How has the Christian faith shaped my life?  Why did I pursue an education in America?   Why did I marry an American woman?  How did I get a break at CBS Network News?  Why did I become an American citizen?  How did I eventually become a professor, chair, and graduate director at an American university?  Why did I become an author?  Why am I writing Christian books in retirement?  These are some of the questions the author answers in Life’s Passages: From Guyana to America.      

Life’s Passages is a spiritual biography that traces my life as a member of the Thomas’ family up to the present time.  Its theme captures the role of a loving and caring God in our lives.  Readers will journey in the local environment of a small South American country - Guyana, and explore the realities of living in America as a student and professor.

Undoubtedly, Guyanese culture helped determine who I was to become.  Social, political, and economic factors were the bedrock of the way I came to view the world.  But it’s my belief that the hand of God was at work throughout my life.  This was true from the day I was born, to my experiences in public school, colleges, and universities.

From my early days in North Road, Georgetown, I would join my siblings in prayer in our three-room home.  I mainly attended Mass at St. George’s Cathedral, Guyana, and Church of the Holy Apostles, Virginia Beach, VA.  These experiences were to have profound effects upon me.  It was however by the grace of God working in my life that I was able to have the necessary breaks to progress in these communities.

Some unexpected opportunities led to fulfillment and happiness.  I benefited from an excellent education, found wonderful jobs, was blessed with a caring family, and friends.  There were trials along the way, when my life seemed as though it was falling apart.  But, by the grace of God I was able to persevere, and overcome these setbacks.  My story therefore is one of hope, love, grace, and above all, the triumph of the human spirit.            

I was initially excited about this book, which describes a wild, little-known part of the world in vivid detail. However, that excitement soon wore off, as Gimlette seems largely drawn to describing war and atrocities, to emphasizing atmosphere over accuracy in his reportage, and to following the stories of white explorers and colonists while stereotyping and relegating everybody else to the sidelines, even though “everybody else” makes up 99% of the population.

The book is structured around Gimlette’s travels through “the Guianas,” three relatively small countries carved out of the Caribbean coast of South America, but which have remarkably little in common with the rest of the continent. Or rather, two countries – English-speaking Guyana and Dutch-speaking Suriname – plus French Guiana (referred to here as “Guyane”), an overseas department of France. These countries’ populations are mostly descended from the black slaves and Indian indentured servants brought there to work the sugar plantations; there’s also a small native population and, in Suriname, villages of “maroons,” descendants of escaped slaves who, centuries ago, formed their own tribes in the jungle. A little over half the book focuses on Guyana and most of the rest on Suriname, with just one 40-page chapter covering French Guiana.

It’s definitely interesting material, and Gimlette devotes perhaps half or less of the book to his travels, while the rest relates the bloody history of the Guianas. I definitely learned a lot from it: Gimlette clearly did a bunch of research, and he visits many sites of historical import and relates stories revealing the significance of these places to the reader. When covering more recent history, he talks to people who experienced historical events, sometimes including key players as well as everyday folk. He travels widely around the countries, from the coast, where 90% of the population lives, to the jungle and the savannah, and meets people from all walks of life. He has an eye for the bizarre, describes his surroundings in colorful detail, and has a smooth, assured writing style.

That said, the more I read of this book, the more disenchanted I became. Gimlette seems drawn to the horrifying, whether it’s the barbarity of slavery or French Guiana’s penal colony, the horrors of recent civil wars, or the mass suicide/massacre of an American cult at Jonestown; this is not a light or easy read, though its tone is often flippant. Gimlette’s writing is atmospheric, but not well-sourced: despite the fact that the book is largely history, it has no endnotes, only a description of his sources generally. And he seems to play fast and loose with the facts. “Even as I write, there isn’t a single road that leads from the Guianas into the world beyond,” he tells us at the beginning, before taking a bus through French Guiana to the Brazilian border at the end. In writing about the Jonestown cult, he asserts that “Jonestown carried on killing for years after the massacre. . . . Even years after the cult’s demise, defectors were still being hunted down and killed” – a claim the internet does not seem to support.

But it’s not uncommon for him to leave his facts vague (who is supposed to have killed the defectors, given that Jones’s loyal followers had already killed themselves?). When discussing Sir Walter Raleigh’s final, ill-fated expedition into the rainforest, he describes in detail the suicide of Raleigh’s friend Captain Keymis and Raleigh’s own execution back home in England, but fails to note why Keymis killed himself or why Raleigh (who comes up time and again in this book) was executed, beyond the vague statement that “the expedition disintegrated into a bloody brawl.” I had to turn to the internet to learn that, in fact, Keymis lead an expedition against the Spanish without Raleigh’s permission, in which Raleigh’s son was killed; Keymis killed himself because Raleigh refused to forgive him, and Raleigh was executed because the skirmish violated the terms of his own parole on a questionable prior conviction for plotting against the king. It’s as if Gimlette wanted to include their deaths for the extra color and weight they lent the story, but couldn’t be bothered to share the facts from which a reader could make sense of them.

