."

Selvon's first novel, A Brighter Sun, \tells the story of Tiger, the protagonist in Turn Again Tiger, the entertaining sequel which continues his story. Married off to Urmilla at age 16, Tiger struggles to understand manhood, or, better yet, adulthood and his place in an expanding world. Going to Port of Spain for the first time, becoming a father, working with the Americans on the Churchill-Roosevelt Road, learning to read, and gaining a deeper, nuanced understanding of knowledge, politics, and race, Tiger's vision of himself and his role as a man brightens as the sun. Of course, aspects of Trinidadian adult masculinity are certainly disturbing, such as Tiger and Joe beating their wives, but the community of Barataria and the various "characters" who populate Tiger's world illustrate nuance along race, class, gender, or political affiliations. 

Selvon, as mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is an expert at humor, the highlight of this novel being Sookdeo, the old Indian village drunk, selling his half-blind donkey that does not "look" well to another man. The vernacular dialogue also shines through this novel, which contains more than enough local colors, sites, and characterization of the countryside, village, and town. Joe Martin, Tiger's best friend in Turn Again Tiger, as well as Tall Boy, the Chinese shopkeeper, have their own backstories, too. Joe's origins in the barrackyards of George Street, for instance, or Rita and Urmilla's friendship which transcends the creole/coolie divide, remind one of Minty Alley by C.L.R. James. Like James, Selvon knows and empathizes deeply with the popular classes of Trinidad during the war, a time of tremendous change as Yankee bases hired local labor at higher wages than the sugar estates and government positions (rum and coca cola!). 

For any and everyone interested in Selvon or Trinidad & Tobago, A Brighter Sun is more than a worthwhile introduction. Although many events happen and Tiger's still unsure what exactly makes a man, the jokes aside will keep the reader enthralled by this rapidly changing world. Indeed, Tiger's growing interest in politics and the class and racial divisions, hint at greater change to come with keen attention to the facade of populist local officials in the legislative council who, despite their appeals to racial kinship, offer nothing but broken promises. Somewhat reminiscent of Naipaul's Suffrage of Elvira or the colonial politician in The Wine of Astonishment by Lovelace. 

Turn Again Tiger

Standing on the hill gave him a feeling of power. He hated the cane. Cane had been the destiny of his father, and his father's father. Cane had brought them all from the banks of the Ganges as indentured laborers to toil in the burning sun. And even when those days were over, most of them stayed shackled to the estates."

Samuel Selvon's Turn Again Tiger is an enjoyable work with great humor, continuing the tale of Tiger, a creolized Trinidadian of Indian descent. Tiger, comfortable in Barataria, agrees to help his father run a new sugarcane estate in the valley, in a small, forgotten corner of Trinidad called Five Rivers. Given false information on the job, Tiger agrees to help his father and moves to this new village, trying to figure out how to be a man along the way. 

According to Naipaul's review of the novel, Turn Again Tiger appears to be a sequel to an earlier work by Selvon, which probably explains his origins in the canefields, his relationship with Sookdeo, the man who taught him how to read, as well as Tiger's fraught relationship with the estate (and by extension, white people, the race all Trinidadians see as God). In his review of the novel, Naipaul seemingly characterizes the novel as a typical or formulaic "Race, Sex, and Caribbean" anti-colonial text, which has some veracity. 

While the central white character to the novel, Doreen, who inspires so much of Tiger's internal turmoil and frustration, is not given the complexity or depth of other characters in this novel (the entire village becomes a character, except the white overseer, Robinson, who, as a symbol of the plantation and colonialism does not mingle with the masses but controls from behind the scenes), one could ask why should the two white characters be centered in a narrative about a multiracial, poor community? Or, on another note of importance, why does this novel include powerful collective women's voices, but reaffirms patriarchal cultural norms and power relations in Five Rivers?

In another way, this novel could be compared in intriguing ways to Mr. Naipaul's Guerrillas or The Mimic Men, which all feature interracial relationships between West Indian men and white women. In Selvon's narrative, the white female body becomes, in a way strangely reminiscent of Jimmy Ahmed's sexual conquests or the fascinating character in Salih's illustrious novel, a way in which the colonized male subject reverts the established order. Naipaul, unlike Selvon, however, includes these white women characters' inner desires and political contradictions in the aforementioned novels. Strangely, much like Ralph Singh or Jimmy Ahmed, Tiger seems to share similar sexual frustrations related to the colonized West Indian, but Naipaul was more dismissive of this aspect of Selvon's novel.