Issue 152 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

How you read Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe may depend on if you're a man or a woman, if you're from the Caribbean, someplace like it, or not. We bring parts of ourselves to bear on anything we read, filtering our perception of characters, settings and events through our own experiences. But with a novel like The Polished Hoe the relationship, often taken for granted, between writer and reader is worth noting: Clarke's latest work of fiction is, in the broadest sense, about the meaning of his native Barbados in the 20th century and, in the narrowest sense, about himself as man and writer today.

"I went to Canada to become an economist, do law and come back and run Barbados," he joked in March at the launch of the book in Barbados. Clarke, 69, immigrated to Toronto in 1955. "It didn't turn out that way." As with most of us, certainly as with his protagonist, the events of a life may be incidental, accidental, yet nonetheless powerfully influential.

The Polished Hoe is a mystery of a novel. The story it tells is about Mary Gertrude Mathilda. Nee Paul, she is known to all of Flagstaff Village and on the plantation she was born as Miss Bellfeels, the favoured mistress of the plantation's manager, Mr. Bellfeels, since she was a teenaged girl. It is the rigidly colonial Island of Bimshire - a euphemism for Barbados - in 1952, more than a decade before independence and genuine emancipation. In this West Indies, slavery, as perpetrated by the white European plantocracy and their descendants, is the Holocaust.

Mary, herself in her 50's, has committed a crime on the plantation this Easter Sunday. Sargeant "Sarge" Percy DaCosta Benjamin Stuart, her childhood friend and not-so-secret admirer, has come to take her statement in the Great House, where she lives. We don't know the exact nature of Mary's crime, for which, as Miss Bellfeels, she'll apparently be spared - not until story's end. But we can fairly guess.

Mary, in the vernacular, is the hoe of the title: "They are both the same ['whore' and 'hoe'], and sound the same," she says; she is the wielder of the instrument she used for years, like her foremothers, in the distant North Field of the plantation, and the instrument itself. The symbolism, sexual and otherwise, is somewhat thick. "The only lights in the Village are the two naked, powerful bulbs which hang like testicles over the verandah of the Plantation Main House. Everything else is in darkness."

Neither Mary nor Sarge is particularly keen to discuss the crime. "It is not those facts [of a story] that I claiming to be true. The story itself is the thing," says Mary at one point in her digressive confession. Sarge, "duty bound," listens, reserving the right as an officer of the Royal Bimshire Constabulary Police Force (and her would-be lover) to make up his own mind about the case. Later, she informs him: "You are a stranger to the truth, to the history, and to the actions of the powerful of this Island, Percy."

The Polished Hoe, which won the 2002 Giller Prize, took the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award and also shared this year's Trillium Book Award with Nino Ricci's Testament, was originally more than 1000 pages. Clarke worked on the book on and off for years. He stalled on it before writing The Origin of Waves (1997), which brought him back to public prominence, and another novel called The Question (1999). Both were set in Toronto, had male protagonists and dealt with relationships from their perspectives.

With The Polished Hoe, Clarke returns to the world of his upbringing, of the recently reissued Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack (1980), but from a West Indian woman's point of view. There is much he has to say about that world. Despite judicious cuts, however, and a Joycean attempt at breadth with discussions on the Romantics, Italian art, jazz, Latin, photography, and African culture, the novel is still on the long side.

Characters explain things to each other they should have no need to. "Gifts are unhealthy," Mary warns the Constable who helps take her statement. "So, sometimes, you have to accept them with a smile, and a skin-teet, meaning you are far from sincere." The Constable, a Barbadian like her, would know this old folk expression. You get the impression Clarke, too, is a little caught up in his own words when Mary gets lost in her wise, wayward thoughts. This penchant is apparent in Sarge's fairly elaborate, ultimately underwhelming sexual reverie.

In so many words, Clarke does capture a time and place in merciless detail, from sex in cane fields to the hard drinking of Mount Gay Rum to propagandist BBC broadcasts. His use of dialect, or nation language, is superb. He conveys the sounds and rhythms and repetitions of Barbadians, which constitute the push and pull of the narrative. And his flashbacks are seamlessly introduced, folding one memory into another.

This is how Barbadians used to speak, think, and in many ways still do. But is this how a middle-aged Bajan woman of Mary's experience would feel? "I never really understand love," Mary confides in Sarge. "Nor loved anybody. Not if I am talking about a man." Her most intimate self remains unknown, if not unknowable.

Little wonder, perhaps, in a place where exchanging sex for privilege is part of everyday life? In the beginning, Mary "liked giving myself to a man. Yes." Until it became "robbery," and not just by Mr. Bellfeels, with whom she has a son, Wilberforce. It was Mary's own mother who introduced her to the plantation manager, who saw her "bright" future in the Great House, and who steered her clear of Sarge and other boys because of that future. "This is Mary-Mathilda's life. Paid for by Mr. Bellfeels. But in a more serious manner, in a more deep and romantic way, her life is paid for by her body. Has always been."

That there are few surprises in The Polished Hoe is more sad than bad. When our suspicions about Mary's precise relationship to Mr. Bellfeels are revealed to be true, the revelation, like so much else in the novel, is merely the confirmation we expected. "It was sacrifice," Mary says of her final encounter with the man. "And it did not demand motive." The society that sprang from the plantation called the shots. Whether you were white or black, rich or poor, master or slave, man or woman.