Perceptions

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by Abu Bakr

I look out. The winter-grey of a northern sky in a drawn out dawn. A snowscape of resting fields. In the half-light a crow sits, as always, on the branch of a dead tree. One day he may speak.

It is calm and there is purity in all this. These last years, I have lived in this part of France. A square of white stone stands alone in a clearing of thin forest. It is a castle from Napoleonic times. Surrounding it, abandoned wheat fields and a little stream. I live in the way a lone barnacle lives fastened on a rock. Facing solitary, the rise and fall of all tides. Indifferent to the lights on the far horizons. Perhaps one day I will loosen my grip, and, unhurried, drift off on the westward flow, heading salmon-like to headstreams where I was spawned. To Wales.

It is a Wales set in the tropics.

This comes to me as I think of another Wales. As I look at the Cardiff return address on an unopened package containing perhaps a novel submitted for publication. I have a connection to this other place named Wales, which is a sugar-estate town on the West Bank of the Demerara. A river flooding the dorsal spine of my Guyana and which disembogues in the Atlantic off the coast of South America. This for me is the head-stream.

The Wales in which Cardiff is fixed is flashed now onto the screen of the mind. Images, I think, from half-remembered biographies of perhaps Dylan Thomas or Richard Burton. In these images men grope their way up from the timeless twilight of the coal mines. To cough their last in those cold stone cottages. Or set off seaward in a dim sun-up. And by sundown would have sunk into the current of a day when all the cockles will not come home. The survivors we see posed, glum, in a grimy pastoral. Then, under an always-grey sky is set a cowering little house. Clinging in its dour solitude to an outcrop of rock, wind-scarred, like the cliff-faces of some islands, and with a sea seething beneath. Painted in oils.

This Dour House in Old Wales. On the canvas summarily executed. An annular jumble of weathered cubes. Its door set quadrangular like the slab of concrete for a tomb, and cautiously agape. But only a resentful colourlessness looks out. Picture, in the lower right corner of the tableau then, this house. And to one side a tree. Crouching in it’s own shadow. Shuddering away from the misery of this House. With gritted teeth straining to wrench its roots out of the stony ground. This Tree its bare branches sculpted by wind-strokes in the form of an arrow. Pointing the way out.

Large as this house, in the tableau, the human figures. Distended upwards, fluid like figures in a Dali. The silent man, rendered here as type. With Suffering Woman. Trailing in a corner of her skirt a pale bouquet of littler kids- consumptive-looking…withered young. And then a dog, like the Petite Souris of the old French school book, in bold colour on the upper left, scurries out to a scowling sunset on a wire-thin road. Bearing on a rod that bounces briskly, a dotted handkerchief, minuscule, with all his earthly belongings. Heading we hope, to a successful life in America. A hero’s adventures in a Canine Corps. A life of high risk as lead dog in a bomb disposal squad, and, while still only in mid-career, a televised documentary in his honour. Honours. Then the lead role of a fictionalised version of the capture of Bin Laden. Wales will always be proud of him. We wish him well. Sincerely.

The Wales of which I am also now thinking is found at the end of this other road, past villages named Malgre Tout, Versailles, Belle Vue, La Retraite…and is this sugar estate factory town. Rather, a large village that seems in my memory to stop conclusively in a Mad Max jumble of an iron heap that is the mill. I have warm memories of the place. On the road to the mill the artist would have painted the litter of straw and cane shafts, the trail of dung left by bull and cow who, after the manner of Hansel and Gretel, have some concern about making their way back. Or simply like the gypsies and wanderers of the past, leave coded signs and comments on the gateposts and milestones of their lives.

In any case, this road, that announces its particularity in this fashion, discarded canes and dung, is important as the road in the picture with the Welsh Dog. It has been for us, my family, the road out. To new Jerusalems all over the world. In fact, the way in as out. Of the land of bondage here symbolised as the sugar plantation to which some of our ancestors were brought captive in the preceding days. A long way from the scarred forests of another continent, where, on another day such as this, I stood and looked at the Sacred Mountain in Eastern Congo in the company of the Vice-Minisister for Public Works. “No aircraft flies over it,” he said.

The place is magical. A High Place. A glowing serenity from its peaks. From where, doubtless, Adam descended.

On the road to my native Wales one drives past clogged canals and the alluvial brown of wooden houses in apparently calibrated degrees of decrepitude. Houses on stilts. The stairs like crutches. On the other side of moss-filled trenches across a plank of warped boards like a drawbridge to another existence. Houses from which were retched in the mornings the living of every creed and race. In the narrow yards, sketched in a careless charcoal, the boy nailing a wheel onto a miniature wooden car. The woman with arms extended upwards to a clothesline. The man, booze-bottle in hand, a-daze in a hammock. A rooster, neurons aflame, in the abandon of carnal pursuit. The unsurprising ordinariness of the quotidian. The outer layer of reality.

But this, like the images of Old Wales that present themselves, is reconstituted reality. In fact, my Wales was a bright place bristling with life. Busy by day as by night.

The boundless “inverted bowl” of the night sky over the plain. The far and random chandeliers of stars and a moon always, in my remembrance, at its full. A night sky as backdrop, at the time, for strange drama. Blood-sucking hags took off in a ball of fire over the cane fields by this night, to descend on the narrow houses of the unsuspecting, and while the family sleeps after a long day in field or factory, to sip the fresh elixir of infants’ blood. The gift, or science, of self-transportation by these means, smuggled, they said, into the New World by the black slaves. Explaining the infant mortality in the malarial bogs of our mosquito-ridden coast, the consequential low rate of population growth, the mysterious evanescence of older folk who, flying against the Trade Winds and navigating like pigeons, made it out of the colony and back to the Congo. Landing, tired but happy, onto the palaver place of a village of wattled huts wherein a cauldron of wild meats, the African’s fatted calf, simmers in waiting. Secret histories, these. And by the time technology had caught up with the hags, a new exodus had begun. This time, in a world banalised into a money economy, a steamer or air ticket took you to the land of jobs and opportunities in the North.

So, by the road that starts at the sugar factory in Wales, my family lit out for the cold continent on which is painted the older Celtic Wales. Or for America.

Hence we have lived successions of displacements. From Africa in the slave ship or Asia over the Behring land bridge, to the New World, and then fated to be wanderers bound for new lights beyond new horizons. And this is the condition of a multitude of men.

Reviewing this I make a note to myself, writing – Perceptions, like particle-clouds, are influenced by mental elements acting like magnetic fields. Emotions. Imagination. Memory. Preference and Prejudice. Wishes and Values. All interact to exert strong forces on the processes of cognition. We look at the world through our own prisms, the images refracted or deformed. We stare at the world through the narrow bars on the window of the prison of the self in which, we pass our lives.

I am thinking this on this morning, here fixed in a landscape of pastel, as the New Year starts on the other side of the world where I was born.

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