The Revolutionary did not look like a ‘Revolutionary’. Didn’t possess Che Guevara’s patchy beard. Fidel Castro’s lion eyes. Brother was shaped like a cricket player. Very slender. Very strong. Brother spoke in Aristotelian paragraphs, his voice calm, even at its crescendo. How did he manage this, this balance of sense and sensibility? This Walter Rodney. This ‘Brother Wally’. This Comrade Stargazer. The Revolutionary didn’t wear bell bottoms. He wore an economics professor’s spring semester khakis, John-the-Baptist sandals, and a white shirt jac stained beneath the armpits. His too-serious face was framed by horn-rimmed spectacles. His Afro was substantial enough to make its point, yet too tame for 1978. Style, his Afro suggested, was secondary to something else. But what? Tulsi turned to Anand, his best friend his whole life, and wanted to whisper in his ears that the two of them – the Sweetboy and the Revolutionary – shared the same two values, the latter admittedly ineffable, but in reverse. Anand was listening too hard; his listening was a performance. Tulsi could tell. This is love: knowing when your friend is putting on and growing frustrated by all that pretense. The unnecessary carnival. Quarter to nine. Tulsi tapped his toes. Bit his thumbnail. Begged Lord Ganesha to bring this meeting – and all its causes – to a swift, Aristotelian denouement.
They had assembled in Gobin’s bottom house. Three weeks prior, a Working People’s gathering in New Amsterdam had been raided by the Dictator’s sycophants, a rebel arrested, accused of vandalizing a ministry office when six alibis – his wife, pregnant, included – had testified the comrade was home feeding his child. Tulsi told Anand they ought to be cautious. They should go to Ling’s. To the cricket ground. But Anand kissed his teeth, in his way, and made it clear that he wanted Tulsi to see something, to feel something before he boarded that plane back to Toronto to read all those books that were separating him from these men. Tulsi watched the two dozen comrades – workers he had spent his whole life hellbent on not becoming. Men who worked in the bauxite mines and on the sugar estates, men who wore sacks beneath their eyes, men who smelt of salt and El Dorado rum, which they nursed while the Revolutionary preached.
-Excerpt from What In Me Is Dark, Illumine, prize-winning short story by Stephen Narain, 2020
The Bristol Short Story Prize is an annual award presented to the winners of an international competition. It is coordinated by Joe Melia and is associated with the University of the West of England, Bristol, Tangent Books and the University of Bristol.
In the 2020 competition, out of the large number of entries that they received from writers of different nationalities around the world, they were able to select a longlist of 40 stories. From among these, there was a further shortlist of 20 which have been published in the Bristol short story prize anthology, Volume 13, edited by Joe Melia and published by Tangent Books, UK, 2020.
The 2020 Bristol Short Story Prize was the 13th award, and in addition to the publication of the anthology, three prize winners were announced. The first prize was awarded to What In Me Is Dark, Illumine by Stephen Narain, a writer and teacher of Guyanese parentage living in Orlando, Florida. The second prize went to Bedtime Story by Tehila Lieberman, a writing coach born in New York and living in Massachusetts. In third place is A Tapestry of Flowers by Faiza Hasan, who was a journalist in Pakistan and the USA, and now lives in Berkshire.
The judging panel comprised Chairman Billy Cahora, a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at Bristol University; Sharmaine Lovegrove, founder and publisher of Dialogue Books, who also founded the Black Writers’ Guild in 2020; Anneliese Mackintosh, a prize-winning short story writer whose work has been broadcast on the BBC and Tom Robinson, a bookseller and bookshop manager in Bristol.
Melia recognises Professors Helen Fulton and Mary Luckhurst of the University of Bristol as among the protagonists in the competition and publication of the book, as well as students at the University of the West of England Chris Hill, Jonathan Ward and Roisin Oakley.
Tangent Books tells us that “struggle, loss, hope and a shared humanity dominate the pages of this collection of the standout entries to the 2020 Bristol Short Story Prize. Together they demonstrate the enduring power of stories to illuminate the world and announce the significant talents of 20 exceptional writers”. For Melia, “the top three prize-winning stories reflect the variety of the submissions. All three stories encapsulate what binds the collection together – the existence of a deeply rooted, unshakable humanity, even in extreme circumstances”.
Lieberman’s Bedtime Story is a kind of dark fiction whose disturbing tale by a child narrator will haunt you forever. She tells you “The land is full of stories if you listen”. It takes you to the frontiers of irony with its mixture of the influence of the fairy tale on the mind of its audience, warped by a first-hand confrontation with reality to the point where the narrator is unable to tell the difference. It interplays with tragedy, a limited consciousness still able to recognise child abuse, but seeking just solutions in a horrifying manner ironically conditioned by bedtime tales.
In A Tapestry of Flowers Hasan very figuratively, enters the consciousness of a Muslim existing in a semi-conscious environment on the edge of vague recollections of war and the need for rehabilitating opiates. Gul Khan finds relief in opium which both sedates him and keeps him alive. He buys it from a confederate who, again with a strong sense of irony, purports to look after his welfare and his Muslim faith. It is an exploration of humanity at its most vulnerable.
What In Me Is Dark, Illumine is an extraordinary narrative of political history, revolution, friendship, loyalty, and the real Guyanese society confronting a conscious, ambitious individual. Narain himself is a product of migration. His Guyanese parents worked in the Bahamas, where he was raised. He studied English at Harvard and earned an MFA in Fiction from Iowa Writers Workshop. Before the 2020 Bristol Short Story Prize he had won a number of other awards and was recognised by the Bocas Lit Fest.
In this short story he employs a great deal of wit, some wry humour, and engaging narration in exploring Guyana’s politics in the 1970s. He fictionalises Walter Rodney and the WPA of that time, presenting a dry satire of the attempts by Rodney to educate and liberate the local working class. The hero, Tulsi, hardly feigns an interest in revolution while his friend Anand, seems to pretend a Marxist political consciousness, inviting and encouraging Tulsi to join the radical movement.
There are many conflicts complicated by Tulsi’s reluctance to pretend, his own consciousness, as an intellectual who truly loves and values literature, yet compromised by the subtle hint that he was aware that the men being mobilised by the revolutionaries were “workers he had spent his whole life hell-bent on not becoming”. The story holds up to question, the political gains of the 1970s in Guyana.
The story itself is extremely significant in Guyanese literature. It is one of the works of fiction set in the Burnham era of the PNC reign in Guyana of the 1970s and 1980s. It touches on the violent attacks launched against the political opposition by thugs working to suppress dissent and political organisation against the regime.
What In Me Is Dark, Illumine is among Guyanese literature that seems to have needed the distance of nearly a decade before it confronted those times. Narain has now added this short story to the corpus of novels, poetry and a few plays that can be deemed Guyanese literature of political protest. It is a worthy winner of the 2020 Bristol Short Story Prize.
The entire anthology, a commonwealth of talent from various nationalities, is worth reading. Within its pages is quite a thorough study of the modern short story and even the more post-modernist explorations receive, perhaps, some slight representation.
