Product Description

When an elderly Bimshire village woman calls the police to confess to a murder, the result is a shattering all-night vigil that brings together elements of the African diaspora in one epic sweep. Set on the post-colonial West Indian island of Bimshire in 1952, "The Polished Hoe" unravels over the course of 24 hours but spans the lifetime of one woman and the collective experience of a society informed by slavery. As the novel opens, Mary Mathilda is giving confession to Sargeant, a police officer she has known all her life. The man she claims to have murdered is Mr. Belfeels, the village plantation owner for whom she has worked for more than thirty years. Mary has also been Mr. Belfeels' mistress for most of that time and is the mother of his only son, Wilbeforce, a successful doctor. What transpires through Mary's words and recollections is a deep meditation about the power of memory and the indomitable strength of the human spirit. Infused with Joycean overtones, this is a literary masterpiece that evokes the sensuality of the tropics and the tragic richness of Island culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #113505 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.ca
Austin Clarke, Toronto resident and Barbados native, maintains that he doesn't write for the limelight, but alas the honours have come in: the Rogers Communications Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for The Origin of Waves, a Governor General's Award nomination for The Question, the W.O. Mitchell Prize for his literary mentorship and his outstanding body of work, and finally Canada's largest and most esteemed annual award for fiction, the Giller Prize, for his novel The Polished Hoe. (Some hushed murmurs have blighted the last of these kudos, calling it a verdict skewed by political correctness rather than literary merit, as if a black man writing about slavery were a recipe for mainstream adulation.)

Clarke's ornately polished Hoe unfolds in less than 24 hours, but it explores the fate of black people, past, present, and future, paced by the Great Time--the place where all those times meet--of African and Caribbean oratory tradition. Clarke plunks his muses down on the isle of Bimshire--Barbados in cloak--in the "Wessindies." It's an unsettling postcolonial landscape, soiled by the "sickening power of poverty"--among other routine brutalities, woman and mere girls can be and are dragged off and forcibly taken atop heaps of agricultural refuse. As Clarke's story begins, Mr. Bellfeels, the tyrannical "red-nigger" plantation overseer of Flagstaff Village, has been chopped down. After Bellfeels's concubine, the dignified Mary-Mathilda, hails up the law, resident barkeep Manny huffs, "Any one o' we have reason to kill that son-of-a-bitch."

Having pined for Mary-Mathilda for close to 40 years, Percy, a church choir-chanting, lily-livered police sergeant who gets around on a three-speed bike, is called up to the Great House where Bellfeels has installed his mistress (and their Oxbridge-educated son who can pass as white) to take her statement on the crime. But Percy doesn't want to hear it, "the powers-that-be don't. The public don't. And the Village don't." Bloody facts aside, island justice sensibilities have decreed that Bellfeels's slaying was a public service. So while Percy intermittently nods off or quashes the "impetus to rape," Mary-Mathilda--a polished ho in her own right, well aware that the other villagers call her a "brown-skin bitch"--unloads a soliloquy on village history, specifically her existential alienation "ordered through the destinies of paternity" and "paid for by her body." The rest of us are left to measure this epic against other grand island overviews like Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco. There's no doubt, this Hoe swings sure and true. --Sigcino Moyo

Books in Canada
When does a novel become a work of art? Austin Clarke's latest novel, The Polished Hoe, is that rare creation that soars above the earth to become more than the sum of its parts. Clarke, a poet, novelist, memoirist, and teacher, raised in Barbados and a longtime resident of Toronto, has explored the unbreakable, unbearable, connection between here and there, present and past-- the universal immigrant's tale--in complex and engaging ways before, notably in his 1997 novel, The Origin of Waves. But this book is different, a profound work in the literal sense, so that one suspects Clarke, like his central character, has been tirelessly polishing this tale, that this is the story he was truly born to write.

At first The Polished Hoe bears resemblances to The Origin of Waves: a marathon dialogue between people who grew up together, people who share roots, memories and a language peculiar to themselves and their homeland. The year is 1952. Clarke's instrument of choice is the English language spoken by the governed in a British colony in the Caribbean, and he plays it like a virtuoso. The principal speaker introduces herself as "Mary-Mathilda," or "Tilda. To my mother I was Mary-girl. My names I am christen with are Mary Gertrude Mathilda, but I don't use Gertrude because my maid has the same name. My surname that people 'bout-here uses, is either Paul or Bellfeels, depending who you speak to...."

While the rhythm here is formal--Mary-Mathilda is making a Statement (in caps) to the police and she means to get every detail right--it also embodies the musical colloquialisms of what Clarke calls the Island of Bimshire, in words like "christen," or hyphenations like "'bout-here" that our ears soon grow accustomed to. Mary-Mathilda, a woman of standing in her community, a woman who employs a servant and lives in a plantation Great House, is voluntarily making a Statement about a violent act she has committed. It is her testament, and will be given in her own good time.

As her confession continues, the woman's strength as well as her beauty becomes more and more evident. First she speaks to a junior Constable and wears him out- -no matter, she goes on speaking even as he drifts off to sleep. But he is just the warm-up act for Sargeant Percy Stuart, a lifelong friend and admirer, who has been avoiding this particular duty by having a few drinks in the local rum shop. Clarke's book juggles good humour with acts committed in "total darkness" against the backdrop of a darker history. Her criminal act and her Statement take place in the space of a single night. It's hard not to think of Joycean affinities here; and there is something of the word-struck Irish in Clarke's speakers, burdened by centuries of deprivation and humiliation, something of Joyce in this sprawling tale beginning early one night and ending at dawn in the same North Field where it all began. From the first page, it becomes clear that we could listen to the hypnotic Mary-Mathilda all night. In fact we will.

