BLUE FLIES BUZZING
Peepal Tree PressNovember 2019Selected by Jeremy Poynting
The teeming characters of Million Hills in Trinidad, from the past and the present, “real” and imaginary, living in the village or exiled in Europe, are linked through the imagination of Raphael, the villager butcher, who has the ambition to write a novel of exactly 100 chapters, each of 1,000 words. Life too often intervenes in Raphael’s task, so characters escape to write their own stories. As Nicole Rachelle-Moore writes: “To read The Frequency of Magic is to enter several simultaneous worlds. By turns dark, fantastical, funny, hard, poignant and transformational, this novel’s magic and spirit propel it towards becoming a literary classic.” Several worlds exist simultaneously: of those still living on the hill, those like the jazz musician and actress who left to seek their fortunes in Europe, and those who have become figments of Raphael’s imagination. Gritty realism rubs shoulders with magic in a uniquely Trinidadian way. — Jeremy Poynting
When Deacon come in the yard, and the sun hit him in his chest, he put his hands on his hip and he ask, “How you find me here, where you come from?” Same time the ravine dry. Blue flies buzzing around the swine pens in the neighbour’s yard. A dog start to whine and bark at two white-headed Baptists on their way back from church. But after all these years, when he see Brenda, his first love, this woman who once tore his shirt from his back that red dusk when they were making love beside the sawmill on Jogie Road, he still feel something. So he assess her at arms’ length first, he search her face for the limits of her smile, then he embrace her, her beating heart to his, and they are together again, like old fire-stick familiar, like a coil unravelling through time and finding its way back to the centre […] He forgive her. She smells of sandalwood and talcum powder.
But is divorce papers Brenda bring to serve the man him, and is just so, right there in Enterprise Village, on the gravel road, on that Sunday, in the new settlement, on land the government either forget, don’t care about, or abandon to poor people children, that his whole dream turn upside down, and the black-and-white photographs begin to fade, the cut-glass vase fall and shatter, the iron bed break and reach the floor. So Deacon delaying, asking after their children, if she have man – anything to not take the damn envelope. He know what it is. Deacon Simmons not stupid. “And your mother, how she knee? I hear she fall out of bed and break it in three places. The farm get road yet? Cars could come in now? The water truck still bringing water or water pipe-borne now? Hurricane pass, who roof get fling off? That road was so bad before, oh gooosh, tyre used to spin, and how Alice, and Ma Quinn? You ever go back Mount Garnett? And your father, he dead yet?” But the letter have to deliver and when she put it in his hand, he bound to take it. So finally he buck and give a bow to mercy – take it, yes – and turn it over, plain envelope, no name, but inside was serious paper to sign. Poor Deacon, his bargain bucket low like a snake’s shadow; he have nothing to give but faith, and Brenda not asking for nothing, but if is marry she want marry a next man, and even if that never happen, then is so it go sometimes, like gun-mouth pants that measure but never make.
She agrees to coffee, black and sweet. They are there on his verandah when the night settles in, and the cane fields rustle gently in the distance, and the scent of burning sage and Indian indentureship, the resonance of plantation slavery, all that wrap up tight, warp and wrap up in the dirty light. He tells her how, just last week, a man drank weedicide to die, but didn’t, so he ran a blade across his own neck to bone, and did, stretched out stiff in bed. One coffee becomes a reconstitution. They listen to the radio. In this village night, they will talk as old friends in the paraffin glow of his lamp, in the smoke of the mosquito coil, till it is late and he must walk her out the half mile to the main road for a taxi back south, and all the while laughing, remembering, when they were young. Two years later, when she dies from breast cancer, it is Deacon who reads her eulogy, before they put her in the ground. ◉
Enterprise Village was named by European colonisers in order to encourage positive qualities in those who settled there. Other nearby towns include Felicity and Endeavour.
Joseph’s polyphonic narrative was inspired by the Trinidadian philosopher Earl Lovelace, who theorised that conventional rules of linear storytelling are subverted in the Caribbean. Instead, he argues, “everything happens at once” and rhythm itself becomes a “unit of meaning”.