Introduction by Victor J. Ramraj

In 1959, the Jamaican author V.S. Reid published his novel The Leopard, set in Kenya. It reflected his angry response to the defaming of a legitimate anti-colonial movement, the Mau-Mau, by the British and colonial press. In 1962, a year before the publication of Denis Williams’s Other Leopards, Derek Walcott published “A Far Cry from Africa,” a poem that evokes a conflicted response to those same Kenyan events and, through the powerful

metaphor of being “divided to the vein” (Walcott’s grandmothers were blacks and his grandfathers European), expresses his particular ambivalence as a colonial individual towards the two worlds in which he finds himself, the local and the imperial. In the year following the publication of Other Leopards, O.R. Dathorne’s The Scholar Man (1964) also explored the symbolic figure of a Caribbean man returning to Africa. In 1968, and without the ambivalences of Walcott, Williams and Dathorne, Edward Kamau Braithwaite published Masks, the second and African-set volume of his Arrivants trilogy. It was a period when in addition to Dathorne and Brathwaite, other writers such as Lindsay Barrett and Neville Dawes went to live in Africa. It was a period when in Jamaica the demand of Rastafarian groups to “go home” to Ethiopia began to penetrate public discourse when the UWI’s Institute of Social and Economic Research published the 1960 Report on thr Rastafarian Movement. In Guyana, in 1961 Eusi Kwayana had founded the African Society for Racial Equality (ASRE) and in 1964 set up ASCRIA, the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa. Denis Williams himself had spent ten years in Africa between 1958 and 1968: five years lecturing at the Khartoum School of Fine Arts and five years at the University of Ife in Nigeria.

This was the context in which Other Leopards appeared in 1963. What sets this landmark novel apart from the other works set in Africa at this time is its unremitting focus on its intensely ambivalent protagonist, Lionel Froad. Froad, like Walcott’s speaker, finds it difficult to choose between the African and the English worlds, plaintively asking “where shall I turn,” and Williams depicts his predicament in an impressive, arresting way. In the first part of the novel, Williams sets out the dichotomised life that underlies the crisis; in the second part he dramatizes the search for a consistent, stable identity. Both parts paint an insightful, psychological, socio-political portrait of a tormented and conflicted colonial, but it is in the second part in particular that Williams’s novelistic talent is most evident when he shows Lionel Froad trying to avoid falling into the interstices between apparently antithetical cultures and trying to find a resolution to his dilemma.
Froad’s disturbed consciousness of his duality is evident from the start. Like the author, he is an Afro-Guyanese educated in Britain. He has come to Johkara, a fictional version of Sudan, ostensibly to work as an archaeological draftsman for an English researcher, Hugh King, but essentially in the hope of finding in Africa his true roots and identity, which he thinks his colonial education has denied him. Intelligent and contemplative, often poetic in articulating his feelings, he informs an unidentified listener/reader what his problem is: “I am a man, you see, plagued by (my) two names, and this is their history: Lionel the who I was, dealing with Lobo, the who I continually felt I ought to become…All along, ever since I’d grown up, I’d been Lionel looking for Lobo. I’d felt I ought to become this chap, this alter ego of ancestral times that I was sure quietly slumbered behind the cultivated mask.”
Such meta-fictional commentary in the opening paragraph of the novel signals us to read the work as a colonial allegory of in betweenity, and many other elements in the novel – some transparent, some less so – support this direction. The opening locale shows Froad contemplating his divided psyche while stalled on a bus on Kutam Bridge, in a town linking the two physical environments of Johkara; it is “not quite sub-Sahara, but then not quite desert; not equatorial black, not Mediterranean white. Mulatto. Sudanic mulatto, you could call it. Ochre. Semi-scrub. Not desert, not sown.” The dividedness of the setting (described in human terms) reinforces the dividedness of the protagonist. In addition to Froad’s being caught between the imperial lion and the native wolf (“lobo” is Spanish and Portuguese for “wolf”) as his first names point up, he sees his current identity as “froadulent”. Other names are allegorical in a more sophisticated way. Halfway through the novel, distinguishing between individuals who are absolutely sure of themselves and their causes, and those who are burdened with uncertainties and doubts. Froad uses the image of the novel’s title: “Some leopards think they have no spots simply because they have no mirrors. Others manage to know, somehow”. So among lobos and leopards he identifies two kinds: those with and those without self-awareness. Froad clearly is “another leopard,” aware of his spots, aware of his vacillation and ambivalence, and in this duality there is perhaps a comment on V.S. Reid’s slightly earlier novel, The Leopard, where the eponymous beat is an altogether less complex metaphor. Froad pays a price for his self-knowledge – he who yearns “to be committed, happy. Like everybody else”. But given his compulsion to know himself he is unlikely to succumb to the self-deception such response entails.
