Children of Kaywana (1st Ace edition)

Children of Kaywana
Mittelholzer, Edgar
London : Ace, 1959
379 p. ; 18 cm

Part One of Mittelholzer’s trilogy of the founding of Guyana begins with the seduction of a Dutch sailor by the eponymous founding mother, Kaywana, a mixed race Amerindian, in a flawed tropical Eden “the air stood still…like a humid cobweb…” in the year 1612. This volume spans a century and a half and ends with the slave uprisings of 1763. Epic in its size and reach, the trilogy is myth and history of the evolving nationhood of Guyana as lived by the family founded in the marriage of Kaywana with the first van Groenwegel. Passed down through a succession of male descendants, the Dutch name holds, but the family undergoes and often resists a process of racial and cultural creolization that is quintessentially Caribbean. Nationhood is represented in this creolization process as well as throughout the trilogy in the struggles of this family to maintain power in a complex but consistently hostile environment. Their lives are threatened by external forces – natural, political and social – as well as the profound psychological imbalances engendered by their efforts to prevail and even survive. Part One focuses on Kaywana’s mixed race granddaughter, Hendrickje, whose life spans almost a century and who is killed in the uprising while defending the plantation, rifle in hand. Hendrickje is both monstrous in her obsessive drive to strengthen the family and occasionally almost admirable in her refusal to be defeated by anything. Fueled by powerful sexual energy, she dominates and destroys almost all the men in her orbit. If misogynist, the portrait of Hendrickje is created through Mittelhölzer’s icy, affectless prose as an inevitable deformation of humanity by the brutality of the colonizing process. Mittelholzer’s admiration for the composer Richard Wagner and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is apparent in the compelling and repellent character of Hendrickje who so embodies the idea of the will to power.

H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois at Chicago Library
Daley Library - Special Collections/3rd floor (non-circ.)
PR9320.9.M5 C49 1959

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