Play
a Song Somebody
by Cyril Dabydeen
Mosaic Press, 2004
Reviewed by Anne Borden
"Roy kept thinking about
far-away places… and the image of the turtles laid out one by one,
their backs atop the water like slabs of stone. He imagined stepping
across the stones and going all the way north.
How far north?
His heart beat faster. Thud-thud, as he twisted in his hammock. He
didn’t want to fall asleep now; and maybe the jaguar was indeed
close by, as he again conjured his father’s fears… and
inexorable fate at work. No,
Pa.
Boy, it’s true.
The night air itself circling, with
places appearing stranger.
Asia, Africa, America – all one
– with the stars moving above."
-Amerindians
This anthology by one of Canada’s
most popular post-colonial writers contains short stories dating back to
the 1970s, selected and re-edited by the author. Most of the stories
centre around class and inter-ethnic tensions, identity and sexuality as
characters migrate across continents as well as the landscapes of memory
and desire. While its arc is not as refined as his other short-story
collections, Play a Song Somebody contains some of Dabydeen’s
best stories, and is an excellent introduction to the breadth and depth
of his fiction.
Like Dabydeen’s poetry, the stories
in Play a Song Somebody are seeped with restlessness as
characters negotiate the pull between North America and Guyana (or Cuba,
or Central America) vis a vis their families and within
themselves. Dabydeen’s protagonists are often isolated from their
communities, physically and emotionally, as a result of their decisions:
to migrate (Mammita’s Garden Cove); to marry across cultural
lines (Close to the Island); to transcend gender roles (When
It Rains in the Sunshine); to collaborate with white developers (Amerindians).
Sexual tensions run high in Dabydeen’s work, and often signify a much
deeper desire in his characters, to love across East
Indian/African/white cultural lines and to muddy the myths we live by
– race, tribe, nation.
This desire is represented most starkly
in The Wedding, where members of a wedding party, mostly
acculturated immigrants to the U.S., come face to face with
"home," and struggle to integrate their shared history within
the context of their new lives in North America. Guyanese-Canadian Mick
is un-nerved by a recent immigrant, Mahal, who calls out to the crowd,
"And when are you all goin’ back there, eh?" Mick is silent,
as is the rest of the wedding party.
"A knot in my throat, because of a
strange emotion mixed with embarrassment in me, maybe due to what I
figured everyone was experiencing, and what our circumstances were
indeed like, in a changed world, a changed spirit too, in us. With Mahal,
though, it was still the same, even as he tried to appear
different."
In addition to these inter-ethnic
tensions, Dabydeen lays bare intra-ethnic conflicts in the anthology’s
strongest and most painful piece, Time to Get Out, in which
ambitious taxicab inspector Al Beharry faces working-class scorn in 17
languages. Class, colour and politics converge in the day-to-day
struggle to make a living in the white world as well as the larger quest
for unity among people of colour now rooted in North America.
"Maybe we should go back home," a frustrated Beharry says to
his wife. "Home, where is home?!" she cries.
This is the greater question that
informs Dabydeen’s work, and the strength of his inquiry draws his
geographically disparate narratives together in Play a Song, Somebody.
Dabydeen sounds out this question in Close to the Island, when a
mother-to-be tempts her lover to leave the island (and his mother) for
the mainland. Their child "would know both the island and the
mainland – like the palm of his hands. Our son… will return to the
island one day." As she promises her lover reconciliation between
the two worlds in the next generation, her hopeful words compete with
"waves crashing… the hurl and buffet of the ocean itself,"
just outside their window. |
