In any small society that wishes to think of itself as civilised, fiction writers must play a major role. Writers engage in a series of crucial thought experiments, reshaping society to redress history, invoke utopia, or simply (a most radical idea) thinking for curiosity's sake. These reconfigurations have the potential to enlarge local self-conceptions, and assist in the ongoing creation and re-creation of society. (Or they can confirm local provincialism and hasten ongoing decay.)
This function (of stimulating thought), and its apparent absence, is especially pointed in a society like ours, obsessively trying to pretend it is a little outpost of Africa, or at least African Ame-rica; 19th century rural India; or the "First World" a la Miami. First World pretensions notwithstanding, in much Trini fiction, the white Creole population are usually presented as cardboard cut-outs, tropes of decrepit empire, eccentrics or carpetbaggers, but rarely as fragile human beings with unique and compelling stories.
This follows much "independence" fiction, and a prima facie look at contemporary fiction suggests that little has changed. The first thing you notice is that much "new" contemporary local literary work comes from abroad, imbued with depraved metropolitan conceptions of the region.
This character of foreign-local fiction is evident from some of the more successful recent books located here, written by Trinis, or Trinis by accident/parentage. They include The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, Black Rock, Soucouyant, He Drown She in the Sea and so forth.
Local creative energies, and money, are invested not in producing writers, but moko jumbies and calypsonians, and bad movies and books about calypso and moko jumbies. Against that backdrop, Keith Jardim's first collection of stories, Near Open Water, published by Peepal Tree Press, is a surprise. From the first story, the integrity of narrative, imagination, and command of the material are impressive in a way you might forget is possible if you've been reading recent Trini/"Caribbean" writers. In brief, this ain't a tourist bro-chure or an ethnic manifesto.
The 12 stories in Near Open Water vary in style, voice and subject, from the decadent third-person narrator describing the con- sciousness of the dissatisfied young wife in the nod to Somerset Maugham in A Landscape Far From Home, to the oppressed first-person diatribe in the Nai-paulian The White People Maid, and the tense, multilayered duologue in the eponymous story, which closes the book.
In a sense, very little "action" happens in the stories. Much more happens subtly in the engagement of the characters with the landscape, and in a type of beauty most "island" fiction misses. Most "island" fiction is colourful-in bright pastel shades for flowers, usually in the hair of pliant island girls, and thick green impastos for jungle.
The temperature is hot, the atmosphere muggy. But Jardim's landscapes are cool blue, the trees' leaves are dried brown, the earth terra cotta, and the clouds fleecy and disinterested. The opening lines of Night Rain capture this: "The land is dry. He walks slowly up the hill to his house, his shoes disturbing the powdery earth among the stones. It is late, cool, and the moon is high above him."
The characters take equally unorthodox paths and cultivate diverse engagements through and with this familiar-strange landscape. The couple in Caribbean Honeymoon, cruise tourists on an inter-island ferry for a sexual dalliance whose purpose remains hazy. The couple in The Jaguar spend their afternoons staring at a jaguar in a cage at the zoo, while in the background lurk all sorts of ominous, indistinct characters who hold the power of life and death.
And you get the impression that Jardim knows that we're neck-deep in unpleasant stories about powerful, evil Third World politicians, corrupt police, and ubiquitous criminals. Those stories have been told, and he does not waste his or our time with them. He remains focused on the fine detail of his character's inner lives, whose intricacies lesser writers forget or do not know.
The story at the book's heart, In the Cage, captures in kernel the central theme of the book: the microphysics of caged power in the figure of the jaguar, which appears in two stories. The jaguar, regal, aloof, is curiously alien yet native to the landscape. Its home is South America, from which ecology the island derives, but jaguars are not native to the island. Yet this one is here: powerful, yet caged and at the mercy of the weak.
Nothing more perfectly describes the state of the populations from the far corners of the Earth, who have found themselves rubbing shoulders and flanks with various alien others in these small islands. What makes Near Open Water valuable is that it does not "tell the story of white people;" it tells stories where white Creoles are fully developed characters in their own environments.
Of course, many characters have unique characteristics which are preoccupied with their encircle-ment by legions of their darker, angrier brethren and sistren. The light-skinned Creoles uneasily occupy fragile positions, and encampments, of status and power. But these citadels are decaying, and can be breached in a moment by the brute strength of the dark mass. And the mass, for all its strength, is equally terrified and impotent.
The mix of varying points of view, style, and intelligence in Near Open Water make it what they call in marketing-speak a "highly readable" book. Jardim's stories show the paradox of hu-man frailty intermingled with memories of historical power in an old historical conundrum of white vs everyone else.
He fills out what was a faint sketch of a silent, fragile community into a 21st century existence sensitively, but unsparingly. From the ambition of the stories, I get the sense that this is a prologue to more ambitious, larger work, which I await expectantly. This is a writer worth waiting for.
