Selvon’s Bush Coolie: Producing Backwardness in “Cane is Bitter” and The Plains of Caroni

While Selvon’s immigrant fiction attends to contingency and coercion narrowing the range of choices available to his characters, two of his post-indentureship narratives—“Cane is Bitter” and The Plains of Caroni—present the choice of self-development as what broadens the horizon of the East Indian. “Cane is Bitter” was originally published in Bim 13 in 1950 and included in Ways of Sunlight in 1957; Plains was published in England in 1970 and republished in Canada in 1985. In both short story and novel, Selvon projects progress by producing the bush coolie, that is, the village East Indian who consents to impoverishment and against whom Selvon fashions the modern East Indian of the city. In using the term modern East Indian, I am identifying the process of differentiation at work in “Cane is Bitter” and Plains and specifying its alignment with the liberal conception of modern progress. The backwardness of bush coolies rationalizes the modern East Indian’s choice to sever ties with the village, emerging as the willful individual pursuing self-realization in the city. In this way, “Cane is Bitter” and Plains remain entangled in the reasoning that legitimized indentureship.

In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe details this reasoning. She approaches “the particular obscurity of the figure of the transatlantic Chinese ‘coolie’” as an “occasion to inquire into the politics of knowledge that gives us the received history of our present” (173). Situating indentureship within the changes in British imperial strategy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, she demonstrates that British parliamentarians and colonial agents construed reliance on the “free labour” of indentured Chinese and Indian labourers as a shift away from the “unfree labour” of enslaved Africans (24). Modern liberalism thus depended on indentureship to consolidate a narrative of modern progress.¹ In Indian Migration and Empire, Radhika Mongia further clarifies liberalism’s investment in the experiment of indentureship in that it “set out to establish that free labour, or social relations characterized by the commodification of labor power, was the manifest and true destiny of humankind” (22). Analysis of “Cane is Bitter” and Plains benefits from this attention to the intertwinement of indentureship and liberalism, particularly Lowe’s argument that liberal notions of freedom and progress extended rather than ended colonial divisions of humanity. She identifies within liberalism an “economy of affirmation and forgetting” that “civilizes and develops freedoms for ‘man’ in modern Europe and North America, while relegating others to geographical and temporal spaces that are constituted as backward, uncivilized, and unfree” (3). “Cane is Bitter” and Plains depend on a similar dynamic between freedom and backwardness. Affirming the modern East Indian’s open-ended future in the city simultaneously justifies foreclosure of the bush coolie’s in the village. This approach to Selvon’s fiction obviously does not deny the varied political projects of mid-twentieth century Caribbean but aims to highlight the difficulties in disembedding representations of East Indians from the forms of legibility liberalism operationalized.²

When Michael Fabre queried Selvon in a 1978 interview about the connection between “Cane is Bitter” and Plains, Selvon explained, “I did not take [“Cane is Bitter”] up later, although it deals with the life of East Indian peasants working in the cane fields. The Plains of Caroni came out of my experiences in Trinidad when I returned there at the expense of the Tate and Lyle sugar company who wanted me to write a book on Trinidad” (69). Selvon’s qualification notwithstanding, the continuities between these texts are clear. There is a shift in setting from a village near Cross Crossing estate in “Cane is Bitter” to a fictional village called Wilderness in Plains, but both texts feature an East Indian protagonist named Romesh who chooses schooling over cane-cutting and who is unable to reconcile his ambitions with his family’s. Moreover, both “Cane is Bitter” and Plains present the cutlass or poya as an emblem of indentureship’s legacy.³ Romesh emerges in both texts as exemplary of the transition from peasant East Indian of the village to modern East Indian of the city because he sees himself as fit for more than cutlass-wielding.

