Virginia Woolf’s Waves

This time last week I was in a 16th-century cottage in the village of Rodmell, East Sussex, somewhat intoxicated, not just by the sun and riot of lavender, roses, and magnolias of the garden and bucolic English countryside but because I was in the home of a writer who once rescued me from loneliness.

I was 21, in between terms, living in borrowed digs in London in December in a bone chilly room and tiny window of perpetually blotted skies, close to a train line, thundering with ominous punctuality every hour.

Forced out by hunger Christmas day I found a newsagent for a feast of M&Ms, chips and idly, missing our warm seas picked up Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I returned to the flat, read it in one sitting not expecting the masterpiece, stream of consciousness of seven voices, distinct, intimate, universal.

She dove so deep into the human consciousness that my loneliness vanished with the interior lives of seven people. Last week I ended my visit to her with a walk by the river where she put stones in her pocket and walked in, and simply lay down face down. Life had become too much for her. Perhaps she felt things too keenly. Maybe she had undiagnosed schizophrenia.

We won’t know, except she made the people who read her live vividly, by articulating stuff we feel, finding the words for ambiguity, the duality of humans, the light, the woolly, the cruelty, the despair and ultimate desire to be connected and loved.

The following Christmas I was home in Trinidad and read VS Naipaul, his harsh novel The Guerrillas about the ‘third World with her disordered armies (read, gangs) and supine population’ (read, apathy). I felt the horror of our islands brutally and clearly observed. The opposite of Woolf, yet as compelling. I read everything of Naipaul too, as he wrote over the years, transfixed by his sneering of our ‘mimic men’, also astonished that he failed to see his own self-loathing in every keen observation. I saw the underbelly of the place that was now home, and it was brutish, ugly.

He was right of much of it but also skewered, as he was blind to the beauty and promise of these islands. That came with Derek Walcott’s herculean language, acknowledging our collective brokenness in these new worlds, and reassembling us with the landscape, the arc of our hills, the changing light, the tilt of our speech, drawing us away from the shadow of enslavement and indenture towards elation, creating finally our answer to Shakespeare.

Sometime later I interviewed for radio (an unfortunate medium for this story) an original indentured labourer. I was avid for details of why he left India, where from, how it was, I asked questions. He responded with grunts, and words like “dis, dat”. Inchoate, unsatisfying sentences. He had forgotten his original language and not acquired a new one. There was profound loneliness in his face, frustration in his eyes. Without access to words, he found it impossible to access himself. The frequent use of violence, silence, the cutlass and poison to resolve pain in rural Trinidad made sense.

Last week as I stood breathing in the magnolia tree, in Woolf’s garden, I thought its fragrance couldn’t match the potency of our Cannonball Tree, yet rarely this beautifully cultivated. Always wild.

There was no space at home, in Trinidad to remember the writers who helped to see ourselves clearly, our broken bits and our beauty. Naipaul’s Lion House lies in ruins. Two Nobel Laureates and no recognition of the place language plays in our development as people. It’s why we are reductive, unwilling to navigate the complex terrain of ambiguity, the duality of being human in us all, evil and good like moonlight on a dark wine wave.

We will navigate our way out of brutality when we stop taking the gang member, the policeman, politician, the judge at face value and look at their hearts, their motives and consider whether they genuinely want to be their brother’s keeper or not.

Without an education that encourages critical thinking, reading, and writing, we remain an inchoate nation muttering “dis” and “dat”, peeled to the right-hand corner of the newspaper checking the days’ murder toll.