2Yet difference takes on a particular resonance in the Caribbean and the narrator’s personal quest also becomes a passionate evocation of the troubled history of the Caribbean recounted in the six ‘Carnival Tales’ that make up two-thirds of the novel. This evocation of the history of the Monagas family from the early days of the colonisation of the Caribbean to the nineteen seventies, is of course the pretext for an indictment of colonialism and for an imaginative revision of its history. Being the last of the Monagas, the narrator has to cope with the burden of colonial heritage bequeathed to him by his ancestors, and his reassessment of the past therefore becomes a passionate acknowledgement of the white man’s guilt for all the evil deeds he committed in the New World. On her deathbed, the narrator’s mother unambiguously accepts that guilt, since she is known to ‘have asked forgiveness from her God for the whole world and for the discovery of the new world, for the conquest, for the destruction of the Amerindians, for the enslavement of Africans and for the indentureship of the Indians’ (p. 22).

3Those cruel events obsess the narrator so much that slavery and indentureship become ingrained in his narrative as two powerful images that incite him on to unearth the truth about the colonial past. Such phrases as ‘enslaved to my memory,’ ‘indentured to my memory’ and ‘indentured to my imagination’ are haunting reminders that the retelling of the past can only be the outcome of an imaginative process by which memories are reawakened and rearranged so as to produce a meaningful pattern out of the chaos of history. This no doubt explains why the narrator feels that only fiction can transcend the barriers put up by official historiography and reveal a truth that had been silenced for too long:

The interpretation of fact, the history of event, is in the end a fiction. On the other hand this fiction is history. The memory is a muse that is continually fretting and changing. This muse is Marie Elena, Lavren’s muse, Marie Elena’s memory; this is the history and fiction of a hermaphrodite, a spirit of mythology with the power to mythologise, to levitate between fact and fiction, reducing opposites to a mixture of genders and races. (p. 40)

4It also accounts for the novel’s complex structure. As we have already noted, the novel is made up of two different types of material. The core narrative corresponds to the six ‘Carnival Tales,’ which span several centuries and are recounted by a heterodiegetic narrator. The tales are framed by an ‘Ouverture’ and a postscript that serve to introduce and end the Carnival Tales. They are completed by a ‘Journal’ that is wedged between the two sets of tales and a small section entitled ‘J’Ouvert,’ which reconciles the personal and collective dimensions of the story by revealing what the reader had suspected all along, namely that Lavren is the narrator’s alter ego.

5The journal, which spans about a year in the life of the homodiegetic narrator, is central to the novel both in position and importance. The narrator uses it to clarify his relationship with Lavren, whom he has chosen to be his guide in the exploration of the history of the Monagas family and of Trinidad. Yet he also writes his diary to recount his own story of growing up on a plantation as the overseer’s son. He feels that the personal and intimate nature of his experience cannot be taken into account by Lavren’s wider historical perspective:

As THE TALES of Lavren unfolded, I found myself inextricably, almost insidiously, seeking out the conclusion of a quite different story. This I must return to tell. I must take over from Lavren. I keep it within my journal. This house told me another tale, or hinted, leading me on a wild-goose chase of clue, sensation, memory and feeling, the torn edges of a sepia photograph, an old daguerreotype, a bundle of baby’s clothes, a black lace dress, a mother-of-pearl crucifix and the items of my father’s press. His voice, now that he is dead. I itemise and it seems a list set out in positions of priority or importance, but that is not what happened at all. I was led and made to progress, a word suggesting far too absolutely a forward movement, when in fact this story was not to be told by linear progression but rather by a process of simultaneities: yes, I think that’s it. (p. 95)

6It is obvious from this quotation that the narrator’s relationship with his family, and with his father in particular, is central to his process of recollecting the past. There is an element of nostalgia about the narrator’s evocation, which is absent from Lavren’s more exuberant account. The nostalgia stems from the narrator’s pining for the prelapsarian state he enjoyed as a child when he was still ignorant of guilt. The guilt stems from the heritage he has to face as the last member of the Monagas family, the archetype of the colonizers. Revisiting his relationship with his family is therefore a way of trying to transcend that guilt:

But today, while the almond leaves rustle, lizards scuttle and the keskidee asks its question, Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?…. The yard opens up into another yard along a gravel drive lined with palmiste. There is the round bed of cockscombs and behind another screen of casuarinas are the barrack-rooms, indentured to my imagination. My motive now is selfish. This is not Lavren’s ironic fiction which tells you about the nightmare of history. It is to ride with him to see the estate, not as the place of enslavement and indentureship, but the place it was before I understood guilt or knew its uneasy feeling. It is him. I return here for him. I take the clothes from the press and clothe him as he was then. I take a white Aertex shirt and pair of khaki pants through whose loops at the waist is laced a brown leather belt (discipline of a father who had to discipline sons, though afraid to touch them). (pp. 129-130)

7What is striking here is how close to the victims of colonialism the narrator is. The leather belt used to discipline children is evocative of the whip once used to discipline the slaves. It is no doubt this implicit identification between the narrator and the victims of colonialism that compels him to launch on his reparative exploration of the past. The narrator’s eagerness to initiate such a process is motivated by his awareness as a grown-up that innocence in the New World was destroyed long ago by the perniciousness of the colonial system. He now understands that even children were deprived of their natural innocence:

I see my world from this height as we mount one of the traces to an escarpment above the fields, on the horizon the Barackpore hills. I don’t reflect on the meanings of names, the history in names. I am with my father as a son, excited because he shows me attention and involves me in his world through his eyes which see the world before us. I see the square concrete bungalow on the hill; behind the high hedges of hibiscus are the barrack-rooms encircling the house. I see this with the eyes of a child, with the eyes of innocence. I see them now and wonder whether for us too innocence existed only in the womb, as it did for those huddled in the barrack-rooms and in the shacks above the city. (p. 130)

9By entrusting the imaginative exploration of the past to two complementary figures – the homodiegetic narrator and Lavren, his alter ego – Lawrence Scott seeks to solve the problem of writing a history of the Caribbean that does not merely conjure up the past but also evinces a true capacity for redemption. This explains why Lavren, a hermaphrodite endowed with the power of levitation, and therefore particularly well suited for the exploration of the past, cannot achieve the writer’s aim on his own. As the homodiegetic narrator perceptively remarks in his Journal, Lavren’s perspective remains too linear and grandiloquent to be able to produce a history that really holds a promise for the future.

10For this to become a reality, Lavren’s Carnival Tales are completed by the homodiegetic narrator’s own personal story, which he claims to be writing for all ‘to be liberated to a history of true feeling.’ (p. 111) With these words, the narrator shows his hope for the future since he acknowledges the healing and redemptive power of storytelling. Paradoxically, redemption is possible even though true forgiving may prove difficult, possibly impossible:

I remembered the vision the hermaphrodite Lavren had had of the middle passage and this memory told me how mixed was the personal with the historical, and how uneasy it would be to separate them in this hallucinated history, how uneasy it was to forgive one another across the races of the nations for the cruelty of the races to each other. How difficult to forgive, across the silence of the years which had separated a family nurtured in this dangerous place, this family house. In the flicker of the candlelight my boy’s body was stretched to breaking upon a tree in the forest of their making, in the garden of their Eden, a fiction of their mythology blurred by the green of parrots and noisy with their hysteria; a serpent crawls upon a fallen branch reaching its own goal, in its own skins varied and coloured like the rocks in the face of the cliff. (p. 110)

12Two images play a significant role in this enterprise. One is witchbroom, which gives the novel its title and symbolises the curse of colonialism. The other is crucifixion, which is just as central since it reflects the process of penance and redemption that is under way in the novel. By claiming that witchbroom, the parasite that attacked and destroyed the cocoa trees in Trinidad, appeared in the early days of colonisation, Lawrence Scott makes an analogy between the destructive power of the fungus and that of colonialism. Skilfully merging legend and history, he legitimises the idea that the colonisers were responsible for the curse that ruined their efforts to harness the New World. Elena Elena, the last Monagas to have tried to fight the curse, was convinced that her inability to eradicate the fungus stemmed from her sins. She thus implicitly acknowledged that the parasite was the consequence of her family’s misdemeanour as colonialists:

God was punishing her. It was as simple as that. The disease that had racked her ancestor Marie Jeanne at San Raphael, took control of her, and she too believed that almost any act she committed or omitted was a sin and brought her to the brink of hell. She began to identify herself as the main reason for the upsurge of the witchbroom…. All was turgid and malformed. The leaves were soft and flimsy, their colour darker than should be. The stalks were blighted and covered with curly white encrustrations that turned the yellow of limes. The usual purple and golden pods became blotchy, blackened and hard. The estates were rotting. This epidemic was as bad as the one that had heralded the crucifixions of Arenales. Nature was revolting at what was being done upon the earth. (p. 84)

13The image of witchbroom used by Scott is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, it is presented as a destructive force, a curse that caused the ruin of many planters. Yet, on the other hand, it can also be viewed as a positive one since failure to eradicate it led to the gradual disappearance of cocoa culture eventually of the plantations themselves, the very symbol of colonialism and slavery. Thus witchbroom is a metaphor for both the curse of colonialism in the New World and its ultimate defeat.

14The parasite’s action gradually annihilates the white man’s aggression on nature by allowing the latter to return to the prelapsarian state it enjoyed prior to the arrival of the Conquistadores. A further paradox is that this cannot be a return to the purity and innocence of the past since the tragic episode of colonisation will never be forgotten. At best, nature will forever retain the bitter taste of experience, as Derek Walcott put it in his essay.

15At the end of the novel, the narrator is confronted with nature’s new face when he takes a walk where the plantation used to be. The monoculture that the coloniser had imposed has been replaced by a large variety of crops. Ironically, the cocoa that now grows amidst the citrus and coconut trees is free from the curse of witchbroom. ‘Mixed’, the word used by the narrator to refer to the diversity existing in this vegetable garden refers to the positive hybridity of the Caribbean.