Readers meet Romesh’s family in “Cane is Bitter” anxiously anticipating his visit from Port of Spain, fretting that absence from the village means detachment from all that constitutes East Indianness. This view, the story suggests, is their ultimate failing for Romesh is worthy of emulation in his attempt at self-development and in his assessment of what he has inherited. His realization that the village and village affairs “were things not easily forgotten which he had to forget” founds his open-ended future while his family condemns themselves to their “poor, toiling lives” by not choosing the same (55). This schism between Romesh and his family is perceptible because the story emphasizes the contemporary moment as one defined by choice. Romesh warns his father, “‘we are such a backward people, all the others move forward to better lives, and we lag behind believing that what is to be, will be’” (54). Here, Romesh captures the story’s sense of historical temporality and its reliance on geographical distinction. On the one hand, impoverishment in the village is the result of an inherent lack of self-command: not merely an inability to adapt to the moment but an inability to recognize the moment as one that affords autonomy. On the other hand, prosperity in the city comes from having made rational choices to garner due rewards. Economic divides of the future are thus dependent on present choices; indentureship and slavery become mere aberrations of the past.

The backwardness of the village East Indians in “Cane is Bitter” both motivates Romesh’s departure and prompts readers to join Romesh in forgetting those he leaves behind. At first, it is supposed that the fundamental difference between Romesh and his family is his waning skill with a cutlass. Hari, his younger brother, teases, “‘You must be forget to use poya, your hands so soft and white now’” (58). However, Romesh’s soft, white hands are what “swung the cutlass tirelessly” at the story’s end as he vows to earn his family the season’s bonus before departing permanently (62). Alternatively, his difference might be assumed to be his desire to continue school or his refusal of an arranged marriage. What unites these, however, is the question of volition. This is the unresolvable difference that allows Romesh and readers to rationalize his forgetting. Romesh chooses to no longer swing a cutlass. Realizing that his family is incapable of the same choice allows him to forsake attempts to challenge his parents’ views or to impart his knowledge to his siblings. When Romesh wonders, “was he sufficiently equipped to propose vast changes in the lives of the people” (55), he definitively answers, no. When his sister learns of his impending departure and asks, “‘But what will happen to us?’”, Romesh “crossly” replies, “‘Don’t ask me questions’” (61), even though he depends on his family’s labour for his self-development. His brother, Hari, questions, “‘who it is does sweat for him to get pretty shirt to wear in Port of Spain?’” (53). Pointing at their sister’s arm, Hari further scolds, “‘Look how thin she is. All that is for you to be a big man’” (53). Romesh’s future is not dependent on organizing against these forms of subjection but on his future subsuming the question of theirs. The condition of Romesh’s progress is his family’s exclusion as they have consented to their deprivation.

If Selvon’s village appears oddly homogenous, it is because its purpose is singular: to lend coherence to the narrative of modern progress. A sociological reading of “Cane is Bitter” is, therefore, suspect. Rather, the short story allows for a study of the production of the bush coolie or a study of the production and control of difference within representations of East Indians. Lowe explains that in colonial discourse the term coolie “was a shifting, historically contingent designation for an intermediary form of Asian labor, used both to define and to obscure the boundary between enslavement and freedom, and to normalize both” (25). The term coolie has definitional and obfuscatory powers. My claim that Selvon conjures bush coolies in “Cane is Bitter” identifies the feint of fixing village East Indians into a knowable category that reality obviously exceeds in order to stabilize the identity of the modern East Indian.⁴ Paradoxically, while the modern East Indian must flee cane-cutting labour as it is what stunts growth, the conditions that define that labour are simultaneously normalized. Readers leave the story unconcerned with the immense profits that this labour generated and assured that no labour disruption is needed. Bush coolies will either develop the capacity to make the right choices to become the modern East Indian or will continue to consent to being an exploitable workforce.