She zigzags between what happened earlier that evening at seven o'clock, when she deliberately walked from her house along the valley-track and then through the cane fields to the Main House, carrying her obsessively polished hoe, to the time when she was a seven or eight years old and was first noticed by Mr. Bellfeels, who runs a riding-crop over her body "as if it was his hand crawling over my body, and I was naked." Her mother, powerless witness to this scene, looked down at the ground. Mary-Mathilda's polished hoe--its blade and wood deserving of their meticulous descriptions--is the very tool she used in the fields as a child. Past and present are therefore fused, but why? Like the aged rum she offers her interrogator, Miss Mary's narrative acts like a slow intoxicant. A dramatic and suspenseful storyteller, she is more than equal to the minister from whose sermons she so liberally quotes.

The relationship between Miss Mary and Mr. Bellfeels, now promoted to manager of the plantation, who has a white wife and family, is well-known in the community, and has produced their successful son Wilberforce, a doctor trained in England. Miss Mary's status is linked to both her possessions--the selection of drinks she has her maid bring to her visitor from crystal decanters, her cherry and mahogany furniture, the European pictures on her walls--and from her own towering reputation as a smart village beauty beyond the reach of the local boys who lusted after her. Wilberforce, a source of pride for his mother, seems, puzzlingly, also a focus of her anger, with his worldly talk of the "ironies of life," a phrase she likes to repeat, a motif in the sermon she weaves into the testament of her history and that of her people. Her son is educated, but, like the policeman she invites into her home, has much to learn.

Mystery fuels Clarke's narrative, as Miss Mary, ironically quoting Winston Churchill ("Give we the tools and we will do the rest"), veers between her life and that of her people: an African great-grandmother whose name she barely knows; men beaten or shot for challenging a brutal system; an abused friend who hanged herself from a tamarind tree; a husband, cuckolded by the governor himself, who struck back as the same time as his wife's ground glass poison took effect on the erring governor. The stories are legion, part of the shared humiliation and anger of the island's underclass, who weave them into myths called calypsos so no one forgets. Yet Miss Mary-Mathilda, in her fancy house, with her educated son, seems to have--with her mother's blessing--taken the advantages offered to her as the "Outside woman" of the near-white Mr. Bellfeels, and prospered. Nagging questions haunt Clarke's tale: what exactly has this mistress-wife done, and why now, after all these years?

That's what takes all night to uncover. The Sargeant becomes the audience for Miss Mary's corrective history lesson, sharing both in the horror at what has happened in the secret tunnels and passageways of his island and in the personally enlightening meandering memories of his hostess. Some of it he has heard before, but much of the worst he has not believed--or chosen not to--and as his knowing friend leads him literally to the matter at hand, her crime, she takes him first to the scenes of crimes of which he knew nothing, what Miss Mary calls the "pageantry of blood" involving everyone in island society, from the highest to the lowest. Yet Clarke makes it clear that these facts aren't what are needed to persuade us that Miss Mary's crime was more than an act of retribution, but her ordained destiny, as a god-fearing woman. "The story itself is the thing. That experience of living through the story." And this is what makes his book so extraordinary, what provides its epic sweep, from the deeply sensual to the factually political, so that we feel it in our every pore. Clarke doesn't merely tell the story; he makes us live through it, as the Sargeant and Miss Mary do on one long moonless night, addressing the crimes that have both kept their fates apart and knit them inexorably together. --Nancy Wigston

From Publishers Weekly
Clarke, considered one of Canada's finest political novelists, but less well known in the U.S. (a memoir, Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit, was published by the New Press in 2000), gets a new launching in this country with this eloquent, richly detailed novel, awarded Canada's Giller Prize. A murder takes place in the 1950s on the fictional Caribbean island of Bimshire (a stand-in for Clarke's native Barbados), where the culture of English gardens and cricket contrasts sharply with the legacy of slavery. The murderer is Mary Gertrude Mathilda, a respected elderly black matriarch. But the identity of the victim is less clear. In the 24 hours covered by Austin's tale, Mary is determined to tell the police about the lifetime of degradations that led up to her homicidal rage, and Sgt. Percy Stuart, a black member of the police force, is determined to stop her. Percy is in love with Mary, but his life has been a continual compromise with the still-lingering plantation system. Nobody represents the system better than Mr. Bellfeels, the white manager of the sugar plantation at the center of the villagers' lives. When she was 13, Mary was, in essence, bartered to Bellfeels by her mother, who was his previous mistress. For 38 years, she bore his groping and his children. Though he has helped their son, Wilberforce, become a doctor, Bellfeels has never shown Mary herself any kindness. At times, Clarke loses confidence in his characters and has them deliver forced sociological truths-for instance, when Mary gives a lecture about Christopher Columbus. Most of the story, however, unfolds through brilliantly written dialogue, a rich, dancing patois that fills out the dimensions of the island's painful history and its complex caste system. Like Texaco, by Martinique writer Patrick Chamoiseau, Clarke's novel, by harnessing the genius of Creole, shows how art can don a liberating face.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Painful
I agree with all of the other reviewers. This book was painfully slow! Generally, I like character driven books, but I did not care about these characters. I kept hoping for a big ending, but nothing ever really seemed to happen. My book club read this book and it received 3/10, our lowest rated book to date (after 2 years)!

repetitive and wordy
this is the first of this author's books i have read, impulsively ordering it after hearing of his award. I am less than 1/3 of the way through and doubt will finish, having scanned through to the end, little changes. honest, well written characters do not make up for the repetitiveness and general boredom of this book.

contrary to popular opinion...
Having not read a lot of fiction based in the Caribbean I thought this was a great place to start. The characters were rich and Clarke's description of a place I have never seen was impressively vivid. I am surprised by the other reviews- the histiroical pain in this book was palatable, the narrative was whimiscal and was indeed deserving of the prize.