Kipling Plass

Description

A politically astute coming-of-age novel set in Guyana in the turbulent late 1970s, where Kipling Plass narrates his and his teenage friends’ struggles for both physical and emotional survival as they contend with the colonial past, racial animosity and Guyana’s economic hardships. Heartbreaking, shocking, and lyrical.

“A novel teeming with vivid Guyanese characters, treated with love and compassion and understanding. There is humour, mischief, suffering, tragedy, betrayal and triumph in their lives. They are Everyman and Everywoman in their passions, their ambitions, their flaws”  David Dabydeen

Kipling Plass meets his younger self when he revisits Guyana after forty years away in the snow countries of the north. This is the precocious fourteen-year-old who has been cast abruptly out of childhood when his disturbed and fragile mother disappears one day and does not return. An avid reader, Kipling begins to write his own story, left behind in the dozen exercise books still stored in his mostly absent father’s house.

He writes of his life in a very mixed African/ Indian village in rural Mahaicony, of the long school holidays spent in the company of his slightly older friends; of discovering the confusions of sex and love; of puzzling over his friend Derek’s attraction towards other men; and trying to work out for himself values to live by.

The world Kipling describes is one of generosity and evil – five murdered fishermen wash up on the coast – of warm neighbourliness and casual cruelty and violence, of the sense of freedom he experiences as a lone runner and the fear of an inescapable destiny as an ‘incest’ child with a mad mother.

This is a book of great beauty of language, of rich humour, bawdiness and starkly observed violence, of memorably drawn characters like Ma Tussy the old obeah woman and Bhojedat, a village leader who tries to protect wayward youths from themselves and teach them to be ‘regular’. But what, Kipling wonders, does it mean to be ‘regular’? This is Guyana’s Shuggie Bain, no less poignant, heartbreaking, shocking, sometimes richly funny, and ultimately hopeful in Kipling’s passage to survival.