By Jeremy Poynting
Jeremy Poynting, founder of Peepal Tree Press, pays tribute to the late Jan Shinebourne.
Jan Shinebourne (1947-2026), who died last weekend, was one of the writers who defined what Peepal Tree was about. I knew her a little before we (though Peepal Tree was then just me) published her first book, Time-piece in 1986, no doubt through meetings of ATCAL, the precursor to Wasafiri and at The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books in London. For over forty years we were good friends, though in recent years I saw little of her but heard from her in many telephone conversations. What I admired about Janice’s work was its beauty and its humanity. She couldn’t write an ugly sentence and even her least likeable characters – like Clarice Chung, the racially exclusionary matriarch of The Last Ship – are invested with understanding and empathy. In her work, there is both a vision of what Guyana could be, and a clear-eyed perception of the divisive forces that continue to hold that country back. That vision rests on what she saw of the matriarchal groups of women her childhood, women of all races whose investment in decency and mutual support was what united them.
If there was one repeating but freshly re-visioned theme in her work, it was the inevitability of loss and separation – explored both as a personal theme and as one affecting a society like Guyana confronting its past and becoming, in the most fragile and embattled way, post-colonial. It is there in her first novel, Time-piece where her autobiographical character, Sandra Yansen, is seen in a prologue returning from overseas to find that the Berbice village life she knew has gone. In the body of the novel, Sandra leaves her village (called Pheasant, where the former inhabitants of the Rose Hall estate have moved in the process of extra-estate settlement that Rooplall Monar also wrote about in High House and Radio and Clem Seecharan documents in his study of Jock Campbell, Sweetening Bitter Sugar (2005)) and moves to Georgetown to take up a job as a journalist. This is in the mid to late 1960s when the government led by Forbes Burnham was beginning to bend Guyana’s media and its judiciary to its increasingly authoritarian and electorally illegitimate will. For Sandra there is the knowledge that living in the city, despite the sexism she meets as a young woman, is a place where she can grow “beyond” the life she could have in Pheasant. But “beyond” is in quote marks because Sandra can never be sure what she can gain, what she has lost. There’s a beautiful scene where Sandra spends a day on the river with the childhood friends, T and Estelle, from whom her new city career will separate her:
Sakiwinkis burst leaves off branches in their flight through the forest, and the pheasants, strange, ancient-looking birds, curved a dipping path in and out of the trees. There were large intervals of silence here; you could feel the space open and shut round you. When it opened, it took you into its silence and snuffed out the life you brought with you; when it shut itself, it was like a flower closing, keeping the secret of its beauty. Then, it left you without comfort, feeling apprehension, so the sudden bursts of noise that broke like shrieks from its still, closed centre shattered and shredded any sense of calmness.
The beauty is there, but she sees that this too is a challenging place, no less than the city where she discovers that people “break up the ground beneath each other’s feet.”
The movement away is returned to at an earlier stage in Jan Shinebourne’s second novel, The Last English Plantation (1988). Here the novel looks at the moment when the former estate dwellers of the quasi-military and hierarchical compound of the Rose Hall estate leave the old logies for independent housing. It looks, too, at the events when the central, autobiographical character, June Lehall, leaves behind her childhood friends when she wins a scholarship to the grammar school in New Amsterdam.
The school is only a bicycle ride and a Canje river crossing away, but it takes June into a “New World”, as the chapter is headed. It is an utterly contradictory world where children of different races confront each other for the first time, where the deep divides between urban and rural, Christian and Hindu, middle and working class explode into name-calling and anxiety. It is also a world where the one really sympathetic teacher, Mr Sylvester, introduces the children to the idea of gentility through teaching them a Jane Austen novel. It is also a world where the whip is still used to reduce children to peeing on themselves.
It is a New World that divides children like June from her past and the friends of her childhood. In distress from events at school, she runs into her childhood friend Ralph Brijlall who, primary school done, is working in the cane-fields, prematurely a man. When he teases her about her school uniform and June points out that he is wearing a uniform, too, his work clothes, Jan Shinebourne writes poetry in Ralph’s response:
He smiled half-heartedly, took up the cutlass and began to scrape the mud from his heels. ‘Uniform? dis? Hmp! Dis ’in uniform, girl, dis is me grave I wearin’, me coffin. Dis is wha’ we gon all end up in, good Guiana mud, me, you, governor, prime minister, lawyer, overseer. Dust to dust.’ He was grim like a man, but he smiled quickly, and threw a handful of mud at her.
I think Jan always understood very clearly her essential Guyaneseness, the contradiction that she had grown up within, that in a society that in the early 1960s broke down in bitter racial conflict between Africans and Indians, the truth was that so many Guyanese lived in a state of cultural heterogeneity. Jan’s father was a Chinese man, whose parents or grandparents had come to BG as indentured labourers, who, as many Chinese had done, became a shopkeeper, serving the mainly Indian Guyanese workers on the Rose Hall estate. What distinguished him was how deeply he was immersed in Indian culture – he was a Hindi/Bhojpuri speaker. On the other hand, Jan’s mother was an Indian who had converted to Christianity as a Lutheran, and as the portrayal in The Last English Plantation portrays, is hostile to the close relationship that the young June Lehall has with an older Indian woman, Nani Dharamdai Misir, because the best future she sees for her daughter is separation from Indianness into some kind of “proper” Englishness. At one point Lucille, June’s mother explodes in rage:
Lucille ranted on. ‘…they drink rum, they just eat and drink rum in their spare time, and beat their wives, and fight at the rumshops and the weddings. You like that coolie boy Ralph Brijlall? You like him? Well marry him and see if you still like him when he is finished with you! Their wives cook from three o’ clock in the morning to late at night! You want to be a coolie woman? Well be a coolie woman! I don’t care! Coolie women have to carry all the burdens for the men, the burden of the sick, the old, the children, burying the dead, and get no thanks for it, only licks! And the women beat their daughters and treat them worse than the men treat them! I don’t beat you! And what do I get for it? Ingratitude! Ingrate!
