Responding to Sex and Gender in “The Sly Company of People Who Care”
Small Axe ‘Reviewing the Reviews’
By Nalini Mohabir and Vidyaratha Kissoon | Small Axe
Unlike a certain representative in the 1938 Indian legislature who commented that “most of the Guiana Indians have adopted . . . a hybrid, a half-baked Afro-American culture,” Rahul Bhattacharya, author of The Sly Company of People Who Care, clearly delights in the mélange that is Guyanese culture.1 As several reviews have so far been published, instead of merely rehearsing details of the book, we would like to focus on conversations about the book and its representation of women, brought to light in a series of letters to the editor in Guyana’s Stabroek News (2011–12). These letters provide important glimpses into how depictions of gender relations, by an “Indian national,” have been received in the Caribbean. We follow this with our own thoughts on sex and gender both in Bhattacharya’s book and in lived experience in Guyana. We have included conversations from other readers, since in the wake of accolades (winner of the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje award and the 2011 Hindu Literary Prize; shortlisted for the 2012 Man Asian and Commonwealth Book Prize) we have heard very little about the book’s reception in the land it portrays. The book’s celebrated status positions Guyana on an international stage, but renders the real Guyana mute in the process — observed but not heard.
If as highlighted in our opening sentence, Guyana exists as a complexly hybrid culture, it is perhaps fitting that it should inspire a book that is hybrid in form (though we are certainly not suggesting that it is half-baked). Bhattacharya offers a first-person narrative which has been read as both travelogue and novel. Like Bhattacharya, the narrator of the book arrives in Guyana for a one-year stay, the longest possible duration under Guyana’s tourist visa, with his required return ticket in-hand. His goal is to bear witness to the country that haunts his dreams, with its “red earth and brown water [that] made [him] feel humble and ecstatic” (3). Within the first few pages, we have a sense of empathy and a vision that sets this work apart from typical pronouncements on Guyana. In contrast to those who set out to explore the Guianas (John Gimlette’s Wild Coast comes to mind), Bhattacharya sees Guyana not as a place where time stands still but rather as a land with its own temporal rhythms, distinct from an overarching comparative narrative of development.
Read more of this review via Small Axe.
