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Chronicle Pepperpot July 20, 2014
Other Leopards by Denis Williams
I
Introduction by Victor J. Ramraj n 1959, the Jamaican author V.S. Reid published his novel The Leopard, set in Kenya. It reflected his angry response to the defaming of a legitimate anti-colonial movement, the Mau-Mau, by the British and colonial press. In 1962, a year before the publication of Denis Williams's Other Leopards, Derek Walcott published "A Far Cry from Africa," a poem that evokes a conflicted response to those same Kenyan events and, through the powerful metaphor of being "divided to the vein" (Walcott's grandmothers were blacks and his grandfathers European), expresses his particular ambiv-
Dr Victor Ramraj
alence as a colonial individual towards the two worlds in which he finds himself, the local and the imperial. In the year following the publication of Other Leopards, O.R. Dathorne's The Scholar Man (1964) also explored the symbolic figure of a Caribbean man returning to Africa. In 1968, and without the ambivalences of Walcott, Williams and Dathorne, Edward Kamau Braithwaite published Masks, the second and African-set volume of his Arrivants trilogy. It was a period when in addition to Dathorne and Brathwaite, other writers such as Lindsay Barrett and Neville Dawes went to live in Africa. It was a period when in Jamaica the demand of Rastafarian groups to "go home" to Ethiopia began to penetrate public discourse when the UWI's Institute of Social and Economic Research published the 1960 Report on thr Rastafarian Movement. In Guyana, in 1961 Eusi Kwayana had founded the African Society for Racial Equality (ASRE) and in 1964 set up ASCRIA, the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa. Denis Williams himself had spent ten years in Africa between 1958 and 1968: five years lecturing at the Khartoum School of Fine Arts and five years at the University of Ife in Nigeria. This was the context in which Other Leopards appeared in 1963. What sets this landmark novel apart from the other works set in Africa at this time is its unremitting focus on its intensely ambivalent protagonist, Lionel Froad. Froad, like Walcott's speaker, finds it difficult to choose between the African and the English worlds, plaintively asking "where shall I turn," and Williams depicts his predicament in an impressive, arresting way. In the first part of the novel, Williams sets out the dichotomised life that underlies the crisis; in the second part he dramatizes the search for a consistent, stable identity. Both parts paint an insightful, psychological, socio-political
portrait of a tormented and conflicted colonial, but it is in the second part in particular that Williams's novelistic talent is most evident when he shows Lionel Froad trying to avoid falling into the interstices between apparently antithetical cultures and trying to find a resolution to his dilemma. Froad's disturbed consciousness of his duality is evident from the start. Like the author, he is an Afro-Guyanese educated in Britain. He has come to Johkara, a fictional version of Sudan, ostensibly to work as an archaeological draftsman for an English researcher, Hugh King, but essentially in the hope of finding in Africa his true roots and identity, which he thinks his colonial education has denied him. Intelligent and contemplative, often poetic in articulating his feelings, he informs an unidentified listener/reader what his problem is: "I am a man, you see, plagued by (my) two names, and this is their history: Lionel the who I was, dealing with Lobo, the who I continually felt I ought to become...All along, ever since I'd grown up, I'd been Lionel looking for Lobo. I'd felt I ought to become this chap, this alter ego of ancestral times that I was sure quietly slumbered behind the cultivated mask." Such meta-fictional commentary in the opening paragraph of the novel Denis Williams signals us to read the work as a colonial allegory of in betweenity, and many other elements in the novel – some transparent, some less so – support this direction. The opening locale shows Froad contemplating his divided psyche while stalled on a bus on Kutam Bridge, in a town linking the two physical environments of Johkara; it is “not quite sub-Sahara, but then not quite desert; not equatorial black, not Mediterranean white. Mulatto. Sudanic mulatto, you could call it. Ochre. Semi-scrub. Not desert, not sown.” The dividedness of the setting (described in human terms) reinforces the dividedness of the protagonist. In addition to Froad’s being caught between the imperial lion and the native wolf (“lobo” is Spanish and Portuguese for “wolf”) as his first names point up, he sees his current identity as “froadulent”. Other names are allegorical in a more sophisticated way. Halfway through the novel, distinguishing between individuals who are absolutely sure of themselves and their causes, and those who are burdened with uncertainties and doubts. Froad uses the image of the novel’s title: “Some leopards think they