Yes, you go to Dharamdai’s house. You talk Hindi, learn mantras, do puja, pick up cow dung with your hands, bring up children with lice in their hair and feed the lice with coconut oil! You see if it will get you anywhere in this country! This is the West Indies, not India, not Africa, not China, the West Indies! We are British!’
And that is what the young June Lehall is offered when she makes the daily journey to the high school and finds herself immersed in what is, literally, English literature. It’s a rich perception of both the power of colonialism in teaching people like Lucille to despise her own people and their culture and the ways in which some of the brightest who grew through the last decades of colonialism were able to turn their immersion in English/ British culture (the epigraph of Time-piece is the great closing paragraph of George Eliot’s Middlemarch) as a way of seeing the Guyana she’d grown up in an original and layered way. The experience of the Rose Hall estate is at the centre of that vision, which Jan herself describes in a paper you can read online:
https://books.openedition.org/pulm/5462?lang=en
Jan’s next book, The Godmother and Other Stories(2004) brought together writing from the years when she was still living in Guyana (she left in 1970 to attend university in the UK, marriage and the raising of two children) and the experience of exile in London. These are well-shaped stories, making good use of her close study of Joyce’s Dubliners. –One story, ‘The Bridge’, was included in Ken Ramchand’s Best West Indian Stories in 1982, where, apart from Jean Rhys, Jan was the only woman writer included. What the stories reveal is Jan’s sharp awareness that in post-colonial Guyana what was emerging was a new middle class, as exploitative of the poor as white colonials had ever been. This class, as the maid, Vera, recognises, are simply the old masters with new Black faces. Other stories explore the sensibilities of the many thousands who fled from the political repression, corruption and social collapse of the 1970s and 80s. The awareness of characters in these stories is shot through with Guyanese images, voices and unanswered questions. It is through these that their new experiences of Britain and North America are filtered. One character lies in a hospital in London fighting for her life, hearing the voices of her childhood in Guyana – her mother, African Miss K, the East Indian pandit and the English Anglican priest. Once again, they ‘war for the role of guide in her life’. In ‘The Godmother’ and ‘Hopscotch’, childhood friends reunite in London. Two have stayed in Guyana, while one has settled in London. The warmth of shared memories and cold feelings of betrayal, difference and loss vie for dominance in their interactions.
And lest it be thought that Jan Shinebourne was principally a writer who was invested mainly in her own experience, her third novel, Chinese Women(2010) displays a remarkable capacity for imaginative projection. She invents the character of Albert Aziz, a Guyanese Muslim who has migrated to Canada and works as an engineer in the nuclear industry. What becomes clear about Albert is that, successful as he is, his rise from poverty on a Guyanese sugar estate has left him deeply scarred by the racial contempt he faced. We see him becoming increasingly attracted by the ideas of political Islam as a means – which he is equipped to do – of exacting his revenge on the white West. But Albert also remains obsessed by his unrequited attraction to a young Chinese girl who lived on the same sugar estate. When he discovers she is divorced and living in England, he decides to pay court.
Jan’s last published novel, The Last Ship (2015), returns to Guyana and the family history that thus far in her writing had been at the edge of her work – those members of her father’s family who remained close to their Chinese heritage. The framing of the novel is the return from London of the long dead Clarice Chung’s granddaughter, Joan Wong, to research her family background. The invention of Clarice’s domestic life – the stern figure in the family shop who will never allow any credit – is the product of that research. In this novel, there’s the tension between the fierce matriarch, Clarice Chung, who reserves her special cupboard of Chinese food only for those family members who remain pure in ethnicity and culture, and those who melted into the wider community, particularly into Indian-Guyanese culture. At the heart of the conflict is the rebellion of Clarice’s creolised son, Harold, who is happy to have sex with women of all ethnicities, and Clarice’s determination that he will marry a good Chinese woman. Clarice is something of a monster, but the novel sets out to understands her. When she tries to tell her story:
It was a language filled with grief, bewilderment and anger that this was how she had ended up – a Chinese person, whom no one understood, on a remote, poverty-stricken sugar estate in British Guiana, far from the homeland she would never see again. When she arrived on a ship, the Admiral, in 1879, she and her family had to stop speaking their language, had to stop being Chinese because people laughed at them.
Beyond her brilliant ear for dialogue, in all Jan Shinebourne’s fiction there is an ability to capture scenes in a dramatic way. In The Last Ship, there’s a tragi-comic chapter called “The Marriage Match” where Clarice interviews the mother and inspects the daughters as prospective partners for her sons. It is both funny and sad with respect to what it shows of reductive ways of looking at people, both in terms of their Chinese origins (hakka or punti) and their ability to escape from their origins in BG as indentured labourers.
At the end of the novel Joan Wong visits China, is disabused of some of the invented mythical history of the Chung family and resolves to fly away “forever from all ideological and ancestral ties, and she promised herself never to relinquish her freedom for such ties. Never.” That I suspect is Jan Shinebourne’s voice, as a writer who has given us five books that probe the human condition through an intensive focus on Guyana. There should have been more books. Jan suffered badly from the effects of ill-health at crucial points in her life, but we should be profoundly grateful for those five.
Discussion