“Under the Tamarind Tree” is the debut novel of Rosaliene Bacchus, a US-based Guyanese, who des-cribes the work as the “mixed fruit” of her struggle with abandonment as well as her concerns about the country’s divisive, racial politics.
During the course of her life, Bacchus, who was born in Georgetown and now lives in Los Angeles, California, has been a Catholic nun, a high school teacher, an executive assistant, an import-export manager, a wife, and a divorced mother of two sons.
After living in Brazil, she moved to the United States, where she says she began writing as a form of self-therapy to address her estrangement from her mother.
The novel, set in British Guiana during the years leading up to independence, tells the story of Richard Cheong, who is obsessed with having a son, which he hopes will carry on his father’s lineage.
As is seen in the excerpt we have published this week, as Richard awaits the birth of what he hopes will be his first son in 1953, the British colonial government suspends the Guianese Constitution, and deploys troops as it disbands the then elected government. As the story progresses, Richard’s family life comes under threat against the background of the political unrest developing across the colony.
The plot of the novel, Bacchus says, is her response to her experiences of being abandoned by people she loved and trusted. “As the protagonist, Richard Cheong, learns, we not only reap what we sow, but also the bitter fruit of deception sown by our parents. The same applies on a much larger scale as a nation. Since the tumultuous birth of our nation, each successive new generation has continued to reap the bitter fruit of racial divisive politics sown by the external ruling powers at the time,” she explains.
While her original manuscript was completed in 2013, the novel is now some 54,000 words leaner, which Bacchus says is in keeping with American book industry standards of maximum word-count for debut novels like hers. “While the initial concept has remained the same, I had to sacrifice the details of some scenes depicting the social practices of the multi-ethnic cast of characters,” she notes.
One of the things that she did not have to sacrifice, however, is what she calls the richness of “Caribbean Creole English expressions and proverbial wisdom,” which can be seen in Richard’s speech and internal monologue. It also serves to draw a contrast between Richard and the book’s “pretentious, upper-middle-class” antagonist, who Bacchus says “speaks the Queen’s English.”
Bacchus has completed a second novel, set in Guyana during the period 1979 to 1980 and inspired by events that occurred during her final year in a Catholic convent. It is scheduled for publication next year. She is also working on a book of creative non-fiction about being a woman in a man’s world.
“Under the Tamarind Tree,” published by Lulu Press, Inc., is available for purchase at http://lulu.com/spotlight/Rosaliene_Bacchus.