Hughie King, Froad’s nemesis, is evidently an allegorical reflection of imperial power – through more fleshed out than the Old Dowager, George Lamming’s imperial allegorical counterpart in Water with berries (1971). But King has an additional allegorical function in Other Leopards. If Williams portrays Lobo as Lionel’s alter ego, his id, representing the intuitive, the passionate, “the swamp and forests and vaguely felt darkness”, King is the cerebral, the disciplined, the ordered, the enquiring–the super ego qualities Froad both admires and resents. Despite King’s condescending criticism of his inability to be more even-tempered and methodical, Froad is “fond of him”, admitting that he envies his “cold intelligence; clear apart mind”. Williams recurringly points to their duality through images of marriage and love (the literalness of which the text plays down). On one occasion, Froad states: “I sometimes felt Hughie could read my thoughts…In some things it was like we were married”. And at the end of the novel, when Lionel tries to shed this burdensome component of his psyche by killing King, Hughie appears to be an understanding participant. “So fast it was as though he was greedy for the screwdriver; he came hungrily into it, like we were lovers understanding this inevitable moment”. Whether or not we are meant to read a homoerotic sub-text here, it nevertheless reinforces the figurative significance of Froad’s assault on his British alter ego.
Williams draws a parallel with another work that has frequently been read as an allegory of the colonial-imperial relationship. Just before Froad plunges the screwdriver into King’s neck, he attempts to hum Ariel’s song “Where the Bee Sucks” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but he finds he “couldn’t sing”. Ariel is Prospero’s smart, temporising, diplomatic servant and Froad cannot sing Ariel’s song because at the point when he makes his murderous assault, he is not Ariel but Prospero’s confrontational other servant Caliban (-Lobo), who uses the language his master has taught him to curse him. Williams suggests Froad’s potential is to appear to King/Prospero as either Ariel or Caliban, unlike Lamming (in Water with Berries) or Aime Cesaire (in the Une Tempete [1969]) who both appear to suggest that West Indian colonials are essentially Calibans (without acknowledging their Arieleque possibilities).
Froad, as a self-aware leopard, is ambivalent in his response to the intuitive world of Lobo, his African-native alter ego. He is disillusioned, for instance, when he discovers the true nature of Amanishakete, the Queen of Meroe in BCE 1. In earlier discussions with Froad, King has relegated Amanishakete culture to the status of the marginal; with no influence on what followed. For Froad, Amanishakete was to prove Ling wrong; she was to counter his dismissive comments, show once and for all that Froad had a noble African ancestry. But when Froad visits the archaeological site where figures of Amanishakete have been unearthed, he finds statues of her flogging slaves. He cannot help seeing her as “cruel, gross, ugly…she knew hate and law. No trace of love and care. She was a spreading desert”. With this disillusioning discovery, the Lionel-King part of his psyche wins through, repressing his Lobo identity.