16Significantly, the novel ends with the narrator’s vision which successfully reintegrates the colonial past into the pre-existing harmony of the New World. Visiting the location where his ancestors’ house in the cocoa fields once stood, the narrator has a strangely redeeming experience. Of course, the house has long vanished but its outline is still visible and he can feel the presence of all the people who once lived there. It is then that the vision of a prelapsarian world integrating and transcending the human dimension is substituted for the image of the former colonial house:

I stood now at the top of the slope by the small mango tree where the anthuriums used to grow under the low branches, and there was a pot of flowers gone wild, breaking the pot to root in the ground. Something in that. The house was not there. The layout of the house was still clear. The stubs of pillars coming out of the ground showed a plan. It reminded me of a grid which preceded an archaeological excavation. A piece of cleared ground.
I stood filled with all that had been here, looking at the vacant space. It rose before me transparently, so that I saw it and, through its walls, the people of the house. Transfigured by absence. Fully present – a remembered self. Our remembered selves.
This was no ruin, and it did not tell why it was no longer there. It asked a question. It was a question concerning the nature of love, the pain of love. I noticed the shadows tremble in the nearby forest where the light made a clearing. (p. 272)

What enables the narrator to have such an experience is the imaginative quest for truth that he has undertaken with the writing of his journal and the telling of the Carnival tales. Significantly, the image of the crucifixion appears in both narratives, thus fusing the personal and the collective dimensions of the novel. It links the narrator’s discovery of his homosexuality and the guilt that accompanied it with, on the one hand, the passion of Christ, and, on the other, the sufferings of the victims of colonialism.

17The implicit process of identification that this analogy suggests is powerfully conveyed by the narrator’s recollection of the afternoon when he buried his face in the crotch of a young Englishman he fancied at the foot of the Cross:

At the foot of the cross at three o’clock in the afternoon.
I embrace my oppressor who has colonised my imagination. I kneel down. I kiss the flesh of his leg. I press my desire against his crotch where testicles bulge, penis cocooned in a loin cloth. I sniff there the perfume of his passion. I inhale my oppression. I lock up, my cheek hard against his leg. I scrape with my fingernails, adding injury to injury. I look up. See! See! How I adore you, crucified one. Back... back down the corridor to my nursery. (pp. 112-113)

18The scene is part of a series of snapshots describing various episodes in which the narrator experienced or inflicted pain. Thus the homosexual scene described above ends in the young boy whipping the narrator. Suffering is clearly a way for the latter to expiate for what was then regarded as a sin. Two other episodes taken from the same series of recollections confirm this. The first one is the battering of a snake in the forest, an obvious attempt to fight his sexual desire. The second is the evocation of the narrator inflicting punishment upon himself with his own belt, which reminds us of the thrashings he received from his father, no doubt for his homosexual tendencies.

19The whipping and the obvious references to colonisation – perceptible in the use of the words ‘oppressor’ and ‘colonised’ – suggest a link between the narrator’s suffering and the pain inflicted on the victims of colonialism. It is no coincidence if, during the afternoon when he killed the snake, the same hysteria of parrots suddenly breaks the silence (p. 113) that troubled Elena Elena, his ancestor, on her visit to Port of Spain after rebel slaves had been hanged in retaliation for their burning of the governor’s house:

The silence of hysteria hung in the memory of the strange black fruit which Elena Elena saw on her visit to the town, hanging from trees along the avenue stretching from the carenage near the cathedral to the front garden of the Governor’s house, where the Englishman had taken her on a visit, through the gridded city at the edge of the gulf. They travelled through the savannah which to this day is a calendar of the seasons, dry as the Sahara, a carnival of dust in Lent, a Mardi Gras of thirst on Ash Wednesday. In the rainy season it became rank and vegetal. While she sipped tea with her husband, the Englishman, on the balcony of the Governor’s house she asked: ‘Why?’ Why the Passion Play enacted over and over again? ‘Why the crosses; it isn’t Lent?’ Then she remembered the hangings on the estate, supervised by the Englishman, which she saw from the window of the turret room. (pp. 61-62)

Elena, their common ancestor, was similarly obsessed by the hysteria of parrot screams, which she viewed as nature’s rebellion against the madness of the priests who, in the seventeenth century, crucified the Amerindians who refused to be baptised (p. 55). It is this madness of the Church that explains the distrust which the Monagas women have had of religion. It also accounts for the narrator’s decision not to become a monk, an idea he had contemplated when he was a child. He holds, as they did, religion responsible for the tragedy of colonialism because it always sided with the coloniser against the colonised. The narrator’s criticism becomes even more radical when he equates God with his father and claims to forgive him because he did not know what he was doing (p. 111), thus ironically reversing Christ’s words before he died on the Cross.

The irony is a reminder that not even the redemptive power of Christ can work in the New World, where the key to real redemption lies in the syncretic power of Carnival because ‘there is no hierarchy in carnival; no colour, no class, no race, no gender: all may cross over and inhabit the other’ (p. 264). It is significant that Lavren should participate in the J’Ouvert parade in the disguise of Christ with a dhoti round his loins and that he should get on his cross ‘to show himself to the shango Baptist people them, who the Governor long time ban with their candle and bell and flower in a vase, with the black Bible on the white cloth spread on the ground’ (p. 265).