The maverick from St Lucia

Keith Jardim

Prisnms, the last novella by Garth St Omer (1931-2018) from St Lucia, who lived for a long time in the US and was one of the most honest and best prose-fiction writers of the Caribbean – focuses on race, but in a deeply serious, highly intriguing and, at times, provocative fashion, often tragicomic.

This is St Omer’s sixth work of fiction; his earlier novellas, published in the 1960s and early 70s, reveal a novelist far ahead of his contemporaries and whose literary influences were largely non-Caribbean.

The catalyst for antihero Eugene Coard’s confession of wrongs and inventions, his account of creating a new identity, is news of a murdered old friend in St Lucia. The story covers the time he left St Lucia to his attempt at making a new life in England, and then in America, where things really get going.

Coard, a somewhat Anancy-like first-person narrator, manipulates the values and assumptions of American society for his own advancement financially and professionally; even personally, he pursues an ideal image of a potential stepfather and politically correct black man to convince a beautiful woman to marry him. He is anything but himself, an entity he may not possess.

Coard twists day-to-day life, tying knots in his present reality and cordoning off areas of his past. He is a master of puppetry, lies, and self-propaganda. He is something of a writer and a fully qualified psychiatrist, occupations that facilitate the kind of respectability he requires to carry out his mission of advancement and, why not, a kind of necessary historic justice – certainly his warped conscience sees it that way.

Thus Coard’s bad begins:

“I wanted, no matter how diverse their cultural, religious, political and ethnic origins in Europe might have been, to entrap them as inescapably within their single condition of American whiteness as I felt entrapped in my single condition of American blackness. I wanted to make them as destructively and self-destructively white as possible, to make racists of those who were not, and make more racist those who already were…The idea was to mangle them psychologically, confuse them about who they were, raise questions in their minds about who they otherwise might have been.”

Coard is clearly an opportunist and his own worst enemy. His story dramatises a fine tension between reliable and unreliable narrator, pitting a St Lucian Catholic background, with its vibrant hypocrisy and anti-life beliefs, against a drive for escape and, yes, freedom.

To have freedom and be able to play it in whatever way you choose once you have achieved a certain financial status is the American dream/nightmare. You can become your own lord and master, which is never enough of course for a man such as Coard.

So eventually our Anancy-like figure – beloved and much varied and popular throughout Caribbean literature – faces his most challenging encounter in America, where race relations – or rather lack – are unlike anything he has confronted in St Lucia. Anancy flourishes at the start, mimicking whatever established Americana wishes to see and hear of a black man. The final results are devastating.

St Omer’s Prisnms restores the possibility, or suggests one, of humane relations among men and women and people of different races and cultures. That’s a positive reading of the story’s end (another reading is there as well); and while such hope is, well, difficult to grasp in our time, this novella, despite its true, human-brutal emotional responses to racism and gender (and also because of them), offers an understanding that makes the reader determined to have that hope.