Williams, further portrays Froad’s divisions in his relationships with the two women he becomes intimate with in Johkara: Eve, the daughter of “the chief”, a domineering black Christian missionary, who like Froad, is from Guyana; and Catherine, King’s secretary, who is from Wales together they constitute another binary opposition tugging at Froad. With patent allegorical intent, Williams has Froad recognise a sketch of Amanishakete in an archaeological volume to be “the image, pure and simple and shatteringly original, of Eve”. Eve has married a Muslim against her Christian father’s wishes, and, when the novel opens, has fled her husband’s home with their baby. Froad, in his Lobo frame of mind, sees her initially as a kindred spirit and becomes her lover. Williams describes Eve, who always addresses Froad as Lobo, never as Lionel, in terms of images associated with the wolf. He compares her to the gloom of forest floors and dark, silent rivers, and (before his disillusion) Froad perceives her as a true descendant of Amanishakete: “Raw, earthly, nearer to the natural state”. Froad, in his Loboesque moments, admires her commitment to Africa, her participation in the spirit-invoking women’s zaar ceremonies and her dancing at local weddings. As Lionel he is less apprehensive of her. King has dismissively told Froad that the Amanishakete culture is a “faecal culture”, and it is in faecal contexts that Froad, as Lionel, comes to see Eve. On one occasion, furious at her for lying to him about being pregnant, he searches for her in an area filled with scavengers emptying latrine buckets in their carts, and later gains entrance to the place she is visiting through a latrine at the rear of the building.
Catherine, who is presented in almost every instance as a foil to Eve, also becomes Froad’s lover. Concerned for his welfare, she acts as a buffer between Froad and King, interpreting King’s apparently imperial attitudes in less offensive ways to Froad. She tries to draw Froad out of what she sees as his beloved “Burden”, his obsessive preoccupation with self, trying to persaud him that King is not always his nemesis. She perceives Lionel as an Anglophile, matter-of-factly asking him, “You ever wished you were white…?” – a question that angers yet preoccupies his. He shares with Catherine his most analytical, reflective thoughts, which he seldom lets Eve hear. He tells Catherine about his meeting with the Muslim leader who wants him to write for their political organ, impressing on her his role as a reluctant Africanist. While Lobo appends Eve in relation to dark tropical imagery, Lionel sees Catherine in terms of romantic Welsh images (an Aspect of the novel that draws intertextually on the contrast set up by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness between Kurtz’s Intended and his African mistress). She is “like those distilled, shadowless twilights you get at times in the Welsh valleys, illuminated from the clouds”. These elements in the novel point clearly ahead to, for instance, the postcolonial fiction of David Dabydeen. Besides the parallel Conradian echo of The Intended (1991), Dabydeen’s Disappearance (1993) takes his Guyanese engineer from Guyana to England rather than Africa (through colonial Africa is present in Mrs Rutherford’s Kentish cottage), but the two novels have much in common in there allegorical structures and fondness for inter-textual reference.
Further illuminating Foard’s state of in-betweenity, Williams portrays him as caught between opposing political causes in Johkara. On the one side are the secessionist Christian blacks of the South; on the other the ruling Muslim Arabs of the North. Eve’s Christian father and Mohammed, an Arab spokesman, both try to persuade him to write in support of their respective causes, one appealing to Froad’s Christian upbringing, the other to his Pan-African sentiments. Williams – again underlining Froad’s duality – has both sides appeal to him in exactly the same words: the trust he will do the right thing because he is “a Christian Negro interested in the future of Africans in Africa”. Froad does not see any true devotion to Africa on either side. He vacillates and procrastinates, and though he does write a piece in support of the Northern status quo, he does so impulsively – as Lobo – and from no strong belief. Whilst he envies others who can make unambiguous commitments, he never manages this himself.
In the latter part of the novel, Williams shows Froad obsessed with the ancient Greek myth of Zagreus. Zagreus, the product of an illicit union between Persephone and Zeus (in the form of a serpent), is pursued by the Titians, set on him by the jealous Hera. To survive, Zagreus has to assume many disguise, but in the end is torn apart by the Titians. The novel offers – metafictionally – multiple ways of interpreting this myth as it applies to Froad’s plight. Froad perceives himself to be similarly the product of an illicit union and to be in need of protection against forces – more emotional than physical in his case – that seek to overwhelm him. Almost himself torn apart by Muslim women at the Zaar, Froad empathetically feels that Zagreus need not have perished. Catherine, on the other hand, sees no parallel between Zagreus and Froad; she argues that Zagreus accepted his fate as the hunted while Froad wallows in self-pity, in love with his “Burden”. The Chief, by contrast, feels that Zagreus had to die because, as a bastard, he lacked the moral force to fight evil (the Titians) and because he broke with his people. Hughie King feels the myth has significance only insofar as it is read historically or seen as underlining the truth that “opposition is the fundamental attitude of being homo sapiens”. To his interesting frustration, Froad is left to wonder which of these interpretations is pertinent.
