Book Review : Ethnic Roots Grow Shallow on an Island of ‘Brutality’

A Casual Brutality by Neil Bissoondath. (Clarkson N. Potter: $18.95; 352 pages)

Raj Ramsingh’s great-grandparents came over from India to cut sugar cane on the fictional Caribbean island of Casaquemada. His grandfather set up a flourishing grocery store. His parents were killed in a car crash.

Raj goes to Canada on a scholarship, studies medicine, marries and settles there. After a year or two, uneasy and seeking roots, he returns to Casaquemada. The roots are shallow.

His grandfather is dying; his uncle, a respected senior civil servant, has become as shaky as the post-independence politicians he works for. Younger, armed factions of the island’s black majority are fighting for power; before long, the island will be in chaos and American parachutists will be landing.

“A Casual Brutality” is a novel about displacement; the displacement of a Caribbean ethnic community whose hold never was very deep. The violent ending of Neil Bissoondath’s book suggests Grenada; but in other respects, Casaquemada more nearly resembles Trinidad. There, an East Indian minority that had lived looking down upon and later--once the queen was gone--fearing its black neighbors, finds itself squeezed out.

Displacement, then, more than uprooting. It is a bleaker thing; not a one-time historical tragedy, but a desolate recurrence.

A Life of Isolation

“I go,” Raj says on his final departure, “like my forebears, to the future, to the challenge that lies elsewhere, of turning nothing into something, far from the casual brutality of collapse, far from the ruins of failure, across thousands of miles of ocean.”

Perhaps that sounds more rousing, more indomitable, by itself than it will to someone reading it on the last page of “A Casual Brutality.” There, it seems out of key, out of place.

The truth is that Raj’s displacement has struck very deep indeed. It is total; it has chilled his marrow, his sense of himself, his feelings about others.

In his account of childhood, of life in Canada, of his wife and child, of his work as a doctor, of his time back in Casaquemada before the final violence, there is no sense of attachment, passion or even response. We find it hard to believe that any new life will be any less numb and isolated than the one we have observed.

Only in his recollection of his grandfather, a calm, industrious man whose love for his family was felt rather than manifested, do Raj’s feelings warm for a moment. It is a lost past and security--a frail one too, lasting only a single generation--that he hungers for, and it is the only hunger he shows.

Otherwise, he tells of his life and that of Casaquemada with distanced anger. His parents he doesn’t remember; his grandmother is a voluble, possessive woman, cheated by political turmoil of her dream of becoming a respected Indian matriarch, surrounded by the love and respect of her children and grandchildren.

Raj’s time in Canada as a medical student is one of isolation, apart from the certain mild affection for his elderly landlady. It is emotional, not actual isolation; he mingles with his fellow students but doesn’t seem to see them. Even his meeting with Jan, a Canadian woman, is a singularly chilly affair; their marriage takes place when she becomes pregnant after a single night of sex.

His encounters back in Casaquemada are more vivid, though still told at a distance. The cast of characters is emblematic of the island’s history and degeneration. An oil boom has disrupted the traditional sugar economy, made a lot of people rich, corrupted their values, and then receded; leaving the impulse of greed with no outlet except violence.

There is Surein, Raj’s cousin, who has made money importing a series of consumerist fads and now imports the most recent fad--guns. There is Madera, a brutal policeman and member of one of the new death squads that shoot people before they can commit a crime. There is Raj’s uncle, Grappler, whose belief in law and civic processes has given way to pessimism and the reluctant view that a Latin American-style strongman may be necessary.

In this case, after the rampage of the armed bands, the strongman role is provided by the U.S. parachutists. And Grappler comments:

“Some people going to say they right, some going to say they wrong. But the way I see it, all they’ve done is to take away our right to kill each other wholesale. And maybe that’s not a bad thing to lose.”

Gloom of a Displaced Minority

There is a deep and documented pessimism in Bissoondath’s fictionalization of the plight of this new Caribbean nation, even if his viewpoint, like Grappler’s, reflects the additional gloom of a displaced minority. The author writes with graphic energy, particularly in describing a violence-wracked city and, quite shockingly, tells how he personally prepares and lights the pyre on which his wife and child are cremated, Hindu-style.

Energy apart, though, the writing is wooden and ornate by turns. Bissoondath assembles whole paragraphs of political and social analyses and inserts them in lumps into the mouths of his characters. The quality of the writing, in fact, makes the book hard to get through, even when the wood bursts alarmingly into flowers. Here Raj writes of the frailty of the past he has been seeking:

“I understood now my sense of the present shifting swiftly to the past. The hole was beginning to gape, and in the widening aperture the viper couched in the heart of comfort was coming clear.”