Title: 'Under The Perfume Tree'
Fiction/non-fiction collection
Publisher: Macmillan Caribbean
Editor: Judy Stone
Publication year: 2006
Reviewed by: Paul H. Williams

The first in a new series of books by The Macmillan Caribbean Writers Series, Under The Perfume Tree is a collection of 12 stories that explore Caribbean themes and sensibilities.

Set mostly in a historical context, the compilation well could have been a Caribbean history reference book, teaching lessons of history by using fictitious and non-fictitious characters and circumstances to tell the Caribbean story.

It explores the nuances of the Caribbean people - blacks, Europeans, Asians, Middle-Easterners, and even that of the indigenous people, the 'Carib'. The book takes you on a journey through time and place, leaving readers with a different experience at the end of each story. From Carib by Alick Lazare, to Maroon by Pirates by Peter Stone, to Return to Guangdong by Willi Chen, to Look the Syrian Peddler Coming, we see the threads of the West Indian experience woven by a slew of Caribbean writers into one historical mosaic.

Under the Perfume Tree is not entirely a collection of fictitious stories with a well laid-out plot and multi-dimensional characters. Most of the stories are condensed extracts of reminiscences and memoirs laced with nostalgia. A few are autobiographical or biographical. Even the fictitious stories, viz, Dada, by Beresford McLean; Protect Me, by Marlene St. Rose; and A Clouded Sun, by Ryhaan Shah, are extracts from novels, Broken Gourds, Into the Mosaic, and A Silent Life, respectively. And, that's why the collection is so different; it's a juxtaposition of historical and personal facts against fiction.

The stories, while very not enthralling, are very interesting. Readers have to be patient because they are slow-paced. The most humorous is The Circumstantial Dentist, which is an extract from Maria Gottlieb Sarles' collection of reminiscences called Sand in My Shoes. Picture the dentist's wife, who sat in a male client's lap, while she extracted his tooth, in her husband's absence. Gottlieb Sarles wrote, "So there was my mother sitting on Rupert's lap. Rupert could only imagine what (passers-by) might think if they looked in through the window." Having extracted the tooth, "my mother was ecstatic. She always possessed a unique quality that enables her to laugh like a child. Jumping off Rupert's lap, she waltzed around the room, holding the tooth in the air and admiring its long, curly root.

Dada, a "condensed extract from Beresford McLean's Broken Gourds", is steeped in Jamaican customs and folklores. It gives a taste of early post-Emancipation Jamaica, but it also says that much has not changed since then.

Romance

Then there is the tinge of romance. In Carib, you read of a Carib girl's love for a young English boy, who was killed by her people, not before English sailors robbed and killed some of the natives. "She wondered what would happen if they knew that, hidden in the inner side of her loin cloth, was a lock of the copper red hair of the balanaele (white boy)."

The most poignant story of nostalgia is Return to Guangdong, which is about a Chinese emigrant mother of three boys, who after setting up shop in Trinidad for years, returned to China after "she jumped out of (her) sleep, now terrorised by the dream that she would die and there were no gim angs, the traditional Chinese funeral urns, to keep her bones. This was a painful and devastating fear. She trembled as the wick of her lamp lowered; she touched her heart and fresh droplets fell from her eyes."

The collection is not only about the people and their circumstances; it is also about the land. The Caribbean landscape is brought to life throughthe vivid and colourful description of the island of Dominica, whose idyllic and pristine beauty was tarnished by greedy, lecherous and marauding Englishmen; the tarry beaches of Trinidad; and the picturesque island of Bequia. The only departure from the Caribbean scenery came in A Clouded Sun, appropriately named, in which a young Guyanese girl of East Indian descent tries to adapt to the grey English weather of London, where she has gone to study economics. She says, "I do not know how I will survive this cold that drips on the spine like ice. I do not know how I will survive ... I close my eyes and fall into a deep, dreamless sleep."

This composite is easy on the eyes (good font size, 1.5 spacing) and on the intellect. It is a beautiful mélange of styles, but the common factor is the ease with which the stories are written. For readers who are searching for affected styles and academic depth, take you nose from Under the Perfume Tree; its literary blossoms are too sweet for intellectual sophistication.

So, on a Sunday afternoon, inhale, savour the scents of history, escape into a world of reminiscences and fiction, but reflect upon our collective experience as a Caribbean people. For, this fine collection in all its provocative charm will transport you from the numbness of forgetfulness to the bittersweet sensations of our Caribbean realities.

paul.williams@gleanerjm.com