November 1, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Kamil Ali
Lightning and thunder through the open window jerked Blakie and Melda out of sleep. A steady breeze lifted the window blind and rain pattered on the wooden bedroom floor.
Blakie cursed the tropical storm under his breath and told it to go away as quickly as it had arrived. The storm retaliated with a sudden clap of thunder that shook the house and jolted Blakie into a sitting position on the bed. Melda dived under the cover.
He swung his legs off the bed on his way to close the window. Melda grabbed onto his arm and anchored her nails into his flesh. He cried out in pain but failed to detach the woman who clung in desperation for his protection.
His heart pounded harder with each tentative step on the wet floor toward the window with Melda attached to him. He had to shut the window to keep out the next attack of lightning and thunder by the storm.
He ducked under the flailing blind and used his free hand to slam the window shut a split second before a streak of lightning lit up the night sky when it hit the garden at the back of the house.
The cold soggy blind landed on his bare back. He pulled it between him and the window and turned. The nightlights fizzed and died, leaving him suspended in total darkness. He lifted Melda and plunged onto the bed halfway through a slip in a pool of water on the floor.
The bounce of bodies on the bed dislodged Melda and sent her crashing to the floor on the other side of the bed. She swore and rolled under it. She covered her ears with her palms and squeezed her eyes shut. Blakie pulled the cover over his body and stuck his head under the pillow.
The house shuddered under the angry tumble of a thunderbolt on the roof. The bed bumped and moved. Blakie grunted and Melda sobbed a loud prayer.
Perfume bottles and a large flower-vase on the dresser toppled over and shattered on the floor. The wardrobe beside the dresser rocked sideways and thudded against the wall. The jolt sent sharp pieces of its full-length mirror crashing to the floor.
The harsh battering of rain pellets against the window increased in frequency and velocity until the window shattered. The high winds rushed in again to lift the blind and send shards of broken window panes flying into the room. The pelting rain broke several other windows throughout the house.
The airstream whistled around the room, gathering momentum that threatened to lift the sharp pieces of broken glass off the floor and send them swirling around the room in a menacing cyclone.
Blakie abandoned his wife and scampered to the bedroom door to escape the wrath of the storm in the room. He turned the knob and pulled the door open. The wind ripped the door from his hand and slammed it wide open against the wall behind it.
The open doorway created a wind-tunnel that forced him into the hallway. The wind blew every door open to give itself free reign of the house. It exited through the smashed windows on the far side of the house.
The fierce wind stabbed Melda with the pieces of sharp glass all over her body and sent her skidding from under the bed, along the floor and out of the bedroom door.
She slammed into Blakie’s legs and knocked him off his feet, unto his bottom. He yelled from the jolt through his spine. She screamed from the weight of his body pressing the pieces of glass deeper into her flesh.
The lightning stopped! The thunder went silent! The wind died! Their gasps sounded loud in the dead silence that followed!
The downstairs door made a long slow screech on its dry unoiled hinges. Blakie had locked and bolted it the night before. A floorboard creaked on the main floor. They held their breaths!
Melda hugged Blakie’s leg. He winced when a sharp glass from her arm sliced his flesh in the blinding darkness.
A drag and a thump on the stair stopped their hearts. A gurgle and the stench of rotting human flesh burned their nostrils in the still air. The nightlights throughout the house relit themselves with a dull yellow flickering glow.
A series of slow deliberate drags and thuds up the stairs froze the blood in their veins. Blakie used every effort to slide himself and Melda backward into the doorway of the bedroom. He leaned past the doorjamb to peek at the top of the stairs.
A wooden suitcase jumped from the top stair to the second floor. It rested for a moment, then the clasps opened and the lid started to rise. Blakie screamed and pushed back into the bedroom.
When the bedroom door flew open, he leaped through the shattered window, thirty feet to the concrete ground below.
The neighbors heard the commotion in the silence after the storm and called the police.
“The storm washed the garden away and exposed the wooden suitcase we used to bury the old lady.” Blakie lay crumpled on the ground. “She returned to take revenge for stealing her home and killing her.” He took his last breath.
Police could not solve the mystery of the open suitcase of rotting flesh in the bedroom
new voices
By Romeo Kaseram
Anson Gonzalez was born in Mayo, Trinidad, on August 21, 1936. Celebrating Gonzalez’s life following his passing on September 6, 2015, Simon Lee recalls an interview conducted via Skype in May that year for the Trinidad Guardian. Lee tells us Gonzalez was the son of a primary school teacher, with the young man spending “a peripatetic childhood in Central and South [Trinidad], moving from Mayo to Palo Seco, Erin, Siparia and Caratal”. According the Lee’s narration, when the young Gonzalez “wasn’t ‘skating downhill on coconut branch’ and ‘tearing up pants’, from the age of about ten”, the spaces of respite between boyhood adventures meant “reading was a major pastime”. Gonzalez particularly recalled reading Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. In his school years, he attended Presentation College, San Fernando, graduating in Form 3 with a Cambridge School Leaving Certificate. Following this, he began teaching at Caratal Roman Catholic Primary School. He taught at this level for eight years, before attending the University of the West Indies. He spent a year at Mausica Teachers’ College following his university degree.