The significance of consent in relation to indentureship is explained by Mongia. She offers a colonial genealogy of the modern state, arguing that “the colonial state and the modern state did not develop along two trajectories in isolation from each other” (12). She connects nineteenth century colonial migration of indentured Indians within “a logic of facilitation” to early twentieth century migration of non-indentured Indians to white-settler countries within “a logic of constraint” (2), and she questions the belief that “widespread state control of migration is a distinctly twentieth century phenomenon” (9). In doing so, she details the debates that spawned across metropoles and colonies in the post-emancipation era as attempts to place constraints on the movement of indentured Indians, who were British subjects, implied constraints on all British subjects.⁵ Since such infringement on free movement threatened the assumptions of liberalism, the exceptionality of indentureship had to be defined. Framing indentureship both as necessary for preserving the precarious post-emancipation colonial order and as volitional meant redefinition of state sovereignty as it pertained to migrant mobility and redefinition of contractual agreements to emphasize consent over equality in exchange (53). As Mongia argues, “[f]reedom was merely the ritual of consent to a contract, severed from the material conditions it stipulated” (48). Indentured Indians came to be understood as capable of consent, but their ignorance required the colonial state’s intervention: “the paternalism of the state enabled it to set the terms of (unequal) contracts and simultaneously required each migrant to ‘freely’ consent to these terms” (54). In Disciplining Coolies, Amar Wahab helpfully adds that indentureship’s focus on the consenting coolie also altered the power dynamics of the plantation. Investigating the Trinidadian context, he argues that “[i]n the post-emancipation period the colonial state’s legal and administrative powers now further permeated the plantation, changing its character to that of a quasi-state institution, absorbing some of the planter’s power, and by proxy consolidating its own sovereignty” (56).⁶ The work of Mongia and Wahab clarifies the stakes of “Cane is Bitter.” By designating the narrative of progress after indentureship as a matter of individual interiority, the story extends liberalism’s conception of the cane-cutting Indian as a consenting—if ignorant—subject. As a result, the story obscures the possibility of redressing the unequal exchange that took place during indentureship; negates the need to address the material conditions of the village; and bolsters the paternalistic role of the sugar company and the state.

Twenty years after the first publication of “Cane is Bitter,” Selvon maintains this emphasis on consent, paternalism, and progress in Plains. As noted in his interview with Fabre, this novel was backed by the Tate and Lyle sugar company. In The Making of a Sugar Giant, Phillipe Chalmin explains that Tate and Lyle acquired 50% of the ordinary capital of Caroni Sugar Estates in Trinidad and the majority of the shares of the Waterloo Sugar estates, forming Caroni Limited in 1937 (314).⁷ In the following decades, Tate and Lyle via Caroni Limited monopolized the sugar industry in Trinidad, eventually acquiring its main competitor, the Ste. Madeline Sugar Company. According to Chalmin, “Tate and Lyle had pushed the logic of the plantation economy to the absurd,” and from “1946–1965, Caroni was a gold mine for Tate and Lyle” (356). The government of Trinidad and Tobago acquired 51% of Caroni Limited in 1970. It completed its acquisition in 1975, forming Caroni (1975) Limited, which was closed in 2003.

Though Tate and Lyle are not referred to by name in Plains, only as “the Company,” its monopolizing power is apparent and unchallenged. The novel’s stance is that, educated or not, East Indians do not escape the Company because such escape is unnecessary; what East Indians need to escape is their backwardness. Romesh’s escape is well underway at the start of the novel. While he “‘was cutting cane from the time [he] was a boy’” (40), he is now wrapping up his studies in agricultural science at the university and working in the Company’s lab, experimenting with sugarcane. He increasingly disavows the village throughout the novel, and by its end, he decides “[h]e was not ever going back to Wilderness, or ever seeing anyone again” (138). Instead, he plans to depart for England via a Company scholarship. Harrilal, his supposed father, is a counterexample to Romesh. At the start of the novel, Harrilal has already sold his cane land to the Company and secured a house, a car, and an overseer position. He appears as beneficiary and cheerleader of the Company as he advises, “‘if the Company prosper, we bound to prosper’” (12). Without the education or self-possession of Romesh, however, he repeatedly shows himself ill-matched for such rewards. By the end of the novel, he is found “drowning his worries in rum” without the wherewithal to become the modern East Indian (107).

