I am not the sort of person who stops reading a book halfway through. I always try to finish, continuing, hoping it gets better. However, I only managed to complete about two-thirds of John Edward Jenkins’ Lutchmee and Dilloo before I decided that I couldn’t go on anymore. The edition I read was published in 2010 by our very own Caribbean Press, but the novel itself was first published in the colonial days of 1877. The book focuses on an Indian couple named Lutchmee and Dilloo who travel from India to British Guiana as indentured labourers. This novel is important because it offers insight into the mind of the white colonialist and the way the “other” – colonized – people on the plantations were perceived by him. So, in terms of postcolonial criticism, the novel is quite a useful and significant one. However, there are other aspects of the novel that should not be brushed aside.
Jenkins’ white, colonialist ideology is present from the very first page when he describes the non-white characters in stereotypical, unflattering, and inadequate ways which entirely misrepresent the colonized people of British Guiana. Lutchmee, one of the novel’s titular characters, for example, is heavily eroticised and exoticised – with Jenkins first presentation of her focusing entirely on her body and how she looks. So much emphasis is placed on Lutchmee in relation to her own body (for example, the instances where she is almost raped) that what Jenkins’ heroine ends up being is a one dimensional character that is so hapless and vapid that she totally stands against what Jenkins sought to do with his novel, which is to accurately portray the life and people of British Guiana. Unless, of course, Jenkins really believed that his presentation of the Indian through Lutchmee was accurate – and with his background and the nature of the time in which he lived and wrote, it is entirely possible that he believed Indians to be exactly the way he presented them in his novel.
The African characters, such as Sarcophagus, are treated even worse than Lutchmee. Jenkins writes that Sarcophagus was “so dubbed by his master from a fancied resemblance in colour and otherwise to some Egyptian stone coffins…[and] for the further reason, that there seemed to be nothing in him” and that “the mind of Sarcophagus is not worth an elaborate analysis… The best instinct of Sarcophagus was a dumb one. If you tossed him a bundle of words, he used them as a gorilla would use a bundle of sticks.” If Jenkins’ description of the African character is not blatant racism, then I don’t know what is. To further compound Jenkins’ distorted representations of colonized people, we have his attempt at representing Guyanese Creole in his Literature. Creole is not, as many believe, simply “bad English.” Creole is a language in itself; a language that was beyond the abilities of Jenkins to comprehend or to represent on paper. In fact, the Creole dialogue he writes is as distorted, insufficient and disrespectful as his presentations of the colonized characters. Jenkins is not a very good writer. Even if his depictions of people were not racist – I just remembered that he referred to the Chinese as “pigtails” – his purple prose and sad attempt to merge poetic language with the novel form would still have resulted in a bad book.