Ideological Tension and Formal Experimentation in Vic Reid's New Day

In 1949 the ghost of Haiti needed to be laid to rest again. Ever since the enslaved of Saint Domingue overthrew colonial rule, abolished slavery and the established property and power relations in the 1790s, and gained independence in 1804, the specter of revolution had haunted the Caribbean and Europe. For conservative writers such as James Anthony Froude, Haiti symbolized the ultimate threat to white domination. In his travelogue The English in the West Indies or the Bow of Ulysses, he repeatedly invokes the danger of black rule to warn his readers about the concomitant "massacre of the French inhabitants" (1888: 7)¹ to later conclude as follows: "political changes which prove successful do not begin in that way" (162). Apparently, the ghost still frightened the Caribbean in the late 1940s when Victor Reid wrote New Day and Jamaica fought for self-government and national independence.

A revolution that "move[s] along too fast" (Reid 1949/1973: 62)² will turn over like a wagon, light-skinned Lucille Dubois tells the equally light-skinned narrator of Reid's novel, Johnny Campbell. Then eight years old, he is on his way to carry a message to Paul Bogle, the leader of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. Lucille continues:

My grandparents were with Toussaint L'Ouverture and took part in the fight for freedom. My parents used to tell me of it, and what is happening here seem [sic] to be the beginning of another Haiti. . . . I am on your side, but I don't want our side to move along too fast. . . . If the revolution had come slowly, it might have come without bloodshed. I am a friend of Deacon Bogle, but I am afraid he might move along too fast.

1973: 62, (my emphasis)

The significant change in the personal pronoun from "your" to "our" gives rise to the questions that interest me in this essay: Who exactly is this group of people for whom Lucille speaks? Whose interests does she share? Who exactly is afraid of the revolution she sees coming? What kind of revolution—that is, a radical overthrow of a social order—would move slowly and thus avoid violence? Whose ideologies are at work here with regard to class, gender, race, and ethnicity? And, more generally, how do narrative and ideology relate to each other?

Focusing on narrative techniques and structures, I will argue that New Days ideological tension and formal experimentation are grounded in the conflicting political projects it intertwines across various temporal settings using a particular type of narrator. Regarding duration, order, and frequency, the narrated time spans eighty years of Jamaican history, but the sheer length of the novel's first part accords singular importance to its respective topic: the most powerful act of organized black resistance against the injustices of post-emancipation Jamaica, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. The retaliation on the part of the established order proved beyond doubt its dread of the Haitian ghost walking the region again. The novel continues with a short second part set on a tiny island to be concluded by a longish third part, which compresses the turbulent history of the 1930s and early 1940s into an ameliorative model of change.

The overall aim of this essay is to examine the kind of cultural work narrative can perform at a particular historical moment for a particular readership. To answer the question of how and for whom narrative does this it will be necessary to combine narratological and stylistic approaches with postcolonial and sociological ones.

Entangled Histories

In 1949, Victor Stafford Reid (1913–87), a Jamaican journalist and writer, published New Day, which met with the expectations of readers and reviewers, who (with few exceptions) praised the novel for its linguistic innovation and its nationalist politics. The Sunday Gleaner (March 20, 1949) hailed it as "a book that should put pride, fire and music into the soul of the inheritors of this island" (Barovier 1949). With a little less exuberance, The New Statesman and Nation (April 1, 1950) approved of the novel for both its...