have no spots simply because they have no mirrors. Others manage to know, somehow”. So among lobos and leopards he identifies two kinds: those with and those without self-awareness. Froad clearly is “another leopard,” aware of his spots, aware of his vacillation and ambivalence, and in this duality there is perhaps a comment on V.S. Reid’s slightly earlier novel, The Leopard, where the eponymous beat is an altogether less complex metaphor. Froad pays a price for his self-knowledge – he who yearns “to be committed, happy. Like everybody else”. But given his compulsion to know himself he is unlikely to succumb to the self-deception such response entails. Hughie King, Froad’s nemesis, is evidently an allegorical reflection of imperial power – through more fleshed out than the Old Dowager, George Lamming’s imperial allegorical counterpart in Water with berries (1971). But King has an additional allegorical function in Other Leopards. If Williams
portrays Lobo as Lionel’s alter ego, his id, representing the intuitive, the passionate, “the swamp and forests and vaguely felt darkness”, King is the cerebral, the disciplined, the ordered, the enquiring–the super ego qualities Froad both admires and resents. Despite King’s condescending criticism of his inability to be more even-tempered and methodical, Froad is “fond of him”, admitting that he envies his “cold intelligence; clear apart mind”. Williams recurringly points to their duality through images of marriage and love (the literalness of which the text plays down). On one occasion, Froad states: “I sometimes felt Hughie could read my thoughts…In some things it was like we were married”. And at the end of the novel, when Lionel tries to shed this burdensome component of his psyche by killing King, Hughie appears to be an understanding participant. “So fast it was as though he was greedy for the screwdriver; he came hungrily into it, like we were lovers understanding this inevitable moment”. Whether or not we are meant to read a homoerotic sub-text here, it nevertheless reinforces the figurative significance of Froad’s assault on his British alter ego. Williams draws a parallel with another work that has frequently been read as an allegory of the colonial-imperial relationship. Just before Froad plunges the screwdriver into King’s neck, he attempts to hum Ariel’s song “Where the Bee Sucks” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but he finds he “couldn’t sing”. Ariel is Prospero’s smart, temporising, diplomatic servant and Froad cannot sing Ariel’s song because at the point when he makes his murderous assault, he is not Ariel but Prospero’s confrontational other servant Caliban (-Lobo), who uses the language his master has taught him to curse him. Williams suggests Froad’s potential is to appear to King/Prospero as either Ariel or Caliban, unlike Lamming (in Water with Berries) or Aime Cesaire (in the Une Tempete [1969]) who both appear to suggest that West Indian colonials are essentially Calibans (without acknowledging their Arieleque possibilities). Froad, as a self-aware leopard, is ambivalent in his response to the intuitive world of Lobo, his African-native alter ego. He is disillusioned, for instance, when he discovers the true nature of Amanishakete, the Queen of Meroe in BCE 1. In earlier discussions with Froad, King has relegated Amanishakete culture to the status of the marginal; with no influence on what followed. For Froad, Amanishakete was to prove Ling wrong; she was to counter his dismissive comments, show once and for all that Froad had a noble African ancestry. But when Froad visits the archaeological site where figures of Amanishakete have been unearthed, he finds statues of her flogging slaves. He cannot help seeing her as “cruel, gross, ugly…she knew hate and law. No trace of love and care. She was a spreading desert”. With this disillusioning discovery, the Lionel-King part of his psyche wins through, repressing his Lobo identity. Williams, further portrays Froad’s divisions in his relationships with the two women he becomes intimate with in Johkara: Eve, the daughter of “the chief”, a domineering black Christian missionary, who like Froad, is from Guyana; and Catherine, King’s secretary, who is from Wales together they constitute another binary opposition tugging at Froad. With patent allegorical intent, Williams has Froad recognise a sketch of Amanishakete in an archaeological volume to be “the image, pure and simple and shatteringly original, of Eve”. Eve has married a Muslim against her Christian father’s wishes, and, when the novel opens, has fled her husband’s home with their baby. Froad, in his Lobo frame of mind, sees her initially as a kindred spirit and becomes her lover. Williams describes Eve, who always addresses Froad as Lobo, never as Lionel, in terms of images associated with the wolf. He compares her to the gloom of forest floors and dark, silent rivers, and (before his disillusion) Froad perceives her as a true descendant of
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