Selvon’s quintessential bush coolie and Romesh’s diametric opposite is Balgobin. He is an aged cane man who worked in sugar estates countrywide before moving into a carat hut at the edge of the land his brother, Harrilal, oversees. Balgobin can never “forget to use poya”; from it he derives his identity, worth, and worldview. As a result, readers repeatedly hear of the foreclosure of his future. Seeta identifies him as “‘deading bad’” (5). Romesh judges him to be “this sick man who lived in the past” (106). Balgobin himself confirms his obsolescence: “he thought of the future, too, how little of it was left for him” (100). His fatalism is, in part, a result of his failed relationship with Seeta. While that relationship led to the conception of Romesh, Balgobin remains estranged from his son and scorned by Seeta. Yet, Balgobin’s role in the novel is undoubtedly to showcase behaviors that Romesh is defined against. For example, readers first meet Balgobin at the village rum shop where he starts his day complaining, “‘These days, I find that is only about my third drink that I feel anything’” (6). Rum-drinking of this sort is the backward habit of the bush coolie. Romesh and Seeta, however, have rum punches at a restaurant in the city, cultivating an air of sophistication while mingling with the upper class. Here, Romesh, detached and disapproving, asks if Balgobin is “‘still hitting the bottle’” (28). This narrative of progress identifies Balgobin’s alcoholism as his inherent shortcoming and Romesh’s capacity for pity as admirable. It neatly sidesteps the Company’s role in pushing village East Indians into a cycle of poverty in which addiction is more likely.

Balgobin’s backwardness includes irrational resistance to change, which culminates in a mock-epic battle with a harvester that the Company introduced as an experiment in mechanizing cane field labor. From the novel’s start, however, readers are primed to recognize Balgobin’s ideals as stemming from a masochistic attachment to physical labour. He frames initiatives of the Company, like a new housing scheme and “talk of Modernizing the Industry,” as responsible for “softening up the workers in Wilderness” (9). He, like Hari in “Cane is Bitter,” puts undue significance on the toughening effects of toiling in the cane fields. Likewise, the narrator describes Balgobin as strangely keen on his immiseration: “he felt, in a way, that his own sufferings and tribulations were necessary for his brother’s success, that it was destined for him to pay the price for Harrilal’s progress” (11). Once again, Selvon’s bush coolies are not accurate representations of East Indians in the village. They are consenting sacrifices. By the time readers witness Balgobin’s clandestine destruction of the harvester, there is little chance of recognizing his motives as anything but obtuse. The novel cynically notes that this confrontation might be spun as the “age-old romance of man against machine,” but it guides readers to its preferred interpretation (89). The narrator explains that Balgobin’s young nephew, Popo, “knew he would never forgive his uncle for leaving him out of that glorious episode of history” (100). Popo’s naiveté leads to romanticization. Balgobin must be equally naïve if he believes his actions constitute anything of significance. The harvester will be replaced, and poya, now mangled from the battle, can only serve as further proof of the bush coolie’s obsolescence. In contrast to the bush coolie who lashes out at the well-meaning Company, Romesh is not interested in the harvester’s destruction as he is incredulous that such an act “could stop the wheels of progress” (106). He is more concerned with how village and family drama “was threatening his self-possession” (122). The modern East Indian is clear-sighted enough to remain trusting of the Company, open to change, and focused on selfhood.

As much as Plains is focused on Romesh’s self-possession, it also commits itself to a project of social ordering to mitigate threats to that self-possession. Seeta embodies such a threat. Her sole focus is helping Romesh “‘to get along and make a name for himself,’” so her interventions in his life are frequent and invasive (64). Her attitude and actions might benefit Romesh, but readers are encouraged to recognize them as not becoming of the modern East Indian. This reading departs from Simon Gikandi’s in Writing in Limbo in which he connects Romesh’s trajectory in Plains to Tiger’s in A Brighter Sun and Turn Again Tiger. Gikandi argues that “[a] schizophrenic identity has become Seeta’s way of mastering the present” while Romesh “concludes that if the future is to have any meaning and truly belong to him, then it must be detached from the past and the present” (137). Gikandi’s reading of Seeta relies on the narrator’s note that Seeta has “a village face and a city face” (47). However, juxtaposing Plains with “Cane is Bitter” provides an alternative understanding of Seeta. Rookmin, the mother in “Cane is Bitter,” is easily identified as another of Selvon’s bush coolies. She is narrowly defined by “hard work,” childbearing, and the “oriental respectfulness” she shows her husband (60). She is also backward in that she is emotionally stunted. The narrator explains, “perhaps she might have been unfaithful to Ramlal if the idea had ever occurred to her. But like most of the Indians in the country districts, half her desires and emotions were never given a chance to live” (50). Rookmin is explicitly presented as an incomplete person, and though she is only thirty-six years old, readers leave “Cane is Bitter” assuming that she will waste away in the village. She is another relic of the past that Romesh and readers must forget.

