Putting up a Resistance!
Michael Cozier
Michael Cozier, 2013
"Ah doh know wat wrang wit dem Indian chirren now-ah-days. We tell dem from small, goat and sheep doh mix, but is farse dey farse."
So sneers an Indian man in the direction of Belinda and Jatulal, star-crossed and racially divided lovers fleeing from their quiet village's tacit condemnation of their union. The sentiment, bridled with invective allegedly steeped in countryside "common sense", is one of several markers of intolerance and ethnic tension marking Michael Cozier's self-published 2013 novel Putting Up a Resistance!.
Churchgoing Belinda spies the enterprising coconut vendor Jatulal plying his trade at the Couva junction, and their hearts swiftly become entangled in the way of endearingly myopic teenage affections. What courses between them swiftly ascends towards true love, but the racially fuelled trauma of Belinda's father's past limits all immediate hope for the pair's happiness.
They flee further and further south, Erin Village giving way to the Andalusian, a coconut estate secreted away behind Columbus Bay. Arriving laden with their hopes for a peacefully twinned future, Belinda and Jatulal find the racial lines of divide even more firmly cemented, presided over by a white manager whose avaricious gaze lingers more than passingly on young Belinda.
If it already sounds like the stuff of high spectacle, or cheap vaudeville, Cozier's penchant for the dramatic takes several sharper, eyebrow-raising turns as he plots out his novel against a seemingly soap-operatic rubric. Vengeful cutlass-wielding drunkards, skittish abused Indian women scurrying about in the night, rum-infused scuffles and police chases that end with cars sinking into the Caroni: Putting Up a Resistance isn't short on slapstick, shock value and plot-propelling alarums.
The work hits its histrionic stride well before Cozier's overall plot approaches a (theatrically high-handed) denouement, and forges doughtily on, in defiance of its own convoluted and vaguely ridiculous structure. Life, we imagine, can certainly be this fraught between a Southern-Trinidadian Romeo and Juliet in the dying days of colonial rule. However, reading it without enough judiciously applied scenes of gravitas, and a certain disregard to pacing, makes the trials of Belinda, Jatulal and others slightly cartoonish when they should wreak consternation.
It is when Cozier allows himself to quiet down on the page that scenes of reflective and contemplative wonder shine through. Jatulal, waking for the first morning on the Andalusian estate, listens to his fellow labourer's morning song in a grateful reverie, reflecting on the way it brings the estate to life:
"Voices began to be raised in chatter and little black window squares here and there began turning orange as lamps and flambeaux were lit. Wooden steps creaked as women descended with flickering lights, their shadows dancing on the wooden walls... the estate was coming alive, and it was that beautiful voice that did it, not the night watchman's bell, thought Jatulal."
Gender relations and the labour struggle are codependent concerns of Cozier's in the novel, and he treats with them both using equal parts problematic framework and earnest zeal. His problematic politics perhaps bear themselves out most visibly in his uneven approach to detailing the female experience in Putting Up a Resistance!. The writer frequently situates Belinda and other plot-significant female figures in direct relation to their physical pulchritude, or lack thereof. There is no shortage of slim waistlines to connote pleasing appearance, and fat figures to signal revulsion and quick comedic laughs. This runs awkwardly and inconsistently counter to authorial attempts to genuinely elicit sympathy and concern for women as victims of abuse.
Counterpoising this, however, is Cozier's concerted series of efforts to show the labour struggle as a common, desperate mechanism, fuelled in equal part by the penury-stricken lives of Indian and African workers alike.
Though the navigation of the novel's own political territory is frequently handled with clumsiness and a sort of male-hegemonic lassitude, the writer's enthusiasm peers through even the most problematic of phrasings.
For its meandering faults, Putting Up a Resistance sallies forth with spit-polished good spiritedness. It seeks to portray an unstinting love story and a labour story commingling on the page. In its description of racial intolerance, it could still be describing any number of sleepy coastline villages in Trinidad, or our commercial town and city hubs where ethnic slurs ring out in broad daylight.