ROOPNANDAN Singh is one of those Guyanese writers about whom one hears very little anymore, like Sheik Sadeek. This is owing, in part, to the fact that their novels and, in Singh’s case, his poetry were published locally, which almost guarantees that they will receive little critical attention beyond the borders of the country, and perhaps not much within it either, beyond the small, dedicated readership that exists in Guyana. Neither writer was particularly popular, even locally, but both were well known to a discerning minority of readers. For most writers, however, local recognition is rarely enough. The ambition of writing is always larger than local notoriety; one writes towards the widest readership one can imagine.
Writing, though, is more than ambition. It is also an urge, a forceful necessity. One senses that Sadeek and Singh wrote because they were writers and that this compulsion may have been the most important impetus behind their prolific production of books that often cost more to produce than they earned. Realistically, the possibility of making a living from their writing in the Guyanese milieu in which they began was virtually out of the question.
Singh’s self-published books belong very much to the enterprising publishing tradition of Guyana, a tradition born of necessity in a country that has never had a significant publishing house of its own. It was in this way that many Guyanese writers got their work into print. Even writers who would eventually become central figures in Caribbean and world literature had to find unconventional means of publication. The work of Edgar Mittelholzer, Jan Carew, Wilson Harris, Martin Carter, Ivan Van Sertima and others appeared through various local initiatives, including A. J. Seymour’s Miniature Poem series in the 1950s. The tradition extends beyond Guyana. Derek Walcott, the St Lucian Nobel laureate, was proud to say that his mother financed the publication of his first collection of poems, 25 Poems, in 1948, when he was eighteen.
This was very much a Caribbean creative tradition. We made music out of discarded steel drums; we made cuisine out of the ‘dash-way’ remnants of the massa’s kitchen; we made art out of the ordinary difficulties and limitations of daily life. Creativity in the Caribbean has often been an act of transformation: taking what is available and making something new of it.
I am not well-versed in the writings of Roopnandan Singh. I have read only his novel, Wild Maami, published in 1995. I know little about the man himself, but I gathered from the book’s adcard that he had previously published five collections of poetry and three novels, a significant body of work about which remarkably little appears to have been written. This is unfortunate because Singh is a fine and attentive writer.
Wild Maami is Singh’s third novel, although, at only ninety-four pages, it is more accurately a novella. It moves with the pace of a good thriller while displaying considerable psychological acuity and close attention to Guyaneseness, particularly the rhythms and textures of Guyanese Creole. These qualities make the book an interesting and, at times, compelling example of locally grounded Caribbean fiction.
The novel is set in Georgetown, in what appears to be the 1960s, when trains were still running in the country. It follows a young couple from their earliest courtship through a disastrous marriage to its final, merciful dissolution. It is not a good marriage; it is, in Singh’s telling, recognisably a Guyanese one, marked by self-sacrifice on the part of the wife and infidelity on the part of the husband. Nadira and Anil meet as teenagers, both still at home and recently out of school. Nadira comes from a disciplined household with her parents and siblings. Anil’s family situation is markedly different. His mother died when he was young, and he lives with his father and stepmother. He is unsettled, emotionally and domestically, and this instability foreshadows one of the novel’s central concerns: how childhood circumstances and nurture, or the absence of nurture, shape adult behaviour.
The young couple fall madly in lust, mistaking it for love, and Singh is particularly interested in exploring the distinction. There is a considerable amount of sex in the book, but it is suggestive rather than explicit, and its function is primarily narrative and psychological. Nadira and Anil possess the heedless sexual urgency of teenagers and repeatedly act without sufficient thought for the consequences. Nadira becomes pregnant and has an abortion. She becomes pregnant again, and this time they are compelled to marry.
That is effectively the end of romance. What follows is marriage, with all its hurts and psychological stressors: infidelity, resentment, irresponsibility and the careless disregard with which one person can treat another. The novel’s interest lies less in the conventional romantic arc than in the slow disintegration of the fantasy that initially binds the couple together.
The world of Wild Maami is remarkably insular, confined almost entirely to the principal characters and their perspectives. They move through a world that extends very little beyond the places in which they live and the people they know. There is consequently little sense of the larger political or social world in which the characters exist. We are not given a broader historical context or a substantial sense of society beyond their immediate apprehensions. This is not necessarily a weakness. Rather, it is a deliberate limitation of the novel’s scope. Singh offers very little exposition, and this contributes to the book’s brevity and pace. The story remains close to the characters, close to their speech, their desires, their resentments and their immediate circumstances. The result is an unusually intimate narrative.
