Kaywana Blood

Kaywana Blood
Mittelholzer, Edgar
London, Secker & Warburg, 1958
523 p. illus. 21 cm

This is the final volume of the Kaywana trilogy, which starts in 1795 and ends in 1953 with independence movement. It records the end of the Groenwegel clan and, symbolically, the end of the Guyanese plantocracy. Given Mittelholzer’s great admiration for the composer Richard Wagner, this final volume evokes the feeling of the end of Wagner’s music drama cycle, the Ring; the final part is entitled The Twilight of the Gods. Wagner’s gods, like Mittelholzer’s Groenwegels, were only occasionally admirable. The main character of this third and last volume, Dirk, has clear vision of the vast changes of the twentieth century, especially the importance of competitive markets; on the other hand , he is defeated in a series of ironic twists by his own powerful dynastic loyalties deeply tied to notions of purity of race. Despite the fact that his closest friend (and half brother) and the woman he loves are mixed race, he denies them a full place in his home and his life. The novel records the triumph of the children of these characters and the rise of Creole Guiana in the twentieth century. Although Dirk realizes the narrowness of his vision at the end, the unlaid specter of race continues to haunt the characters even as independence becomes a possibility. This is another Mittelholzer novel of borders or thresholds: race (of course), sexuality, the bush and the cultivated, settler/ colonial, slave, indigene and metropolitan, sanity and madness. Formally elegant, a heavily unmediated use of soft Creole for dialogue throughout; as is typical in the Guyanese novels, Kaywana Blood uses extensive natural descriptions as clues to meaning. It ends with abrupt irony (about race) and a lack of resolution, which renders a sense of continuation, of the irresolvable elements, in this case, of race and colonialism.

H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois at Chicago Library
Daley Library - Special Collections/3rd floor (non-circ.)
PR9320.9.M5 K33 1958

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