Hardcover (September 1, 2002)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.ca
Austin
Clarke, Toronto resident and Barbados native, maintains that he doesn't
write for the limelight, but alas the honours have come in: the Rogers
Communications Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for The Origin of
Waves, a Governor General's Award nomination for The
Question, the W.O. Mitchell Prize for his literary mentorship and
his outstanding body of work, and finally Canada's largest and most
esteemed annual award for fiction, the Giller Prize, for his novel The
Polished Hoe.
(Some hushed murmurs have blighted the last of these
kudos, calling it a verdict skewed by political correctness rather than
literary merit, as if a black man writing about slavery were a recipe for
mainstream adulation.)
Clarke's ornately polished Hoe unfolds in less than 24 hours,
but it explores the fate of black people, past, present, and future, paced
by the Great Time--the place where all those times meet--of African and
Caribbean oratory tradition. Clarke plunks his muses down on the isle of
Bimshire--Barbados in cloak--in the "Wessindies."
It's an unsettling
postcolonial landscape, soiled by the "sickening power of poverty"--among
other routine brutalities, woman and mere girls can be and are dragged off
and forcibly taken atop heaps of agricultural refuse. As Clarke's story
begins, Mr. Bellfeels, the tyrannical "red-nigger" plantation overseer of
Flagstaff Village, has been chopped down. After Bellfeels's concubine, the
dignified Mary-Mathilda, hails up the law, resident barkeep Manny huffs,
"Any one o' we have reason to kill that son-of-a-bitch."
Having pined for Mary-Mathilda for close to 40 years, Percy, a church
choir-chanting, lily-livered police sergeant who gets around on a
three-speed bike, is called up to the Great House where Bellfeels has
installed his mistress (and their Oxbridge-educated son who can pass as
white) to take her statement on the crime.
But Percy doesn't want to hear
it, "the powers-that-be don't. The public don't. And the Village don't."
Bloody facts aside, island justice sensibilities have decreed that
Bellfeels's slaying was a public service.
So while Percy intermittently
nods off or quashes the "impetus to rape," Mary-Mathilda--a polished ho in
her own right, well aware that the other villagers call her a "brown-skin
bitch"--unloads a soliloquy on village history, specifically her
existential alienation "ordered through the destinies of paternity" and
"paid for by her body."
The rest of us are left to measure this epic
against other grand island overviews like Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco.
There's no doubt, this Hoe swings sure and true.
