Search results for ""Author Rooplall Motilal Monar""

The backdam people of Lusignan Estate have left the sugar company's cramped barrack housing and moved to their own individual houses in Annandale Village. They enjoy better conditions, freedom from interference by the estate authorities and more involvement in the wider life of Guyana. But something has gone - the old closeness, the old certainties - as the people exchange their communal life for their own separate 'high houses', and the coherent Indianness of the estate days is challenged by the new messages brought by the radio, politicians and 'clap-hand' Christians.In these stories of trade unionists, cooks, cricketers, political activists, rogues and small boys, Monar creates a vivid, picaresque world of people struggling to make sense of changes which they are experiencing at the deepest levels of consciousness. The same character who invests his energies in trickster strategems can also cry out in depair, 'No meaning, no purpose. O Gawd is where yuh deh?' In focusing on the 1950s and 1960s, several of the stories confront the tendency towards amnesia with regard to the outbreak of ethnic conflict between the Indians of Annandale and the Africans of neighbouring Buxton. The last story in the collection reflects on the next stage of the journey as the former backdam people begin to leave Guyana for new lives in Britain. These stories are told in the creole voices of their characters.Rooplall Monar was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.

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Data and Big-Bye begin their arranged marriage as strangers, sexually ignorant and under the eagle eye of Big-Bye's domineering mooma. She wants Data to be a proper Hindu doolahin, a modest, obedient daughter-in-law. He, still under his mooma's apron strings, regards Data as his sexual plaything. Data has other ideas and her struggle for independence sets off janjhat in the house. The couple's hesitant steps towards understanding are set at the heart of an acute portrayal of a community in deep cultural crisis. Monar gives us unique access to the lives of Indo-Caribbean workers: their hopes and despairs, their religiosity, their poetry, their bawdiness, their sense of cultural continuity and their awareness that their world has changed. Rich and energetic in language, this is a novel which speaks from the midst of the world it describes.Rooplall Monar was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.

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The poems in this collection ask how meaning and creative sustenance can be found in the tensions between a broken Indian heritage, the harsh history of labour on the sugar estates and the native tradition of an Indo-Guyanese 'bung coolie' culture. They attempt to find a way forward from a state of limbo - which is both a state of placelessness between ancestral Indian memories (which can no longer sustain) and repulsion from the harsh history of oppression in the canefields of Guyana, and also a place of liminal possibility rooted in the hesitant native tradition. What is seen as reactionary in the Indian heritage is subjected to iconoclastic questioning, what is democratically alive is celebrated. Written during the Burnham years of economic collapse and political and racial oppression, there are poems of sharp anger against all that has made life spirit-sapping and hazardous, but an anger which is inverted love, because Monar's poetry is Guyanese to the bone.This collection was given a special award in the 1987 Guyana Literary Prize awards.Rooplall Monar was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.

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The stories in this collection give an unrivalled picture of the lives of the Indo-Guyanese workers on the sugar estates in the period between the 1930s and the early 1950s when the estate communities broke up. They explore with great insight the ambivalence between accommodation and resistance that characterized estate life. They portray a people subject to the most oppressive forms of labour and managerial authority, sometimes held back by their inner conflicts and superstitions, but invariably engaged in some form of resistance, whether overt, or more frequently scampish schemes for avoiding hard labour or taking some advantage of the estate authorities. Above all, the backdam people resist by refusing to surrender their sense of community and cultural identity.The stories are unblinking in their portrayal of the violence and bawdy of the estate dwellers' lives, celebrating those like Massala Maraj who outwit big Manager but also mourning those who are broken by the punishing years of canefield work. The stories are by turns comic and tragic in their tone, but always in the end sympathetic to the vigorous individuality of people who struggle to live their lives 'according to their own likeness'. This is a landmark collection in its total commitment to the Hindi-influenced Creole of the sugar workers - though a glossary provides help with unfamiliar terms. Above all, these are the backdam people's own stories, told in their own creole tongue and shaped by Monar's skills as a storyteller."The success of Monar's comic treatment is that it enables him to present scenes of gross violence and brutality without sentimentality. We laugh... but do not ignore the cruelty, pain and suffering involved..."Frank BirbalsinghRooplall Monar was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.

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