The prose is direct, neither complicated nor dense. One of the marks of the novel’s authenticity is its deft use of Guyanese Creole, which, in places, is reminiscent of the language employed by Rooplall Monar. The dialogue often approaches poetry, its rhythm wonderfully attuned to the cadences and tones of actual speech. One does not get the sense of an approximation of the Guyanese vernacular; rather, one feels that the language itself has been captured. This is a considerable accomplishment. Writing convincing dialect is notoriously difficult, and Singh manages it with remarkable precision. One irritating blanche was the lack of spelling distinction between ‘awe’, which contextually would be ‘a-we’ in Creole, meaning ‘we’, and ‘awe’, associated with wonder, powerful emotions or something vast.
What is most evident throughout the novel is its authenticity: a raw and particular naturalism that comes close to what one might actually see and hear in Guyana. The marital travails ring with the uncomfortable truth of lived experience: the affairs, the recklessness, the betrayals and their inevitable consequences.
There is a particularly poignant scene towards the end of the book. Anil, in a moment of desperation, when his star is very much on the wane, returns to see his former wife. He has been reduced significantly from the man he once was. Nadira gives him a hundred dollars and tells him to go away. It is a sobering moment because the power dynamic between them has been completely reversed. Once, Anil was the dominant figure; now, Nadira possesses the power to dismiss him.
The scene is made more painful by his interaction with his two children, which is almost entirely devoid of filial connection. What exists between them is obligation rather than affection and love. Anil has never really been a father to them beyond the biological fact of fatherhood. His emotional absence becomes another measure of his diminishing significance, another indication of the obsolescence of the man he has become.
Singh is also saying something here about Guyanese women and the burdens they are often required to bear in relationships with bad husbands and irresponsible men. It is Nadira who ultimately triumphs over the men in her life: over her domineering but loving father; over Anil, her womanising husband; and over Chitram, her womanising lover, whose fate ends the novel with a bang. She eventually escapes both the country and the men who have defined so much of her life.
Singh seems to suggest that the women are ultimately the stronger characters: they endure, adapt and survive, while the men diminish, fail and, in some cases, die. The men are implicitly weak. What is especially striking is the subtle transformation of Nadira, which Singh handles with considerable care. She moves from the romantic innocence of puppy love to a growing awareness of her predicament with Anil, and from there to choice and agency. She gets a job, moves out, establishes a place of her own and eventually takes a lover, but by then her relationship with men has changed. Her motivations have become more calculating and mercenary. She has learnt, in effect, how to behave like a man.
This is consistent with the novel’s implicit understanding of Guyanese society as one in which women often exercise greater practical authority than men, even when the men imagine themselves to be in charge. Guyana can appear, in this respect, like a matriarchal society in which women rule while men pretend to rule.
There is, at times, in the novel, a reaching for profundity through conceits that lose their connection to the objects of comparison, along with a tendency to overexplain: to tell rather than show. These are minor distractions from what is otherwise a highly entertaining and dramatic narrative. The narrative voice occasionally intrudes upon the flow of the story with commentary on one matter or another. Such interventions create a certain dissonance and risk distracting the reader from the narrative’s momentum. This is unfortunate because the story itself is compelling, and Singh’s framing of it through the characters’ perspectives is otherwise consistent and deft.
But these are relatively minor reservations. Wild Maami is an exciting and culturally relevant read: a very Guyanese novel, attentive to the milieu, the people, the speech and the particularities of Guyanese culture. Its achievement lies partly in its refusal to distance itself from the ordinary realities of Guyanese life. It is psychologically attentive without being ponderous and linguistically convincing in a way that gives the novel much of its vitality.
There are echoes here of the psychologically acute fiction of another Guyanese writer, Roy Heath, particularly The Armstrong Trilogy and The Shadow Bride. Like Heath, Singh is interested in the intimate pressures of family, sexuality, marriage, class and social expectation, and in the ways these forces shape individual lives. Yet Singh’s voice is distinctly his own, particularly in his use of Guyanese speech and his sharp observation of domestic life.
It is perhaps one of the ironies of Guyanese literature that a writer such as Singh could produce a substantial body of work and yet remain so little known, even within the country of his birth. Wild Maami suggests that much more of his writing deserves to be recovered, read, discussed, and placed within the broader history of Guyanese and Caribbean literature. Writers like Singh remind us that literary history is not made only by those who achieve international recognition. It is also made by the persistent, often solitary labour of writers who continued to write because writing was something they had to do.
