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Dem Bones

Some thirty years ago in the National Museum of Guyana, amidst the geological, archaeological and historical artefacts in their display cabinets, there existed a carefully cordoned-off empty space. It consisted of a plinth covered in plush red fabric surrounded by gold tasselled ropes, as if waiting for secret royalty. I am not sure how many other countries set aside a space in their national museums for their ghosts, spirits and jumbies. Not many, I imagine. Behind the empty space hung various plaques with detailed sociological descriptions of each spirit, itemizing its habitat, appearance, customary behaviour and even dietary preferences, an attempt by the rational with its orderly classifications and categorizations to contain or overpower these disturbing beings.

Take Moon-Gazer for example. Moon-Gazer is about sixty feet tall and can be seen straddling roads on moonlit nights. It is clothed in white, and grows and diminishes as the moon rises and sets. It devours people who attempt to pass between its feet unless they are smoking a cigarette and remain silent. It harms people when the moon is hidden by clouds. And what about the Bush Dai-Dai? It has hairless yellow skin and is slightly shorter than a normal human being. It lives in the interior, has a tail but no knees and a reversed foot. People say it can be of either sex and that it guards Amerindian treasures. When annoyed it eats people or tears them to pieces. Favourite food, bananas.

In recent years the space in the museum has become less prominent and the gold tasselled ropes have gone. Rationalism has gained the upper hand.

I was reminded of all this recently when I picked up a novel by Edgar Mittelholzer, the Guyanese writer who first brought Guyana’s fiction to the attention of Britain. The book is called My Bones and My Flute (1955), and on rereading it I was

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Some thirty years ago in the National Museum of Guyana, amidst the geological, archaeological and historical artefacts in their display cabinets, there existed a carefully cordoned-off empty space. It consisted of a plinth covered in plush red fabric surrounded by gold tasselled ropes, as if waiting for secret royalty. I am not sure how many other countries set aside a space in their national museums for their ghosts, spirits and jumbies. Not many, I imagine. Behind the empty space hung various plaques with detailed sociological descriptions of each spirit, itemizing its habitat, appearance, customary behaviour and even dietary preferences, an attempt by the rational with its orderly classifications and categorizations to contain or overpower these disturbing beings.