In Plains, Seeta is presented as “unlike the traditional image of the obedient and servile Indian wife” (12). She is the decision-maker of her household. She stopped an arranged marriage for Romesh, and she secures for Romesh a scholarship and a position in the Company. Nevertheless, Seeta’s role in the novel remains comparable to Rookmin’s. Seeta’s backwardness manifests both in her possessiveness over Romesh and her insistent jockeying for power. Romesh’s romantic relationship with Petra, a white Trinidadian woman, facilitates his choice to distance himself from these traits. In a conversation in which Petra advises him on confronting Seeta, she admonishes, “‘I refuse to believe you’re so weak-willed and Indianized’” (85). She ties her comments to Romesh’s masculinity, putting off their next rendezvous until Romesh has “‘asserted [his] manhood’” (86). For other liberal subjects to recognize him, Romesh must know himself as willful and know the East Indianness of the village as outmoded. Romesh’s masculinity, his viability as a romantic partner, and his compatibility with liberal progress all hinge on disentangling himself from Seeta.

In this light, Seeta’s possession of “a village face and a city face” is demonstrative of a capacity for deceit that the modern East Indian must progress beyond (47). Hence Romesh’s repeated accusations, stating at one point “‘[e]ven now you’re trying to deceive me’” (126) and later asking, “‘[h]aven’t we had enough deceit?’” (130). The narrator draws readers into Romesh’s assessment of Seeta by describing her as ready to “bulldoze and bamboozle, contrive and connive, cajole and implore. She had even considered and accepted having herself fucked for Romesh to attain her ambition” (66). The novel’s structure is such that in attempting to identify threats to the modern male East Indian’s self-possession, it simultaneously stokes judgment of the bodily autonomy of East Indian women. This is another way in which the novel remains caught within the rubrics of indentureship as planters, missionaries, British administrators, Indian nationalists in India, and indentured Indian men in the colonies all sought to surveil, regulate, punish, or pathologize the sexuality of indentured Indian women.⁸ Plains continues to police East Indian women’s sexuality, not in terms of Christian morality or plantation efficacy per se, but in terms of preserving the liberal order of society. Given Romesh’s later accusation that Seeta is “‘the sickest one of all’” (127), readers are to recognize Seeta’s excessive drive as threatening the promises of ethical individualism. Ultimately, Seeta, like Rookmin, is to be forgotten. After Balgobin’s death, Romesh coldly watches Balgobin’s cremation from afar, choosing Petra’s company over his family’s. The little thought he gives to Seeta is to wonder, “Would she peter out her life in the village, growing old like countless Indian women, sustained on memory and hope?” (138).

