Jan Carew’s Black Midas: Nature, form, and the metabolic rift
Dr. Michael Niblett is currently a Research Fellow at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, working on a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled ‘Literature and the Environment in the Caribbean: The Case of Guyana’. He hosted ‘The Arts and the Environment’ conference, which took place at the Cara Lodge Hotel, Georgetown, Guyana, on September 4 – 5, 2010.
In June 2011, the Peepal Tree Press newsletter reported on Niblett’s study of Black Midas.
In August 2011, I attended the Inter-Guianas Cultural Festival in Suriname, during which time I learned that the mentioned book is used in schools of that country. I made the connections, resulting in a shortened version of a long paper prepared specially for this column.

THE IMPACT of the Guyanese environment upon the country’s literary production is well attested to by numerous writers and critics. The works of Wilson Harris, A. J. Seymour, Edgar Mittelholzer, Mahadai Das, and Pauline Melville, to name only a few, have been greatly influenced by the distinctive geography and biodiversity of Guyana. A common motif in many texts is the contrast between the rainforested topography of the interior and the flat alluvial plain of the coast. The coastal landscape, of course, is the result of the massive and complex land reclamation scheme set in train by the Dutch in the eighteenth century. Through the work of enslaved labourers, the coastland was drained and empoldered with a system of dykes, dams, and sluices, facilitating the establishment of large-scale plantation agriculture.
This article considers Jan Carew’s 1958 novel Black Midas, which not only contains rich descriptions of the landscape, flora, and fauna of Guyana, but also offers a way into thinking about the impact and legacy of those environmental transformations. The organization of, and approach to, the land instantiated by colonialism—the land as an external object to be possessed, penetrated, and drained of its resources—haunts Carew’s novel. Indeed, the ecological ruptures associated with plantation capitalism imprint themselves on the aesthetics of the text.
That Carew’s narrative should bear the impress of the ecological changes wrought by Guyana’s forcible integration into the capitalist world-system should not be seen as something unique to his work alone, or the result of a particular idiosyncrasy of style. It might better be grasped as a structural tendency in literatures from ‘peripheral’ locations that have been subject to the violent imposition of capitalist modes and structures, a process that not only results in the dissolution of older social forms but also inevitably causes massive disruption to local ecosystems.
In the case of the Caribbean, colonial penetration and the subsequent rapid decline of the indigenous population resulted in the disintegration of the aboriginal conuco system of subsistence agriculture. The spread of plantation-based sugar-cane cultivation from the mid-seventeenth century onwards led to the clearance of huge swaths of forest, which in turn disrupted nutrient cycles and exacerbated soil depletion, as well as dramatically increasing rates of soil erosion.  This erosion reduced the moisture-retaining capacity of the soil, resulting in plants being subjected to greater drought stress.  Deforestation also led to climatic changes, with seventeenth-century observers recording decreases in levels of moisture and rainfall.
As Bonham C. Richardson observes, the “abruptness of this change was unprecedented, and it represented a sharp ecological discontinuity with the past.” The Caribbean “had been absorbed into an expanding European-centred commodity exchange of trans-Atlantic scope. And growing European market demand increased sugar productivity schedules that knew or cared little about insular soil erosion rates or [. . .] heightened drought susceptibility.”  With the export of sugar-cane and other commodities, therefore, not only surplus value but also ecological resources—in particular soil nutrients—were being pumped out of the region.
To understand the historical break in nutrient cycling this engendered, it is necessary to turn to Marx’s concept of metabolic rift, which appears in unsystematic fashion throughout his work. As Foster and Clark observe, Marx developed the concept in the context of “the alarm raised by agricultural chemists and agronomists in Germany, Britain, France and the United States about the loss of soil nutrients—such as nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium—through the export of food and fibre to the cities. Rather than being returned to the soil, as in traditional agricultural production, these essential nutrients were being shipped hundreds or even thousands of miles away and ended up as waste polluting the cities.”  The origins of the rift thus lay in the way capitalism remade and intensified the division of labour between town and country. In Marx’s words:

[L]arge landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.

As Marx implies, the rift became progressively globalized as the town-country antagonism was rearticulated on a world-scale. With colonialism a “new and international division of labour” was created, involving the conversion of “one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field.”  The robbery of natural wealth this entailed was highlighted by Marx in his discussion of Ireland. For a century and a half, he noted, “England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.”  The self-expansionary logic of capital, moreover, ensures that the ecological contradictions engendered by the metabolic rift multiply over time, intensifying the ruthless depletion of peripheral environments.
My contention, then, is that the aesthetics of Carew’s novel encode the opening of the metabolic rift and the phenomena it has given rise to in Guyana: the breaks in nutrient cycling, the depletion of the environment, the loss of natural wealth overseas, the typically dependent pattern of imports and exports, and the underdevelopment of internal linkages. It should be emphasized, however, that such phenomena are not necessarily documented at the level of content, but might rather be found figured in formal or stylistic properties.
Through the travels of its protagonist, Aron Smart, Black Midas looks to map the distinctive geographies of the country. Set in the mid-twentieth century, the novel begins with Aron’s early childhood in the coastal village of Mahaica, a former estate situated on reclaimed land. Later Aron moves closer to Georgetown having been apprenticed to a doctor, Ram. On leaving the doctor, he travels into the interior to work as a pork-knocker, setting up camp at Perenong Creek. After making a fortune in diamonds he moves to Georgetown and lives the life of an affluent bourgeois, buying a house in the city that once belonged to a white colonist and generally flaunting his wealth. Following a ruinous investment in a sawmill, Aron returns to the the interior in pursuit of more gold and diamonds.
The novel is saturated with images that point to the debilitating impact of the metabolic rift, despite the narrative making very few direct references to the colonial situation. Crucial, in this regard, is the depiction of the mining activities of Aron and his fellow pork-knockers. While ostensibly offering freedom from the dominant economic order of the plantation, the pork-knockers’ operations in the interior are shown to repeat its extractive, unsustainable relation to both land and labour. (To be continued next week…)

1. See Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1891-1905 (Kingston, Port of Spain, and London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981), pp. 2-3.
2. See David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 221-223; Bonham C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 28-31; Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 64-72.
3. See C. T. Kimber, Martinique Revisited: The Changing Plant Geographies of a West Indian Island (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1988), pp. 180-81.
4. See Grove, Green Imperialism, p. 67.
5. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, p. 30.
6. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” Socialist Register (2004), 188.
7. Karl Marx, Capital. Vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin and New Left Review, 1981), p. 949.
8. Marx, Capital. Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 579-80.
9. ibid., p. 860, n. 23.

(To respond to this author, either call him on (592) 226-0065 or send him an email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com)