The book by its cover

PART 1 A review KEITH JARDIM

“…. Where do you think the error started?”

“I suppose you can say it started here. In the society you have here. It isn’t organised for work or for individual self-respect.”

“We won’t quarrel about that. But you don’t think the leadership might have had something to do with it as well?” – V S Naipaul, Guerrillas.

MY Ballantine paperback of Guerrillas (1975), based on the murder of Gale Ann Benson in Trinidad in 1973, the subject of Naipaul’s great essay, Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad, has a memorable cover.

The title is the largest word on the cover, set in all-caps and camouflage-green; below it is the name of the 2001 Nobel Laureate, in the same green but reduced in size. And below that there’s a picture of a young woman, nude except for the lush and vigorous sprout of vegetation around her loins. Part of the vegetation is decorated with a blood-red drooping hibiscus-like flower; a vertical dark opening marks its centre. She has her arms crossed against her breasts, palms on shoulders, and is staring not at the reader, if you look closely, but at something far off in the distance, behind your left shoulder.

Behind her, hugging her, powerful arms and hands the only fully visible parts of his anatomy, is a man whose skin is a shade or two darker than hers. His right hand, fingers splayed, rests on her bare stomach, while his other grips her left shoulder, arm bent at the elbow, cast down along that tender and pale area of flesh between her underarm and scapula.

But wait, there is more: directly behind her head, her European features instantly giving way to black hair which is sudden and dense, suggesting the Afro-like hair of the man, the young woman’s head and the unseen head of the man are superimposed on the lower curve of a dark blood-red sun; this red is darker than the hibiscus, the colour of a severe bruise.

And in the lower left of the fertile vegetation obscuring the woman’s pubis and legs, is an iguana, prominent enough in the illustration so that the texture of its reptilian skin is apparent. It seems quite capable of leaping completely out of the lush vegetation, its two front legs hanging, not entirely relaxed, the five-fingered claws of each leg remarkably similar to hands readying to clutch at some kind of prey. The iguana’s gaze is directed, like the woman’s, toward something in the distance. There is mild anticipation in the iguana’s face and the woman’s.

The background is all white heat, with a hint, ever so slight, of green.

The obscured man – faceless, represented not as a human being so much as a twisted, primal force – and the cool iguana, and the pale woman, nude and beautiful: they are the children (or unformed selves) of colonial history, and are desirous of power, love, respect and admiration. But they are in a corrupt garden, and are often unaware, even uncaring, of their fate, as is the island they inhabit.

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"The book by its cover"

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