According to Lee, Gonzalez “tried his hand at various cultural and other activities”, wryly recalling how his skin colour framed how he viewed the world, and how it in turn assessed him. Says Gonzalez: “Because I was red, and went Presentation, I felt I could play football.” Lee adds: “His complexion neither improved his footballing skills, nor the roles he was offered as an aspiring actor. Gonzalez also wanted to act, “but never got good parts”. According to Gonzalez, “Anytime they wanted a light skinned person, they got me. One of my first roles was a Chinaman in a shop, in Douglas Archibald’s, Rose Slip.”
Lee adds: “Never one to take himself too seriously, Anson nevertheless wanted to correct or inform a younger generation often entirely ignorant of its elders’ youthful achievements: ‘Remember we’re all old bats, nobody knows we did anything. I tried playwriting, but it was too hard. I scrambled through one play with Freddie Kissoon, Eric Roach, Walcott, but I couldn’t compete.’” According to Lee, Gonzalez also tried “his hand as director, and went on to act with the Trinidad Theatre Workshop”. It would take a close encounter with ill-health to spur him on when he lost a kidney during his twenties. Says Gonzalez: “I thought I was going to die.” Surviving this close call, Lee notes, “led to a frenzy of artistic activity”; it also prompted him to “look for something more sedentary.” It was in this time when Gonzalez “had begun to make a little mark as a poet”, Lee notes, with inclusion in the 1967 government-sponsored literary collection that commemorated Trinidad and Tobago’s fifth anniversary of Independence. According to Gonzales, this “gave me a leg up”. Later, he was drafted to the Publications Unit of the Ministry of Education, in a “small role on the book selection committee”. As Lee notes, “all those who have benefitted from his unstinting generosity can be grateful that for once at least the bureaucrats, in seconding him, unwittingly launched a thousand writing careers”.
Gonzalez founded the literary journal The New Voices in 1973, which was published bi-annually until 1993. As an active participant in the arts, he was also a facilitator in the birth of the Writers' Union of Trinidad and Tobago in 1980, and served as its president between 1988 and 1990. He received the first WUTT Writer of the Year Award in 1988. Lee notes The New Voices broke new literary ground, publishing work by more than 300 Caribbean writers, and which was also responsible for the Bibliography of Creative Writing in Trinidad and Tobago from 1962 onwards, that Gonzalez later produced. He also founded The New Voices Newsletter in 1981, another of his initiatives servicing Caribbean writing. Adds Lee: “More egalitarian than the pioneering Beacon magazine of the 1930s, New Voices along with the Bajan Bim, the Guyanese Kyk-Over-Al and the Jamaican Focus magazines, provided the vital first publication portal for new writers in the pre-Bocas Lit Fest period, when regional publishing was either moribund or minimal and metropolitan publishers only dealt with established names.” In 1979 Anson established Poetry Day, celebrated on October 15 in Trinidad and Tobago, and which has now spread to eight Caribbean territories.
Then there was the literary career, which as Jennifer Rahim tells us in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Gonzalez began writing during the turbulent late 1960s and the 1970s. She says, “As one of the group of 'new' post-independence poets that includes Anthony McNeill, Mervyn Morris and Dennis Scott, Gonzalez brings to his poems the conflicts of a young, multicultural, post-colonial nation caught in the midst of nation-building. Kenneth Ramchand has recognised Gonzalez as among the writers ‘who are genuinely involved in building upon our complex traditions’”. Additionally, “The critical, unromantic eye that Gonzalez's 'nationstate' poems casts on efforts to attain a national identity and autonomy is typical of the 'new' generation group. Not swayed by the mass philosophies of the black consciousness and nationalist movements, he maintains a unique perspective and uses symbols of the nationalist and black liberation movement – the steelband, in 'Cadence', and jazz, in 'Hey, Alfie' – to expose their shortcomings and failures. Music – its tones, rhythms, and moods – forms an interesting feature of Gonzalez's poetry, an influence that perhaps originated in the 'dub' poetry tradition of the 1960s and 1970s.”
Gonzalez published several volumes of poetry: Score (with Victor D. Questel, 1972); Love Song of Boysie B. and Other Poems (1974); Collected Poems 1964-1979 (1979); Postcards and Haiku (1984); Moksha: Poems of Light and Sound (1988); and Merry-go-round and other Poems (1992). Among his non-fiction work are Self-Discovery Through Literature: Creative Writing in Trinidad and Tobago (1972), and Trinidad and Tobago Literature: On Air (1974). Gonzalez also compiled a bibliography of Trinidad and Tobago writers, Creative Writing in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (1977).
Despite being critically ill with a heart condition, in 2013 Gonzalez moved from Trinidad to live in Wales with one of his daughters, where he passed away on September 6, 2015. Says Lee: “While it may be too soon to fully assess his contribution to Caribbean culture in general and literature in particular, there can be no doubt that Anson Gonzalez, (along with A.J. Seymour of former British Guiana and founding editor of Kyk-Over-Al and Frank Collymore of Barbados’ Bim magazine) was one of the major agents of developing and promoting indigenous literary production. The legacy of his selfless lifework continues not just with Poetry Day, but in the pages of the books he helped inspire and bring to print and in the inclusive creative vision he helped foster, which we need now more than ever.”
Sources for this exploration: Trinidad Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.tt/lifestyle/2015-09-14/swansong-anson-gonzalez; Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English; and Peepal Tree Press.