LoveReading Says
Rooted in the cultural complexities of a Caribbean island, where colonialism constricts and oppresses deeper-rooted connections, beliefs, and potential futures, Merle Hodge’s One Day, One Day Congotay is a mighty achievement. Set on shifting sands, and ringing with iron band rhythms, this is an ambitious, immersive, tragi-comic tour de force that draws readers into an enlightening journey through generations, family tensions, village life, and community conflict through the first half of the 20th-century.
Gwynneth Cuffie — teacher, music-lover and champion of children — lives in a rural village on the Caribbean island of Cayeri where she treads a tight-rope between very different worlds. Conflict simmers at the heart of the Cuffie family. Through their lives, they follow very different, and often opposing, paths. While Gwynneth’s father is a Catholic schoolmaster driven by a desire to be seen as “respectable”, her seamstress Mumma is devoted to the Spiritual Baptist church, which has been banned by the colonial authorities who fear it.
Meanwhile, Gwynneth and her sister Viola are at odds with their brother. Favoured by their father, Roy’s education at an elite school leads him to feel ashamed of his race, while Gwynneth becomes deeply involved in the anti-colonial struggle (cue further conflict with her father), and devotes her life to various forms of reconciliation.
Working within the colonial education system, Gwynneth facilitates the forming of a school tamboo bamboo band, and supports emerging iron bands. Pertinent to current times, she notes the lack of representation in children’s books, the fact they only depict “rosy-cheeked children”. And so Gwynneth encourages her pupils to be creative, to write and illustrate their own stories, “to convince them that Cayerian children and their lives were just as worthy of being written about”. She brings this same ethos and passion to music, declaring, “Cayerian children should also be learning some songs of their ancestors across the ocean — songs of African and India”, since this will “help ground our children in their own reality”.
Rich with details of everyday life, the complexities of family relationships, political context, and the human impulse to strive for better, fairer days, this is a novel to savour and return to.
Keen to read more novels by Caribbean writers? We have a Collection devoted to exactly that. And you can discover more about this book’s fabulous publisher, Peepal Tree Press, in our Industry Insights feature interview.
Joanne Owen
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One Day, One Day Congotay Synopsis
Merle Hodge’s rare achievement is to create a dynamic work of fiction around the life of a woman who is unquestionably good: Gwynneth Cuffie, schoolteacher, lover of children and music, and pillar of her small semi-rural community. The novel shares her adult life through the long, hard years of colonialism on the Caribbean island of Cayeri in the first half of the 20th century. Within Gwynneth’s family are all the faultlines of the Cayerian world. She, with sister Viola and younger brother, Roy, are the children of ill-sorted parents, a marriage wrought from a surge of youthful sexual attraction, but thereafter of two Black lives headed in different directions. Her Catholic schoolmaster father is desperate for respectability at the cost of denying everything about himself and his past in the impoverished world of the yards; her mother, a seamstress, is a stalwart of the Spiritual Baptist church, then banned by the authorities as a threat to colonial order. She is the one person that headmaster Cuffie dare not try to control. But when Gwynneth becomes deeply and tragically involved in the anti-colonial struggle, there grows an insuperable breach between father and daughter.
Gwynneth’s triumph is to build treaty between the world of colonial education, and the world of Mumma’s Spiritual Baptist village where Africa -- feared and hated by Puppa and the aspiring middle classes -- remains a very real and revivifying presence. It is from the rhythms of Africa that the local youth, whom Teacher Gwynnie assiduously supports, develop the iron bands that bring modernity to local music and grow into the national culture of steelband.
The tensions within the Cuffie family continue through the generations – Roy, the apple of his father’s eye, alumnus of an elite college that has taught him to be ashamed of his race, is in dramatic conflict with his sisters. But Merle Hodge offers another vision of family that has little to do with biology, and everything to do with love. This is the family that gathers on the Cuffie sisters’ gallery: Ollie and Gaston, the two men with whom the sisters have deep friendships, but from whom they maintain their independence; neighbours Marjorie and Lennox (himself a child Marjorie has taken in) and Sonny, the child of Mumma’s carer, Monica, who has left him in the sisters’ capable hands to pursue her opportunities in the USA. It is Sonny who is Gwynneth’s true life work, the child who promises to hold the future to account.
This is a novel whose form is true to its meaning, a book that balances linear narrative with a structure that peels away the layers of time in a way that shows the constant interpenetration of past, present and future. Its subject is life, tragic, comic but always in struggle for better must come. It revisits and revisions the colonial world from a womanist perspective. It is a novel, like George Elliot’s Middlemarch that celebrates the small, hidden lives that make the world a better place. Like any richly documented historical novel, it has much to say, by implication, about the present.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781845235246 |
| Publication date: |
27th January 2022 |
| Author: |
Merle Hodge |
| Publisher: |
Peepal Tree Press |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Primary Genre |
Historical Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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