By Michael Niblett
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.

At first, as Kwame Dawes notes, Aron imagines the interior to be “uncolonised space, virgin territory where he can experience the primal dawn of the pioneer.”  The idea of the interior as a locus for renewal is reinforced by the connection that is made between the forest environment and an expanded or liberated sensibility. “[M]y whole being came alive in the forest,” exclaims Aron. “The sight of the sun, white and molten in a wide sky, the big trees with no wind to breathe on them at midday, orchids and wild flowers on a rock-face, the sound of a river shouting quickened the flow of my blood and made my heart jump with excitement” (p. 240). This sense of liberation is contrasted with a feeling of confinement on the coast, where, says Aron, “we had been shut in [. . .], cramped between the sea and an ocean of forest” (p. 108). Insofar as the coastal landscape has been contoured by the demands of colonial capital, the freedom experienced in the relatively undeveloped (in capitalist terms) interior can be read as signalling emancipation from a habitus bounded by colonial norms. Moreover, the interior seems to provide the material opportunities for a different way of life. The mining activities of the pork-knockers appear to hold out the possibility of an alternative to the plantation complex—a basis for accumulation independent of colonial interests.
However, despite its incomplete subordination to the colonial economy, the interior is not the virginal space Aron conceives it to be, but rather one pervaded by the ghosts of colonial history. Take the following passage, which describes a dream Aron has after arriving in Perenong and visiting the remnants of the mineshaft in which his father was killed:

I was a boy in Mahaica again, hunting in the swamps. I walked up to a cluster of lilies, but before I reached near them the earth suddenly swallowed them. I reached the spot and heard voices shouting under the water, the voices of a man and a woman [. . .]. They climbed out of the deep hole and came towards me and for a moment I thought they were my father and mother. I ran towards them calling them by name, but as I drew near I discovered that they were headless and the laughter and talk were coming from a hole in the centre of their shoulders.  (p. 113)

Aron’s dream evokes a jungle landscape haunted by the discursive and material legacies of colonialism. The image of the headless people recalls the stories recounted in Walter Ralegh’s The Discovery of Guiana (1596) of the Ewaipanoma, while the extractive relationship to the environment augured by Ralegh’s inventorial account of Guiana’s natural resources persists in the pork-knockers’ gouging out and mining of the landscape (the “deep hole” of Aron’s dream is a reference to the mineshaft in which his father died). Although Aron initially experiences a sense of liberation in the interior, the quest for gold and diamonds ultimately brings about his alienation from the landscape. Like the pork-knockers, who see themselves “as giants subduing a wide world” (p. 114), he comes to view it as merely an external object against which to define his individuality. Thus, he remains bounded by the capitalist logic of the separation of society from nature.
Indeed, it becomes clear that this logic, and in particular the law of value, writes itself all over Aron and the pork-knockers’ activities. The impulse towards ceaseless accumulation that seizes hold of them is accompanied by an increasing inability to view nature as anything other than a store of quantities to be appropriated and consumed. Marx, in indicting capitalism’s disturbance of “the metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” argues that this mode of production “only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”  Despite its underdeveloped character, the pork-knocking industry as it is presented in Black Midas would seem to bear out Marx’s point. Repeatedly in the novel we see miners driven to pushing the exploitation of nature beyond existing limits in their quest for wealth, only for this to precipitate an environmental reaction and a human calamity. Thus, Aron’s father drowns after a vein of gold is pursued too close to a creek-bed; James Wellington, one of Aron’s men, is crushed by a falling tree after digging below its roots in search of diamonds; and Aron loses a leg when his relentless tunnelling causes the mineshaft to fall in on him at the end of the novel.
The dynamics at work here are neatly summarized by Aron’s companion Pancho:

If it wasn’t for you, skipper, me would ‘ave lef’ the gold just where it born in the earth belly. Me like me hunting and me fishing, me walking through the bush whole day, and now and then me like a spell in town to gaff and drink with the boys. If all the folks in the world was like me, the gold and diamond would ‘ave lef’ jus’ where they was borned ’cause when you take thing out the earth and you en’t put nothing back the land and the river does claim sacrifice.  (p. 257)

Pancho sets up a clear opposition between a sustainable, subsistence-style economy oriented around use-value, and the expansive, appropriative, and exchange-oriented logic undergirding the miners’ activities. His final remark, moreover, points implicitly to the metabolic rift and its impact with regards to the rupturing of ecosystems and the depletion of resources, as well as to the necessity of ecological restitution as the condition for the rational production of nature.
Carew’s novel can be read as underscoring the importance of such ecological restitution. Those incidents referred to above, in which characters are killed or injured as a result of over-exploiting the earth, gesture figuratively to the problems generated by its absence. This in turn might be read as a negative critique of the repercussions for the country as a whole of having been denied the possibility of the restitution of natural and economic wealth by capitalist imperialism.
If we accept that Black Midas mediates the environmental consequences of colonialism in this way, it becomes possible to read the metabolic rift and its effects back into whole strands of imagery in the novel. There are a series of other incidents that continue the theme of nature ‘taking revenge’ for a lack of restitution, including the death of a pork-knocker after the killing of a snake (p. 121) and a dream of Aron’s in which the earth sucks him down into “a well of darkness” (p. 31). But the narrative also returns to the initial opening of the rift in Guyana, that is, to the original ecological trauma wrought by colonial penetration. Mahaica is described as “a bowl axed out of swamps and forests on a river bank” (pp. 22-23). The socio-environmental situation this instantiated—an agricultural landscape from which the nutrients were gradually being leached—seems to resonate in the description of the drought that strikes the village:

The sun burnt fiercer and the sunsets looked like a broken rainbows piled           high on the edge of the sky. [. . .] On my way to Grandpa’s farm, I saw a host of white roots under the shallow water in the rice fields day after day coming closer to the surface as the sun enticed them to their death. The river fed on the swamps and the sun in turn fed on swamp and river. The villagers caught basketfuls of fish in muddy waterholes until the sun dried these up, leaving the air heavy with the stench of rotting fish.  (p. 35)

In the context of the colonial depletion of the ecosystem, the image of the sun feeding on and draining the vitality from the land becomes heavily over-determined. Later in the novel, the connotations of this motif are figured more explicitly through another of Aron’s dreams, one that emphasizes the way the colonial encounter established Guyana as a nutrient source for a gluttonous metropole: “I [. . .] dreamt about Christopher Columbus coming to my grandma’s hut in Mahaica. And she had prepared a meal for him of white yams, eddoes, peas and rice, and just as we were all about to sit down to eat, Columbus complained that he had stomach ulcers and my grandma cut up some slices of roast beef for him” (p. 226).
Crucially, the above motifs spill over into more general descriptions of the colonial condition, so that the traumas of ecological history become associated with the brutalities of the existing social structure. For example, in musing on the lawyer George Kendall’s success in penetrating the exclusive, viciously competitive world of the native bourgeoisie, Aron describes him as having “axed his way into high circles” (211), thereby recalling the earlier description of Mahaica. Kendall himself, meanwhile, depicts the colonizers in terms highly suggestive of the ecological despoliation of the country: “‘The white man is like a tiger orchid, high up, feeding on us, never sinking roots in the mud: he brings his orchid house from England and lives in it. He’s leeching away our sap all the time, but he’s so high up we don’t even know or care for that matter’” (p. 210).
Similar imagery crops up throughout the novel: it is rarely as explicitly linked to colonial exploitation as in the preceding passage, but the effect of the accretion of such tropes and conceits is to reinforce the sense of the text as haunted by the ecological repercussions of colonialism. Thus, Aron talks of old age as turning “people into vampires”: “They must feed on the young, shut them up in rooms, breathe the same air they breathe, claw at their young limbs with dried-up hands and gloat over their innocence” (p. 22).  Personal relationships are characterized in terms of consumption and parasitism: “I didn’t like the way I depended on her for everything,” Aron says of his lover Belle. “It was as if she had leeched away a part of my insides and I was no longer whole (p. 154).
There are a series of other motifs I could mention, but I want to turn briefly to narrative form. It is possible to identify a generic discontinuity in Black Midas: the novel appears initially to be following a fairly standard Bildungsroman format, tracing the development and maturation of the protagonist; but it then veers off into a picaresque tale defined by the serial piling up of adventures. Moreover, Kwame Dawes has noted the way Carew’s text does not really progress in the sense of moving towards a narrative climax. Aron, he argues, fails to reach any new “understanding of self that will allow us to read a natural closure to the work.”
This argument can be extended to the pork-knockers more generally. Just as the narrative piles one adventure on top of another without Aron experiencing any kind of qualitative transformation, so the pork-knockers constantly acquire wealth but do not actually accumulate anything. They expend all they earn and must always start over afresh. Hence, they remain locked in a cycle devoid of real development. This static cycle of wealth and ruin would seem to stand as a figure for the colony’s underdevelopment, for the way the surplus value the country produces is constantly lost, exported abroad, and so unable to propel internal development. But the export of surplus value, as we have seen, is also the export of ecological resources. Thus, the dual emphasis in the narrative on the wealth-creating powers of the pork-knockers and the inability to make of this a platform for long-term gain points to the structural limit to growth imposed by dependency and the metabolic rift. The novel’s generic discontinuity can be read as mediating precisely this limit: the break with the Bildungsroman form—with the novel of formation and development—and the shift to a picaresque form that resists narrative closure, registers the break in nutrient cycling, in the return of ecological resources to the local environment and their capture by the unequal flow system of capitalist world-ecology.
In summary, therefore, the metabolic rift and the ecological trauma occasioned by the colonial penetration of Guyana pervade the aesthetics of Black Midas. The text in turn points to the necessity of abolishing the rift if independence is not to be as hollow a venture as the sawmill Aron invests in. As Carew’s novel intimates, so long as nature continues to be treated as merely an external object to be consumed and degraded, exploitative social relationships will also remain entrenched. For the exploitation and exhaustion of natural resources always entails the exploitation and exhaustion of the labourer: any attempt to reorganize society along more equitable lines must involve the reorganization of the nature-society relationship.

i Kwame Dawes, “Introduction,” in Black Midas by Jan Carew (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2009), 13.
ii Marx, Capital. Vol. 1, pp. 637-38.
iii Cf. Liebig on the British imperial policy of robbing the soil resources of other countries: “Like a vampire it hangs on the breast of Europe, and even the world, sucking its lifeblood without any real necessity or permanent gain for itself.” Quoted in Foster, “Marx’s Ecology in Historical Perspective,” 2.
iv Kwame Dawes, “Introduction,” in Black Midas by Jan Carew (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2009), pp. 8, 9

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