And then there’s the fact that so much of the book is focused on white European men like Gimlette himself, even if they did nothing more than wander into the jungle and die (see Raymond Maufrais). It winds up giving the impression that only these people’s stories are worth telling, particularly alongside Gimlette’s ready stereotypes of everyone else. The Amerindians, apparently, are cannibals, as are the Africans. Escaped slaves who set up fiefdoms full of brutality and debauchery are “reverting back to old Africa,” despite the fact that this is how the colonists operated toward them.

So ultimately, I can give this book a cautious recommendation at best. It’s a colorful introduction to a world about which little has been written, but it’s also a heavy read, imbued with the author’s biases and questionable, unsourced assertions. Too bad, for a book that began with such promise.

I am slowly learning about the importance of choosing the right circumstances under which to read a book. This one I read while traveling with family, and I found its brand of lively melodrama perfect for semi-distracted, oft-interrupted reading. Judging from Of Marriageable Age, which I read years ago, had this book received my full attention, it likely would have irritated me; as is, I enjoyed it. That said, it is quite similar to Of Marriageable Age, and if you loved that one to pieces you should go ahead and read this.

The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q follows three generations of Guyanese women: there’s Dorothea, a tough and outspoken crusader; her daughter Rika, a sensitive and socially awkward artist; and Rika’s daughter Inky, a modern teen who grows up in London. The story begins when the elderly Dorothea comes to live with Rika and Inky, opening old wounds and bearing a precious antique stamp. While it begins with Inky’s first-person narrative, the bulk of the novel uses the third person to trace Dorothea’s and Rika’s pasts in Guyana.

The novel is entertaining and well-paced, though predictable and cliché. It has all the elements you’d expect from a good soap: love triangles, secret parentage, accidents followed by tearful epiphanies at hospital bedsides, amnesia, characters presumed dead only to reappear, Big Misunderstandings that could be cleared up in under 5 seconds if the characters actually spoke to each other, important letters that aren’t read… you get the idea. That said, this novel is an above-average version of that; Maas develops the story well, and Dorothea and Rika are well-drawn and sympathetic characters. (I can’t say the same for Inky, who is a stereotypically self-centered modern teen without any interesting qualities. Inky’s interpretation of the ending also seemed to me dead wrong. 

Perhaps it was Maas’s intent that Inky doesn’t understand people nearly as well as she thinks she does; it’s hard to tell.) The setting is also interesting and we learn a bit about Guyanese history and culture.

This isn’t great literature, but it is an entertaining family saga. It would make great airplane, beach, or doctor’s office reading. Don’t assume from the page count that it will last, though; it goes by quickly.

When Sharon Maas first made it known to her then-agent and then-editor that she was thinking about writing a book set in her native Guyana, she met with blank incomprehension and utter rejection: "Guyana? Whyever would anyone write about that little backwater country; a place nobody knows anything about and which probably at least half her projected readership wouldn't even be able to correctly point out on a map? No no no," she was told, "stick with what is safe and what people know. And if you want to write a book set in an exotic location, write something set in India. You know India, right? You've lived there – so you can just as credibly write about that. And there are plenty of people out there who do want to read books set in India. It's even a sort of literary trend these days. You'll fit right in."

Sharon's response, after actually having published three books in which Indian settings played a crucial role, was to refuse to work with anybody who was not open to her own ideas about the construction and settings of her books; even if that meant not having any literary agent at all, nor a publisher, for the foreseeable future. The one thing she did not do, however, was stop writing. And looking for a new publisher, who would accept her without any preconceived notions about which niche to fit her in. Over a decade after the publication of her third novel, The Speech of Angels, she finally struck gold – so now here it is, the book (or first of several books, hopefully) that might never have gone to print if its author had not finally found a publisher willing to take her on solely on the strength of her writing, and accept the chosen setting as an asset rather than a burden.

Read the full review on my own website (ThemisAthena.info) or on Leafmarks.

This week, I've been finishing the audiobook version of A Thousand Lives, Scheeres' account of the Jonestown massacre. I have also discovered Thirty Seconds to Mars. Tears and awe in the car--and I've been amazed at the eerie appropriateness of the lyrics to many songs on the LOVE LUST FAITH + DREAMS album. They sound as if they are describing Jim Jones:

I'm tired of the waiting,
For the end of all days.
The prophets are preaching,
That the gods are needing praise.
The headlights are coming,
Showing me the way.
The serpents are singing,
A song that's meant to say:

All we need is faith.
...
A maniac's new love song.
Destruction is his game.
I need a new direction,
Cause I have lost my way.
...
The maniac messiah,
Destruction is his game.
A beautiful liar,
Love for him is pain.
The temples are now burning,
Our faith caught up in flames.
I need a new direction,
Cause I have lost my way.
...

--"End of All Days"

 

I loved this book because it was about the people who lived and died at Jonestown, rather than Jim Jones himself. It humanized the whole event--and it celebrated Congressman Leo Ryan, the only US Senator to be assassinated while performing his duties. Imagine your congressman being told that you are concerned about relatives living in a foreign country, possibly being held against their will. Now imagine that senator flying to that country in response to personally check on those relatives' welfare.

You can't do it, can't you?