ELLY Niland is a significant Guyanese writer. Her mellifluous, lyrical poetry collections, In Retrospect, Cornerstones, and East of Centre, have sharp angles that surprise and delight. Niland’s poetry is characterised by a fine, granular attention to nebulous emotions, coming close to what we feel but often find difficult to describe in words. Hers is a poetry of surprise, candour, and deadpan humour, in which the punch line arrives as an afterthought, or in which a situation, often serious, contains its own comedy. She brings the same lyricism and emotional sensitivity to the ten stories in her Guyana Prize-winning short story collection, Bone Soup and Other Tales (MJN Press, 2016), which in structure and subject occasionally resemble the stories in Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River, with something, too, of Jan Carew’s The Guyanese Wanderer.
In Niland’s tales, however, there is nostalgia, not the mordantly sentimental kind, but a nostalgia in which the past is excavated and examined, stirring up uncomfortable truths. Here, the extraordinary is found in the mundane, which acquires the quality of something never before seen because those who inhabit this world have rarely stopped to analyse or observe it. It is not surprising that most of the stories concern children, mostly boys, or mothers. Fathers are rarely central; at best, they remain peripheral, somewhere at the edge of the story or entirely off the page. These are not happy stories, per se. Their lyricism often belies the harsh realities beneath them.
The title story, “Bone Soup”, has the compressed feel of carefully edited prose and a sting in its tail. Its reveal is surprising, but the stronger effect comes not from the surprise itself, but from recognising a familiar and painfully realistic experience of poor people. Every Sunday, the nameless narrator’s mother sends him to the local butcher shop to beg for bones and scraps for their dog. Each time, the butcher provides them, wrapping them neatly for the boy to take home to his mother. The meat, of course, is not for the dog. The boy and his mother have none for themselves. The butcher may know this. But he plays along, helping preserve their dignity. No one needs to humiliate poor people. The small families in these stories live in tightly knit coastal communities in Guyana, where everyone knows everyone else.
Niland’s eye for realistic description is remarkably attentive; even the finest details of the mundane are captured. When the boy in “Bone Soup” goes to see the butcher, we see the clotting blood of freshly cut meat, the carcasses hanging from hooks; we hear the buzzing flies and smell the rankness of the butchery. The boy, of course, is familiar with these realities, so what he sees comes across as matter-of-fact rather than revelatory. Something similar occurs in “Market Day”, in which another boy goes to market with his mother and discovers that there is more to be found there than food. The story is ultimately about people rather than things. The boy’s interactions with the sellers, and their genuine concern for him, are poignant and protective, knitting him more firmly into the community and into the fabric of place.
The stories enshrine indelible relationships and connections. These filial and tutorial relationships feel like “passing the torch”, with knowledge, skill, and tradition moving from one generation to another. “A Chef’s Table” is an explicit amalgam of this idea. The child, taught how to prepare a dish, is being inducted into a tradition, not through formal instruction, but sideways and gently, through correction and direction. It is a distinctly Caribbean pedagogy of practical home economics, in which knowledge is absorbed through participation rather than formally imparted.
All the tales deftly dispense with extravagant exposition, leaving on the page a precise rendering of the characters’ perceptions. What they see, the reader sees, and their gaze is particular and fierce. This is especially evident in their observations of where they live and work and in their sense of place. Niland sketches the coastal villages in a few deft sentences that ring true, touching on what is seen, heard, smelled, and even tasted. Nowhere is this more evident than in “Market Day”, where the women’s language, rendered in East Indian Creole, is as authentic as the description of the market environment itself. Language and landscape exist in seamless congeniality.
Most of the stories read like snatches of autobiography, and many are narrated in the first person, offering a singular perspective through which everything is seen and known. This point of view is not always successful. Because the world is apprehended almost entirely through the narrator’s eyes, the perspective can become limiting, sometimes too outward-looking, seeing everything except the self.
In “Holiday”, a nostalgic story, the narrator laments that “now that life is nearly done”, suggesting that she is an older woman reflecting on an idealised childhood spent in the countryside during long school holidays. The narrator comes from “town”, and she shows a genuine sense of wonder at country things, country people, and the country way of life. The narrator is never named, but we might call her Elly. Her nostalgia is that of a child, one without an understanding of the history behind what she sees. When she watches a woman washing clothes by hand, for instance, she does not consider that machines can do such backbreaking work. The adult narrator later punctures this idealised balloon. The youthful gaze gives way to adult reality and to a more circumspect awareness of gossip, poverty, religious wrongdoing, and the vulgar realities of life.
A particular issue with these stories is that we do not always get to know the characters, their inner lives, their cares, their fears. They are outward-looking people whose gazes extend beyond themselves, with insufficient self-reflection. This may be because many of the central characters are children, whose lives have not yet accumulated enough experience to examine. But even what they do possess is often subsumed beneath the abundance of things they notice in the world around them. Much comes from without and comparatively little from within. We rarely encounter their physicality or receive enough personal detail to construct a fully realised picture of the “I” who tells each story. Many characters remain unnamed or are described only minimally. The stories consequently leave the reader wanting more. But this is hoping for more than the author needs to supply. After all, this is a book of “tales”, as the title makes explicit, and tales are sufficiently distinct from “short stories”. These tales adhere to the conventions of the genre: they exemplify the oral tradition of storytelling, employ familiar tropes of folklore, and possess a distinctly didactic inclination.
The best tales in the collection sustain a lyricism that exists beyond character and carries the reader along, as good prose should. At times, the rhythm and language take us down another road, making us almost forget the characters themselves. Jamaica Kincaid’s incantatory prose in “Girl” and “In the Night” does something similar. This quality also appears in “A Chef’s Table”, “A Mother’s Tale”, and “Know It All”, though not always with the same sustained force.
These are tales of childhood in a particular time and place: a British Guiana of the past, before independence. They have many charms, are often funny, and are told with consistent lyricism. Yet the characters sometimes pale in comparison to their settings and the excellent detail with which those settings are rendered. They are mostly lookers, their gazes directed outward. The reader does not always get to know them sufficiently from within.
Some of the strongest narratives, “Money Hawk” and “Fish Tales”, for example, create characters of atmosphere that are almost as compelling as the human beings in the tales. They possess an eliding quality, in which place appears almost on the fly as the narrator passes through a town, his eyes alighting with poetic precision on people, buildings, birds, and trees. The effect is sometimes almost haiku-like in its brevity and imaginative compression. There is something of the tourist’s perspective here: the eye moves quickly across the landscape, registering details and impressions without necessarily penetrating deeply into the lives of those being observed.
“Money Hawk”, in particular, employs a framing narrative that invites the reader on a journey through the village. The landscape and its landmarks are pointed out, along with some of the inhabitants and fragments of their histories. The result is less a conventional narrative than a guided passage through a remembered place.
The collection is ultimately about time and place: a pre-independence Guyana and, more specifically, the coastal villages that constitute its social and imaginative landscape. Niland’s rendering of place is indelible and authentic, filled with the rituals, habits, speech, and realistic details of everyday village life. For this reason, the tales are a joy to read. Yet one cannot help wishing some were longer, allowing the characters and their motivations to develop more fully. A wonderful lyricism runs through the collection, consistent without becoming monotonous, and this lyricism, along with Niland’s extraordinary eye for the details of place, remains one of the book’s greatest pleasures.
