By Frank Birbalsingh
Frank Birbalsingh is Emeritus Professor of English at York University, Toronto, Canada.
The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q, recently published by Bookouture, follows a blockbuster tradition set by previous novels of Sharon Maas, for example, Of Marriageable Age, (2000) Peacocks Dancing, (2002) and The Speech of Angels. (2003). The title “Small Fortune” refers to the unique value of the “B.G. One cent Magenta” stamp produced when Guyana was still a British colony (British Guiana or B.G.) and a shipment of new stamps from Britain failed to reach B. G. The “Magenta” was part of a replacement batch of stamps printed locally, and to prevent forgeries, hand-signed by postal clerks one of whom was the author’s great-great grandfather.
Activities of Maas’s chief characters in Small Fortune, all members of the (fictional) Quint family, are observed over three generations, and across continents both in Guyana and in Britain (London.) Maas’s narrative technique is, to say the least, challenging. Not only does she employ three narrators – the matriarch Dorothea Quint, her daughter Rika, and Rika’s daughter Inky – but each narrator speaks from a different perspective of place (either B.G. or London) and time, from the 1930s and 1950s (Dorothea), the 1960s (Rika), and the 1990s (Inky). There is risk of confusion, for instance, when we have to abruptly connect events from Inky’s narrative, in the 1990s, to those from Dorothea in the 1930s and 1950s, or from Rika in the 1960s to Inky in the 1990s; but through extraordinary skill, if not genius, Maas ensures that these connections come through, with flying colours of coherence and smoothness, in almost every case.
The technique pays rich dividends in creating suspense, and ensuring that chronology is neither sacrificed nor diminished. Events in Small Fortune properly begin in the 1930s, in Georgetown, where values of race, colour and class prevail in Dorothea’s family and friends, members of a coloured, brown or mixed blood (chiefly African/ European) group that forms the colony’s urban middle class through their concentration in business, higher branches of the civil service, the professions and clergy. In the 1950s, however, an era of decolonisation beckons with election of a mass-based party, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) which threatens to transform B.G.’s feudalistic, colonial, social structure. But it is quickly quashed by British rulers with the aid of troops introducing a new era of change and transition, and with Guyanese becoming dispersed through migration to richer countries like Britain and the US. Although perhaps driven by personal more than political motives, Dorothea and her family are part of this migration.
In Small Fortune, Dorothea Quint (née van Dam) has four children: twin sons – Norbert and Neville – who migrate, one to England and the other to the US; a daughter Rika who leaves for London, in the 1960s, under circumstances shrouded in secrecy and mystery; and Rika’s sister, Marion, who plays almost no role except for patiently providing care of her ageing mother, Dorothea, in the family home, in Georgetown, while her brothers and sister are abroad. It is the combined effect of Dorothea’s secret hoarding of the one cent Magenta stamp, over decades, and Rika’s self-enforced silence about her early life in B.G., during long years in London, that spark travel and tribulation in the lives of characters, thrilling suspense, and a shattering climax in Small Fortune.
Since it is not fair to give away the climax of the novel to prospective readers, suffice to say that suspense is first sniffed by Inky soon after her grandmother Dorothea moves in to live with her and Rika in their house, in London, in the 1990s. For Inky was born in London, and at the age of eighteen, knows nothing of Guyana or her relations there: all she senses is a “capsule of venom” (p.241) in Rika and a “knot of discord” (p.241) between Rika and her grandmother, known as “ol Meanie” because of her stubborn, erratic and cantankerous ways. Inky’s reactions capture suppressed tension in her Mum and grandmother until they eventually explode.
What Rika does not know is the colonial family history that produces tension. Dorothea was Minister of Women’s Progress in the short-lived PPP government of B.G. in 1953, and later achieved fame as a crusading advocate and champion of women’s rights.
Rika, on the other hand, a girl of merely sixteen when she left B.G. for London, was “a misfit, an outsider bumbling as ever,” (p.132) who read “unusual texts by the Christian Mystics, and the Sufis and the great sages of India, Shankara and Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi”(p.131). Rika’s greatest, most influential friend was Rajan, an Indian-Guyanese whose mother worked as a maid in the Quint household.
Although full details of the novel’s dénouement are not revealed here, we can surely imagine the revolutionary impact of Rika’s spiritual relationship with the son of her family’s maid on Guyana’s deep-seated, feudalistic, colonial ethics: fracture, dispersal, migration, and a disturbing, shifting sense of home that can be spiritually destructive. Dorothea sums up this impact in a deceptively simple question: “if you don’t know where you come from how you going know where you going?” (p. 335)
Whether it is sordid greed prompted by the small fortune of the Magenta stamp on her relatives, or their dispersal into homelessness from Guyana, Inky who knows only South London and regards it as her home examines the effect of migration specifically on her mother: “she [Rika] had left her territory at only sixteen! … Was the texture of Guyana merged into her consciousness as South London was in mine? Did she deny that sense of home… and if so, was she somehow damaged, stunted, broken? Who was she? … Maybe deep down inside she missed that sense of home. And family. Who were all these people Gran [Dorothea] constantly talked about?” (pp.237-238) More troubling still, Inky reveals the paradoxical yet inevitable effect of homelessness on herself: “I grew nostalgic for a family, a home I’d never known”(p.239).