Other Leopards provides no solution to Froad’s predicament. The ending of the novel leaves Froad, like the proverbial possum, literally “up a gum tree” (an apt phrase given its ambiguous significance of being in a state of contentment or in a state of great difficulty). After stabbing King, he flees to a belt of Johkara jungle, strips himself of his clothing, daubs himself with mud, and perches on a tree. The last paragraph depicts him in this position watching a brightening horizon and wondering if it is King coming after him – having survived Froad’s assault – or if it is really the dawning of a new day. And if it is King, will he be cruel or kind? If it is a new day, will it still be burdened with debilitating ambivalence? The Allegorical implication of all this is that, unable to accept that he is one thing or another (unlike Eve in her categorical immersion in Africa, or Catherine in her easy decision to return to her life in Wales, or the Chief in his readiness to be deported back to Guyana), Froad appears to be experiencing a reverse evolution back to a primordial state from which he will eventually evolve organically, naturally, in “his own” time. The tree in which he awaits the approaching dawn is one indigenous to the Sudan region – a hashab tree. From this variety of semi-desert tree comes almost all of the world’s gum Arabic. As such it is essential to the economy of the region. It provides, too, much needed fuel and building materials and its strong roots prevent erosion and hold off the encroaching desert. This and the meaning of its Hebraic name – “planning an d thinking” – makes it an appropriate tree for Froad to ascend as he waits, naked, for a possible rebirth or, in his primordial state, for evolution. He does not know what he will become – his own man? – or even what that entail: whether he will discover and accept his African roots, or come to embrace his Ariel-Caliban, Lionel-Lobo conflicted existence. The ending, though ambiguous, is not pessimistic. On the contrary, the images and phrasing suggest a fresh start. What form it will take is not, however, clear.
William’s own life and subsequent writing offers support for a positive reading of the ending of the ending of the novel. In an interview with me, he said that, feeling uncomfortable with Europe and Africa, he decided in the 1960s to return to his own “primordial world”, the interior of Guyana. He lived from 1968 to 1974 in the Mazaruni area of Guyana hinterland, writing and painting and researching Amerindian tribal art, particularly their petroglyphs. He describes this as a “tremendous” period of his life, one free of “twentieth-century anxieties”. He recalls with pride the building his own home, acting as midwife when his wife gave birth, and having no library, no books other than – oddly – a regular subscription to The New Statesman, through which he “kept up with language”. Was this Williams’s own ascent of the hashab tree?
In his 1970 Edgar Mittleholzer lectures, Image and Idea in the Arts of Guyana, Williams addresses very explicitly the “mongrel” condition, the cultural heterogeneity of the Caribbean and the Guyanas. (Williams’s daughter, Charlotte, adopts the expression “mongrel” approvingly for her own mixed heritage – Guyanese-Welsh – in her memoir Sugar and Slate [2002]). In an argument that presages the ideology of creolite, of the creative potential of a mestizo consciousness, Williams argues strongly against the tendency of seeing Caribbean history “in the light of biases adopted from one thoroughbred culture to another, of the Old World” (the references in Guyana in 1970 being African, Indian, European cultural contexts). In particular, Williams argues against the perpetuation of “filiastic dependence on the cultures of our several racial origins” because this inhibits Guyanese and Caribbean people from “facing up to the facts of what we ubiquity are”. It is an argument, albeit expressed in a more materialist vein that points us to see Other Leopards, in spite of Froad’s patently ambivalent and conflicted state of mind. Attuned to be the same context as two of Wilson Harris’s early novels, The Far Journey to Oudin (1961) and The Secret Ladder (1963), where respectively the old world heritages of East Indian and African (and by inference the European as well) are seen as beset by the tendency to be locked in “ghetto and arbitrary reservations of self-interest”, a “self-sufficiency” that n Ken Ramchand’s words, denies the reality of the Caribbean’s “complicated and incestuous family tree”.