As a placeholder for attitudes that Romesh must be defined against, Seeta also facilitates the novel’s take on anti-Black racism. When Harrilal suggests that Romesh might face racism in England given what Black people there were facing, she retorts, “‘That is black people. We is Indians” (5). The novel’s derision of her attitude is obvious, and readers are to assume that Romesh would refuse Seeta’s stance. Selvon’s modern East Indian aims at a cosmopolitan creole sensibility rather than racial isolation.⁹ However, racism—like alcoholism—is cast as an individual shortcoming. This approach deprioritizes socioeconomic and political conditions and shelters those who control these conditions, namely the Company. This stance is conspicuous as 1970 saw Trinidad’s Black Power Revolution. Brinsley Samaroo, in “The February Revolution (1970) as Catalyst for Change in Trinidad and Tobago,” situates the events of 1970 within the longer and broader histories of collective organization inside and outside of the country. In effect, Samaroo demonstrates that activists aimed to confront the very dynamics that Plains obscures. Samaroo also overviews the contradictory ways in which East Indians fitted into these events. He notes, for instance, the supportive efforts of the Society for the Propagation of Indian Culture in UWI’s St. Augustine campus, which were connected to “widespread dissatisfaction among the sugar workers, who were particularly angry that their union, under the leadership of [Bhadase Sagan] Maraj, was dragging its feet in negotiations with the British-based owners of the industry” (105). The NJAC (the National Joint Action Committee) march to Caroni that took place on 12 March 1970 and the subsequent meeting in Couva on 20 March emphasize the fact that the novel was published in a context in which the politics of East Indians, their attitude to anti-Black racism, and their aptitude for collective organization alongside Black Trinidadians were contentious and consequential matters.

In Plains, there is frequent reference to strikes, unionists, student protests, and incipient political movements. In fact, Romesh’s relationship with Petra is initiated because they were both bored when “in the presence of a group of mixed students animatedly arguing about the desirability of a black power movement in Trinidad” (24). Its approach, however, differs from “Cane is Bitter.” The short story anticipates the West Indies Federation and the fruits of independence, and as a result, it emphasizes the significance of political participation. Readers of “Cane is Bitter” see Romesh scolding his father for voting by bribe and for not heeding the speeches given in the city by “‘[p]olitical men…from India’” (54). In the short story, while the bush coolie is bereft of political consciousness, the modern East Indian seeks to deepen that consciousness in relationship with others. By the time of the publication of Plains, however, Selvon had witnessed the collapse of the Federation and felt popular frustration with some of the unfulfilled promises of independence. Consequently, while “Cane is Bitter” suggests the self-fashioning possibilities of political participation, Plains comes across as disenchanted in this regard.

For the most part, the novel portrays political debates in a supercilious manner. At its start, Harrilal and Balgobin debate in the rum shop with Harrilal believing that the Company should get more land while Balgobin suggests, “‘Is we government what should run the sugar’” (13). Their views, though, are clearly without import. Those with power, specifically Eric Williams and his administration, appear stuck in superficial exercises of nation-building: “There were Members of TrinParliament, TrinSenators, TrinMinisters, TrinDirectors, TrinAmbassadors, and Trinrazor blades” (2). Alternative political visions also appear, but they are lampooned as reactionary and opportunistic. For example, after Balgobin destroys the harvester, the narrator mocks one “enthusiastic unionist” who “saw this opportunity in the crisis to create a new political party, the Commu-Demo-Afro-Indo-Triniworkers” (107). Likewise, in the final chapter, the narrator mockingly describes “strikes all over the island” uniting in defense of Balgobin “who had had the courage to fight single-handed against the disaster of mechanization” (136). According to the novel, collective action—more likely than not—is manipulative and dependent on hyperbolic rhetoric. It is not that Plains denies the challenges faced by those laboring in the cane fields. The narrator notes, for example, that “it was said that, statistically, the incidence of suicide was highest in the sugarcane areas” (107). Rather, the novel remains stubbornly skeptical of every effort at collective organization to give momentum to its assertion that the edification of the modern East Indian is what will produce necessary change.

To this end, after Balgobin’s destruction of the harvester, readers witness village East Indians whipping themselves into a frenzy before anticlimactically dispersing. It is tempting to read this attempt at organization as potentially consequential by connecting it to past strikes and rebellions in the Caribbean that destroyed the property of planters. However, the narrator makes it clear that the village East Indians in Plains build themselves into nothing more than a directionless mob (132). Teeka, Romesh’s brother, is a key figure in this confrontation. Like Hari in “Cane is Bitter,” Teeka has a tumultuous relationship with Romesh. He continues to work in the cane fields, angry at Romesh’s transformation into what he terms “‘a white Indian’” (128). Once again, Selvon has the bush coolie consent to his immiseration as readers learn that Teeka felt that “it was his fate to suffer in silence while his big brother got the glory and the fame” (54). As Romesh seeks to confront and pacify the mob at the novel’s end, the relationship between Romesh and Teeka crumbles. Teeka, aiming to maximize his brother’s emotional suffering, allows Romesh and Petra to leave but not before readers witness how inured by indentureship the bush coolies are. They are easily cowed by the presence of Petra: “The shouting and the tumult ceased as if by signal, turning to mutters and murmurings as the white woman appeared” (134). Bush coolies can only exist in a predetermined relationship with a white person while the modern East Indian assumes an equal standing. At the novel’s end, Teeka’s future is left undefined, but the possibility of village East Indians uniting and being led by someone like him seems dashed.

