Kingdom come

By Edward Baugh


The Fear of Stones, by Kei Miller (Macmillan Caribbean, ISBN 13: 987-1-4050-6637-2; ISBN 10: 1-4050-6637-7, 158 pp)

Kingdom of Empty Bellies, by Kei Miller (Heaventree Press, ISBN 0-9548811-2-5, 84 pp)

Kei Miller makes an impressive debut, proving himself equally gifted at short story and poem. He writes with passionate understanding of bruised, repressed, and deprived selves seeking, achieving, or failing to find release and freedom. Deep feeling and violent experience, hinted at by the titles of the collections, are represented with tact, sensitivity, artistic control, and technical variety.

The stories in The Fear of Stones imagine a range of characters whose lives and potential for self-realisation are trapped in adverse and extreme circumstances. In not a few cases they are subject to or live in fear of violent physical abuse. Where this abuse is depicted, the narration is taut, controlled, without sensationalism. The stone image and the fear associated with it strike the keynote of the collection. The image, explicit and foregrounded in some stories, implicit in others, assumes variable symbolic significance. It is, for instance, the stone of punishment which the community hurls to drive away or kill those who have transgressed against its shibboleths. It is the stone of hardship, of poverty, and injustice which afflicts the poor. It is the stone of fear and inarticulacy that sticks in the throats or stomachs of the abused. It may even be some preternatural, irrational sense of dread or doom that one carries secretly inside oneself. In “Love in the Time of Fat” (an echo of Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera), the stone of painful, repressed memory, which Jackie carries inside her, is dislodged in an avalanche of release.

The preternatural and the ghostly give an added dimension to one or two of the stories, and, relevant to this dimension, there is the symbolism of the ominous. For instance, in “Walking the Tiger Road”, the protagonist’s sense of threat and doom is imaged in his nightmare of being attacked by a tiger. The symbolism is extended, as the story reaches its climax, in the tiger-striped appearance of the road on which he is walking home in excited anticipation of seeing his mother again. At the same time, there is the mother’s increasing sense of the ominous in the seemingly obsessive pecking of the woodpecker on a nearby light-post, which has intrigued her for months and from the outset of the story. At first, her religious-superstitious mind had read it as a good sign, that her son would be returning to her. The climax of the story is the collision, as it were, of the two sign-symbols.

The title “Walking the Tiger Road” aptly suggests the awareness of lurking danger and social hostility with which the protagonist has to live once he realises his homosexuality. In “Tolston Closing”, eighteen-year-old Naomi finds love and hope when she is rescued by the proud Rastaman Tolston from her poverty-stricken life and an abusive, alcoholic father. She commits herself completely to the authority of Tolston’s belief system, and is psychologically paralysed when, after her sixth pregnancy, Tolston walks out on her. How she eventually responds to this abandonment and loss of self is instructive.

The oppressive force of class and colour in the Jamaican context is a central factor in “Government Cows” and “Blood on the Door”. In the former, working-class Augustus Silvera has for years been writing letters to the editor of the newspaper. The letters are his attempt to bring to public notice particular situations which show the scant regard which the Establishment has for the underprivileged. However, none of his letters has ever been published. Frustrated, he decides to stop writing. The story takes the form of the last letter that he will ever write to the editor, a woman. To read the story is to understand why this letter has to be the last, and to enjoy Augustus’s sweet revenge as we get to the twist in the tale. Most importantly, though, the story implicitly brings home the truth that Augustus’s letters have never been published because, to use a Jamaicanism, he is only a “little man”. At least it is some comfort that the story, in its way, realises what Augustus’s letters had wanted to prove: “Poor people can have voice in this country too.”

“Blood on the Door” is the story of the pain and the faith of Miss Yvonne, an inner-city mother, “who had raised six sons and buried one.” The reader who knows Jamaica will not wonder about the absence of any father; that absence is itself a telling sociological reality. William, her first-born, has been summarily murdered by the police. When “the fair-skin woman him used to do yard work for” accuses him, wrongly and contemptuously, of stealing her money, his “slight temper” understandably gets the better of him and causes him to approach her aggressively with his machete. His flash of inarticulate anger is partly an expression of his realisation, like that of Augustus Silvera, that the poor have no public voice. His accuser calls in the police, who go after him and gun him down in cold blood outside his mother’s house. But Miss Yvonne finds strength in her faith. When the community rallies round to console her and to wash the bloodstains from outside the house, she insists that they leave the stain on the front door. She sees it as God’s sign that he will protect her house, like the blood marks that protected the Israelites at the time of the Passover. And so it seems to do. Her greatest test comes when a hurricane bears down and she refuses to join the general evacuation to safer ground.

A theme of special focus in the collection is homosexuality. It features in the opening and closing stories, and in the longest and most ambitious one, the title story. In these pieces Miller makes a significant contribution to recent developments in the treatment of a subject that has been traditionally taboo in West Indian literature. The stories are a useful input into the long-standing, generally unvoiced, and inconclusive debate about the bases of homosexual love and desire. Miller presents sensitively the often conflicted self-realisation of the homosexual male in an aggressively homophobic society. The impact of these stories may be as much in highlighting the cruelty of the homophobia as in presenting homosexuality in a favourable light.