Though the ending of the Other Leopards points Williams’s later more explicitly positive thinking about mongrelization, it is its ambiguity that attracted critical attention from the moment the novel was published. Gerald Moore sees Froad as regressing towards infantilism; as such he sums up the novel as a record of failure “but it is a failure of the kind necessary to understanding”. For Michael Gilkes, “climbing the tree is a symbolic act, for the tree…represents a hollow pillar of light by which the shaman climbs up to heaven or down to the underworld”. For Louis James the “pressures of finding an identity have driven Froad…into ‘the castle of his skin’, rejecting possession of either Africa or Europe. However agonizing this position, it is the true point of discovery”. Edward Baugh believes that what Froad comes to accept is that he is a split individual, adding that it “may seem a let-down to the reader that Froad has taken as many pages to recognise what the reader might have been able to tell him from the onset; but what is important is that Froad now does recognise it”. Mark Kinkead-Weekes sees the ending as “a mordant exposure of what it means to be ‘uncommitted’ and without ‘identity,’ whilst Wilfred Cartley reads the novel as being in “search of a freedom in which all times fuse…”. As these different is contiguous reading demonstrate, Williams has not written a simplistic novel – whether allegorical or literal – in which he provides easy answers. His concern is with dramatising Froad’s debiliting colonial in betweenity. Later writers and theorists would offer ways of coping with this colonial-postcolonial predicament. There would be V.V. Naipaul’s argument that even though the English tradition is not his, the English language certainly is, or Derek Walcott’s view that his “divided self” allowed him a more encompassing, cosmopolitan vision; or Christopher Koch, in the Doubleman (1985), similarly seeing his protagonist as not disadvantaged when he describes him in that eponymous state; or Salman Rushdie considering it as advantage to be a “translated man” and Homi Bhabha talking positively of a “third space” between the imperial and colonial sphere that allows the colonial; the advantage of camouflaged mimicry. All this was to come, but in 1963, Williams is willing to leave Froad up the hashab tree, thinking about and anticipating what comes next. Perhaps there are times in the novel when the allegoric overwhelms the literal, flesh-and-blood creation and development of character. Williams is preoccupied with the generic problems of racial and national identities, less with the psychological truths of personal problems and relationships. As the first part of his epigraph to the novel from Ptolemy indicates – “Some things happen to mankind through more general circumstances and not as a result of the individual’s natural propensities” – he is exploring the effects of the larger, historical-political factors rather than the individual’s “hill of beans”. There are times, in the first part more than in the second, when the players are not so much individuals as representative figures. They talk about politics, race, and culture – the dominant elements that define their relationships. King and Froad discuss African antiquity in documentary rather than personal fashion; Catherine and Lionel debate about whether he years to be white; and Lionel and Eve talk about cultural differences in analytical rather than personal terms. If Eve does briefly reveal her jealously for Catherine when she accuses Lionel of being “white inside and you can’t man me because the whiteskin woman’s on y’ mind”, it is done in a way that leaves the women representative rather than individual figures. In the second part of the novel, which illuminates the last sentence of the epigraph from Ptolemy – “For the lesser cause always yields to [the] greater and stronger” – Williams makes a stronger attempt to impart more flesh-and-blood dynamic to his characters when they explore their experiences with lovers and parents. But however much one may regret the price Williams pays for privileging the allegorical over the individual and the psychological, there can be no doubt, on the evidence of his epigraph, that this was precisely his intention. Like Wilson Harris, Denis Williams was committed to an aesthetic that by-passed the novel of character; as an allegorical work Other Leopards is unquestionably one of the most sustained and artistically realised in West Indian literature.