THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS: BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
WRITER REMINISCES ABOUT FRIENDS WHO RECENTLY PASSED AWAY, BRAIN MATHEWS AND GEORGE LAMMING This sense of sadness is deepened by the evening as few birds fly to their nests: You wonder where do they spend their night.
June is a cold and cruel month in Canberra. Winter sets in early: The flaming leaves of transplanted trees fall to the ground, sodden in mud, on the windswept, tarsealed roads.
The trees stand starkly bare, exposed like veins and arteries without the skin of foliage.
The pale sun sinks in its wintry gloom, as a chilly darkness descends on the buildings, with gardens of wilted flowers and withered grass.
No birds sing on the sedges of the main man-made lake, rippling like the restless soul of a city in search of its transplanted identity.
Everything in the National Capital of half a million people seems man-machine made, set in steel and concrete. There are hardly any ancient ruins visible to the naked eye.
Only an Australian flag flutters forlornly from a silver structure on the world’s most expensively designed Parliament Complex, opened in 1988, 200 years after Australia was annexed as a British colony.
It reflects the heritage of human aspirations despite the tragedies of colonial conquests, and imperial ambitions.
Fiji’s modest but proud Parliament was destroyed by a colonel and ten masked gun men in May 1987.
I remember the day every time I drive in the shadows of this gleaming symbol of freedom and fraternity,
however flawed in the light of modern reconsiderations and revaluations.
Winter casts its cold, callous spell and one is tempted to remain inside.
But in the warmth of your home, if you are lucky enough to have one, the thoughts of thousands of homeless in this big country are never faraway; you see it daily on your TV screen.
And the wars, earthquakes, famines, that go on in the killing fields around our COVIDridden and wounded world.
They continue to haunt you long after the lights are switched off and you close your eyes trying to sleep.
This sense of sadness is deepened by the evening as few birds fly to their nests. You wonder where do they spend their night.
A few native trees sway in the wintry wind in the empty parks.
Scarcely any children play and no one walks on the edges of a small lake near my home.
The heart of darkness deepens.
Next morning, though, a single splendidly coloured parrot can light up a leafless tree.
Brian Matthews
I was in such a mood when I got the news that two writers I’d met on several occasions died in June.
Brian Matthews (1936-2022) was in Adelaide at the university of Flinders.
I met him at the then Centre for Research in New Literatures in English, CRNLE.
CRNLE was the marvellous invention of the late Dr Syd Harrex.
He created a world of New Literatures in English Down Under and published books by new writers from the Indian-Pacific region.
Two of my books were published by CRNLE. I was invited to the launch of one of them; there I met Brian Mathews, Don Dunstan and the late Dr Umanand Prasad, a person of incredible generosity, especially to the University of Fiji.
The School of Medicine at UniFiji is named after him.
Tragically he died driving in Adelaide.
I got the news of his accidental death when launching a book at a conference in Innsbruck, Austria.
In Adelaide my little volume, Lines Across Black Waters, was launched by an Australian poet, Tom Shapcott.A Fijian friend, studying at Flinders, was keen to launch his book.
We were delighted. Unfortunately, the book was still to be printed.
But my resourceful friend managed to get the covers printed of the two books.
And he asked Brian to do the honours. Brian obliged with the unforgettable words:
I’ve launched many a book but never two covers of two books!
That evening we went and dined at Don’s Table in the city. Don Dunstan and his partner were the hosts.
Later, I met Brian Matthews at a couple of conferences and read his books. Subsequently, he became the chair of the Literature Board of Australia Council.
He awarded me a generous grant to travel and write a piece on my journeys into India, published in Unfinished Journeys, celebrating India’s 50th Anniversary of Independence.
Now that Brain Matthews is dead, my heart fills with evening sadness. And I think how we’ve grown on the acts of kindness and caring of others.
George Lamming
Before I could recover from the shock of one death, I read that George Lamming, the West Indian writer, had died, aged 94.
He was born in Barbados on June 7, 1927 and passed over on June 4, 2022.
A good innings you might say. Lamming was a pioneering writer from that remarkable harvest of the Caribbean Creative cauldron: a generation, that shaped our thinking on colonialism and postcolonial narratives.
He explored the many consequences seen from the perspectives of the victims of conquests, genocide, slavery and that visceral virus of racism in the Caribbean and in London, the imperial capital.
He was a contemporary of V S Naipaul whose works I read in Leeds and taught at USP. Lamming and Naipaul were contemporary rivals in literature, one’s inheritance was slavery, the other’s indenture.
Two pioneering books of Lamming remain in my mind: In the Castle of My Skin, and The Pleasures of Exile. Writers like him and a host of others opened the world for many beyond the boundaries of English Literature.
The West Indian writers did for Literatures in English what their cricketers did for the game of cricket. They excelled in both.
George Lamming visited Australia in the mid 1970s when I was doing my doctoral studies at the ANU.
I invited him and a dozen colleagues from the English Department, ANU, home to dinner.
The evening lasted from around 7pm – 2am and George enthralled everyone with the stories of life in the Caribbean and its history of revolts and revolutions that changed the thinking of the British imperial enterprise.
The descendants of slaves knew also how to revolt and shape the first revolutions.
It’s no wonder that one of the richest Literatures in English comes out of the Caribbean Sea.
George Lamming had liked one of my early poems: It’s in my book, Girmit: Epic Lives in Small Lines, published in Fiji a year or so ago and recently released in India.
I dedicated that poem to George Lamming: The Strange Death of Bisnath,pp.130-133.