Of the three stories, “The Fear of Stones” is the most searching exploration of the subject. It also gives a good view of Miller’s technical skills. It is the life-story of a young man, Gavin, and traces factors that contributed to his being “different”, including even the mysterious possibility that his sexuality was fated. At any rate, the narrative persuasively suggests the dynamic complex of variables that constitute any given individual. One of Miller’s strengths is in the shift and interplay of voices and points of view, and the dislocation of time sequence. The procedure enables information and meaning and the portraits of characters to emerge with just the right timing. A subtle aspect of meaning to emerge in due course in this story has to do with the narrator’s relationship to the protagonist. For most of the story the narrator, a university lecturer in mathematics, appears to be simply an outsider who happens to know about Gavin. Eventually, however, there is a hint of a closer relationship. This realisation would seem to cast additional, appealing light on the portrait of Gavin. This said, the narrator’s recurrent editorial interventions throughout his story are mostly rather postured, sententious, and gratuitous.


When, in “Tolston Closing”, forlorn Naomi loses herself in the dance at a Nyabinghi ceremony, the narrator observes that she had been seized by “the feeling that comes when black people worship”. It would perhaps be even more precise to say, “when black women worship”. This feeling is alive in “Church Women”, the poems which constitute part one of Kingdom of Empty Bellies. These poems celebrate the strength which the black women of the peasantry and the proletariat find in their revivalist faith and self-expression. It is the spirit that “will strip Britain / off their tongues, allowing them to dance free” (“Tongues I”). They are the women “who learn the art of do-without; / how to stretch cornmeal porridge / for the children, give the man / the last piece of hardough bread” (“Fasting”). Idiom, imagery, and tone represent them spiritedly. In the possession of worship,

it wasn’t no joke, it wasn’t black people
making monkey of themselves;
it was the Spirit running
hot lava inside of women . . .
(“Shouting”)

Their Creole comfortably assimilates Old Testament allusion in their defiance of “Satan and sin” (“War Dance”) and hard times. The woman whose son has been locked up, no doubt wrongly, by the police, who had kicked in her door at night to arrest him, knows “how to prophesy — call down Armageddon, / flood-water, twenty plagues of Babylon — how / to bawl down Jericho or sing It Is Well” (“Off-key II”). They perform the courage of their faith.

By sharp contrast with part one, part three, “Rum Bar Stories”, depicts the menfolk of those women as broken-spirited, languishing in the rum shop as they dull their sense of inadequacy in the amber haze of rum and beer. The contrast is a telling aside on the gender politics of Jamaican society. Here, in place of the red banner of the women’s church performance, and “the flag [that] flash bright / in each woman’s eye, / the colour of Jesus’ blood” (“War Dance”), the only banners are the “Heineken / banners [that] sigh / off the walls”, and the man whose “house is a beige crowd / of disappointments” is “too nervous, / too proud to cry in his wife’s lap” (“Gin Gin Mule”). Still, the poet writes of these men with understanding and compassion, and the book ends with the poignant “Drink & Die”, which contrasts with the spirited death-bed thoughts of the church woman in the poem “Death”, which ends part one. In “Drink & Die”, an old boozer, sensing his own death drawing close, losing his memory and his way, speaks to his rum-bar friend now six years dead, telling him to wait on him, because he will soon be joining him: “I coming slow. / These days the rum bar / seem further away.”

The title of each of the “Rum Bar Stories” is the name of a cocktail, and is followed by the relevant recipe, an unusual epigraph. These recipes may prove useful extras to the book, and there may be a point in the contrast between the “upscale” life they represent and the unglamorous reality of the lives of the men in the poems. These cocktails would hardly be served in the bars they frequent, and the men would be unaccustomed to anything but the basic drinks. The tactic of the titles and recipes may be more clever than compelling.

Part two, “In Dream Country”, consists of a lively miscellany, a few of the poems drawing on the spirit of the “Church Women”. There is the Creole “Psalm 151” (there are only 150 psalms in the Bible), which speaks to the “bad men” and “dons” of our time, warning them to beware the Old Testament God, who can be more dangerous than any of them, for “if you draw knife onto God, / then He will draw knife on to you”. There is the humorous astonishment at the losing prudishness of the woman who is surprised to hear of people who make love “in the light”: “Astonishing / that [her] children were fathered by a silhouette” (“This Is an Apology . . .”). We empathise with the young woman who, in the cold of Boston, feels the irresistible pull of Caribbean “riddims” (“Caribbean Bass”).

A binding theme is the historical struggle of black people for self-assertion. There is the poet’s ode to the Africa in him, in his “Granna”, whose unexpectedly blue eyes signify “the endless ocean”, the Atlantic of the Middle Passage and the “twenty million / drowned Africans” (“Granna’s Eyes”). We applaud the courtroom defence of “The Bus Driver [Who] Is Accused of Not Wearing Uniform”, his plea for the freedom of his dignity against a small-minded, mechanical submission to rules. The individual’s claim to freedom and dignity is also memorably affirmed in “A Who Seh Sammy Dead”, an elegy to a monkey who “escaped from the Hope Zoo in Jamaica and was found dead, two days later”, killed by dogs. The poem uses the Jamaican folksong “Sammy Dead” to shape itself and to deepen its meaning. In wry amusement, we salute the monkey as another in the line of rebel black heroes who inspire The Fear of Stones and Kingdom of Empty Bellies.