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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Exotic Landscapes

Exotic Landscapes

Martinique, Trinidad, Dominica, Barbados – these names have for most people old and obscure associations of piracy, slave-trading, wrongs criminally inflicted and criminally avenged. Mr Pope-Hennessy describes his book as an ‘extended footnote to the work of that great writer, James Anthony Froude’, the author of English in the West Indies. He is perhaps too modest. His own sensitive, unprejudiced eye lacks the special focus of the historian and sociologist. But he has obviously an affinity with the squalidly exotic landscapes he has passed through and the deeply passive genius of the transplanted Africans. For the French administration of Martinique, its order and efficiency, he has several good words to say; his view of British administration is less sanguine: ‘. . . the ragged clothes spread out to dry by washer-women on the shores of the Roseau River, which daily and publicly proclaim the inexcusable poverty in which the working people of Dominica are maintained.’

The condemnation is sharpened by its sharp concrete reference. Mr Pope- Hennessy is a tourist, with a difference. His grandfather, as a benevolent Governor of Barbados, abolished flogging in the eighteen-seventies, thus arousing the bitter enmity of the white planters; and he himself in 1938 was private secretary to the Governor of Trinidad and Tobago. Thus he is linked to the West Indies by birth and occupation. But there is a closer spiritual link of attraction and repulsion to the haunted luxuriance of these islands, their juxtaposition of death and fertility. He defines this bond in a balanced and lurid prose, which becomes at times prose-poetry: ‘All down the coast the sand was black and ashy soft, unlike the tumbled stone beaches of Dominica

. . . huge nets were stretched along the beach on poles, as though someone were trying to fence in the land or fence out the sea.’ One would like to see more of the world through the eyes of this author.

1954 (96)