The significance of the politics of Plains can be better appreciated via reference to Andrew Salkey’s Georgetown Journal. Published in 1972, it documents Salkey’s attendance of the Caribbean Writers and Artists Conference in Guyana in February 1970. He travelled from London with Selvon and John La Rose, stopping briefly in Trinidad before witnessing Guyana’s founding as a Co-operative Republic. While in Trinidad, Salkey interviewed Clifford Sealy and Wally Look Lai, developing what he calls “a commentary on our total contemporary Caribbean condition” (29).¹⁰ Sealy invokes Plains in this conversation, specifically a brief anecdote that describes a lottery prizewinner. It appears in the novel as follows: “There was a man in Wilderness who had won a national lottery prize, and afterwards he walked backwards all the time, as if he hoped to get back into the past, or keep away from the future. People had to be careful how they treated him, lest he became violent” (4–5). Salkey offers a reading based on Sealy’s insights, suggesting that it is an allegory for the state of Caribbean countries post-independence. He reads “[i]ndependence and sovereignty” as the lottery prize and “back-tracking from our social responsibilities and political commitments” as walking backwards (30). There is no “real intention or even inclination to go out and make the future, and put underdevelopment behind us,” Salkey claims, noting that no one in authority proffers “a strong critical voice” because of the threat of violence. Salkey believes, however, that “in our real-life situation, the grim reality is that the people won’t, any longer, leave the Wilderness man alone; they’ll demand a violent confrontation.” This reading by Salkey, which is dated 15 February 1970, seems well-timed given that on 26 February 1970 NJAC initiated their first demonstration in Trinidad.

Salkey’s reading is driven by the political needs of the era. Today, the ballad of the lottery prizewinner appears comparable to the tragicomic episodes of Selvon’s immigrant fiction. Its playful use of contingency and the irrational disrupts the smooth narrative of Romesh’s self-realization. It is exemplary of why a novel like Plains needs to be read both for its production of difference (in terms of the bush coolie) and for its fleeting detours from this narrative. Lowe suggests as much in her reading of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. She establishes that within the genre of autobiography “[n]arrative temporality is itself a powerful vehicle of liberal progress” while suggesting that readers should attend to how “uses of temporal digression” in Equiano’s writing “also destabilize the generic conventions of linear progressive development” (60). This practice finds value in Selvon’s lottery prizewinner. Nevertheless, reinserting the episode into its context in Plains shows how it remains caught within descriptions of backwardness: it is provided to highlight Harrilal’s ineptitude in his relationship with his wife, preferring as he did to believe that “the money had gone to her head” (4). These complexities of narrative temporality are part and parcel of an assessment of where the Caribbean stood in 1970. Salkey had this to say about that moment in time: “We were all being guided by inherited social and political systems with creaking and alien machineries, governed by Caribbean leaders bent on sticking close to a hopelessly sterile, mimetic course of governing, and instructed by ‘men of promise’ disinclined to cut away from it and invent a new strategy and philosophy of living” (35). This summation captures why Plains expresses dissatisfaction with the advances of independence and suspicion regarding the opportunism of would-be leaders. Its designation of the individual as its agent of social change, however, relies on what can be included in Salkey’s “creaking and alien machineries.” Reliance on the liberal narrative of modern progress and its production of backwardness enhances class and racial divisions and makes more difficult Salkey’s injunction to “cut away” and “invent” anew.