Take Moon-Gazer for example. Moon-Gazer is about sixty feet tall and can be seen straddling roads on moonlit nights. It is clothed in white, and grows and diminishes as the moon rises and sets. It devours people who attempt to pass between its feet unless they are smoking a cigarette and remain silent. It harms people when the moon is hidden by clouds. And what about the Bush Dai-Dai? It has hairless yellow skin and is slightly shorter than a normal human being. It lives in the interior, has a tail but no knees and a reversed foot. People say it can be of either sex and that it guards Amerindian treasures. When annoyed it eats people or tears them to pieces. Favourite food, bananas. In recent years the space in the museum has become less prominent and the gold tasselled ropes have gone. Rationalism has gained the upper hand. I was reminded of all this recently when I picked up a novel by Edgar Mittelholzer, the Guyanese writer who first brought Guyana’s fiction to the attention of Britain. The book is called My Bones and My Flute (1955), and on rereading it I was as terrified as I had been when I originally came across it in my youth. It is set in Berbice and concerns a spirit called the Dutchman. Mittelholzer came from what was known then as a coloured family in the small town of New Amsterdam in the county of Berbice, originally a Dutch colony. When I last went there the only way to cross the Berbice River was by ferry although I believe there is now a floating bridge. The river is one of three great rivers in Guyana. Once when a friend of mine was visiting I organized a trip for her on the Essequibo River. When she saw the river she asked if she would need a passport. The river was so wide it was not possible to see the bank on the far side. She thought she was leaving the country. I was making a trip to New Amsterdam to visit friends. While the rusty ferry was being loaded I waited at the pierhead or stelling as it is known, from the Dutch. The river was flat and wide, the waters a milky caramel colour, the air warm and windless. On the far side it was just possible to see a low green fringe of bush. There was nothing to indicate human habitation except one church spire that rose out of the green strip. Guyana is a hugely underpopulated country and wherever there is a small town or settlement it is impossible to ignore the impermanence of human life in that setting, surrounded as it is by a vast hinterland of uninhabited rainforest, bush, swamp, river and savannah. It affects Guyanese writers and in Mittelholzer’s work characters can seem to have a closer contact with nature than with family or society. He paints pictures of ‘the green doldrums’ and ‘the dark green menace’, ‘the perpetual hissing of the rain’ and ‘the chirruping of tree-frogs’. These days, unlike, say, Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville, writers have less contact with the elements, less chance to consider the relative puniness of their own existence. That day as I waited to board the ferry I was aware of the endless calm patience of the river, lapping at the wooden support beams of the stelling as if it were waiting to reassert itself over the manmade impediment. Soon the ferry was chugging through the water overloaded with goods, sacks of grain and agricultural machinery. Passengers crowded together on deck, shoving and jostling each other, leaning over the railing, studying the waterline and wondering if the shuddering boat would sink. The crossing took twenty minutes. From the landing-stage, I walked into a town in full rigor mortis. Many of the once stately wooden houses were dilapidated, sagging a little, their timbers cracked by the sun, the white paint peeling. I looked for New Street. There is a notion that the history and geography of South America are both so extreme as to appear fictional or even magical to outsiders. The line between fiction and reality is blurred. In New Street the modest single-storey houses on stilts were set at a distance from each other but they too were in disrepair and looked as unstable as a house of cards. It was hot and I needed a cool drink. I couldn’t see any numbers on the houses so I stopped a passer-by: ‘Excuse me, sir, which house is number sixteen?’ The man paused for a moment and then replied, ‘They all number sixteen in this street.’ I felt I was in a dream, though later I discovered that the whole street was indeed ‘Lot Sixteen’. Eventually, I found the right house. Later that day, as I wandered around town, I was reminded of Mittelholzer’s landscapes, the glittering black waters of Canje Creek and the Dutch names of old plantations: Oostermeer and De Hoop. In 1763 there was a great slave rebellion in Berbice: 2,500 slaves rose up against their Dutch colonial masters. Cuffy the leader declared himself governor of Berbice. The uprising was brutally put down by the Dutch commander van Hoogenheim. Many lives were lost. The Dutchman’s spirit is supposed to patrol the borders of plantations, sometimes on horseback. The story of My Bones and My Flute is set in the 1930s. It concerns the Nevinsons, a New Amsterdam family, owners of a timber factory a hundred miles up-river in Goed de Vries. A canister discovered there contains an old parchment written in Dutch. Mr Nevinson decides to investigate. He takes his wife, daughter and a friend, all of whom have handled the parchment. It turns out that whoever touches the parchment begins to hear a flute playing and later becomes subject to an enormous force that drags them towards the river. One local Amerindian woman has already drowned with the mark of a flute branded on her thigh. The parchment was apparently written by a Dutch planter whose wife and children had been slaughtered in the uprising. He wrote in hiding, knowing he would die, demanding that his bones be given a Christian burial alongside his flute and cursing anyone who did not comply. He saw himself surrounded by spiritual forces that were evil and Satanic. Mittelholzer was exceptionally well-read, and in My Bones and My Flute he produced a traditional ghost story to match those of Edgar Allan Poe and M. R. James. He recreates the oppressive atmosphere of the bush, the metallic call of a bird, the rank musky smell of a creek’s rotting vegetation and the needle-fine whine of mosquitoes. What is happening inside the family house is contrasted with the everyday sound of the saw-mill engines, the workers’ voices and daily life carrying on as usual somewhere not too far away. Inside the house those dark spirits take on different manifestations: sometimes the figure of a man; sometimes a grey furry sub-human presence humping along the floor; a swirling mist that enters and sinks into the daughter; a goatish stench; the stigmata of a flute on the skin. They always have the same effect of dragging the victim towards the river to be drowned. The only thing that can keep them at bay is fire – a match, a candle, an oil lamp. The function of the bone-flute in pre-Columbian and pre-Christian Amerindian cultures is highly debatable. But there are stories of Macusi and Warao origin where the flute is particularly magical in dispelling evil spirits and making sure a certain area remains sacred. Who knows whether that idea was lodged somewhere in Mittelholzer’s psyche? In his story, the flute is ambiguous. It could be either a good or a bad force, but eventually the family follows the sound deep into the bush. Anyone who wishes to know the rest of the story can read it for themselves. After my wander around town I returned to the house where all the conversation was about the chloroform robbers who rendered their victims unconscious while they carried out their robberies. That was many years ago. I think New Amsterdam has had a facelift since then, and a friend confirmed it: ‘Yes. Ah believe dem a nice it up now.’ In the village of Mahaica in Demerara, a ritual takes place every so often where a table is laid with delicious snacks and jellies and left out overnight to appease the spirits of the English dead in a cemetery nearby. I asked a woman why the same ceremony was not conducted for the Dutch, who also occupy part of the cemetery. In the sun her face shone with scorn. She replied: ‘Everyone knows that the Dutch are unappeasable.’ Edgar Mittelholzer’s work is out of fashion now. Sometimes his writing is lurid and populist, but it can also be powerful. His personal attitudes, his avowed racism and extreme right-wing opinions are judged to be abhorrent. For the last half of his life he relocated to the English home counties, Farnham to be precise, where he chose to commit suicide by pouring petrol on himself and setting himself alight. I am writing this in England in May. In Guyana it is the rainy season and I think of the heavy rains falling endlessly over that vast uninhabited expanse of bush.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 74 © Pauline Melville 2022


About the contributor

Pauline Melville’s latest collection of short stories, The Master of Chaos, was published in 2021.

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