Hanna
Title: Walking
Author: Joanne Haynes
Publishers: Oxford, Macmillan Education, 2007. 189 pages.
Reviewed by: Mary Hanna
Lively and gregarious, Walking is a first novel by Joanne Haynes that tells the coming-of-age narrative of its engaging protagonist, Josephine Chin. Rites of passage are detailed: sexual, personal, intellectual, and creative development are dissected in the sprightly voice of child, teenager, and adult. Josephine pulls the reader in and steupses her way to final maturity. This is a novel for the young, who will identify with Josephine's experiences at school and in the home, where Josephine is at war with her mother for the most part.
Set in Trinidad, the oral quality of this narrative is strong, as if the author is confiding in a close friend. The story develops from local convent setting to University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, to South Trinidad and New York. It is wholly of the Caribbean, and Josephine is a Caribbean protagonist, brought to vivid life with the horrors and humiliations experienced by a lonely, suppressed little girl; the turbulent and self-centred angst of the teenage rebel; the introspection, confusion, and questing of the young adult searching for answers in a life filled with change and challenges. Josephine must find a way to ingest her father's wise advice: 'Happiness is a choice.'
Walking is a serious novel told in light prose and geared to the youth market. It is a book that will be appreciated by young Caribbeans; it is full of the realistic details of their lives. Josephine is a child plagued with the embarrassing accident of incontinence when under stress, as she often is in the classrooms of Sister Angelica's convent school. She must grow out of this phase and come to a new level of engagement with life. As a teenager, Josephine has learned how to pretend, how to project a cool persona that makes her appear fearless and wins her more friends than she knows what to do with. She learns to attract boys, but her grades suffer for it and she must repeat her exams after going to night school. She is never able to commit wholeheartedly to a relationship and feuds mightily with her mother. Josephine turns to her many sisters for guidance but often they are not there, having moved on in life, like her brother Jed, who is 25 years older than she is. She doesn't know how to plan for a future she is uncertain of, and all is turmoil for this bright teenager who nevertheless is failing at school.
As an adult, Josephine finds herself taking pride in her job as a teacher, like her mother, but in a school in the deep South of Trinidad where she comes into contact with poverty and obeah. Josephine has married one of the boys she had become involved with and learns the great beauty of having a son. But she loses a second baby to the trauma of forced abortion when she contracts German measles on a visit to her family. This stress on her marriage is overcome and Josephine will have two more boys before she learns to control her temper and commit to happiness. She must come through anxiety attacks, diabetes, and finally the fear of having her dreams succeed - for Josephine wins through in a writer's contest and is able to attend a workshop where her artistic career is set in motion. She becomes the writer she had always dreamed of being, with the full support of her husband James.
a fine teacher
The opportunities that are presented to Josephine are entirely Caribbean-generated. She attends a meeting of the Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars in Grenada where her talent as a rap artist is applauded, and the workshop she attends will be in Trinidad. She has been schooled entirely in Trinidad and does well in her CXC and her A Levels, once she applies herself. Josephine is a fine teacher, caring for the students over and beyond their intellectual needs, for she discovers that they have no lunch and are groggy in the afternoons. She sets herself the task of solving this challenge and becomes popular and successful in her profession.
Josephine's sexual history will be of great interest to her readers. She begins sexual activity the day following her CXC exams and is fortunate in not becoming pregnant for either of her boyfriends. She appears in control of the situation and able to compartmentalise her various activities so that she can meet her obligations. Josephine's father dies in hospital just prior to her exams and it is this trauma that causes her to fail her subjects so she must retake the exams. She writes: 'This is upsetting to me as it is liberating. That the efforts and people and things and time we worked with and for are, in the end, all left behind. That the things that tied us become the things we set free. That we aren't as all-important as we think. That we relinquish everything that identified who we were.' Josephine must learn to cope with the fact of death; this becomes the central challenge of her young life, and is only resolved at the very end of her narrative.
Josephine's story is full of lively characters and tongue-in-cheek happenings. The details of her life are well-rounded and as bright with humour as with angst. She tells her story with a lilt that could only come from the oral tradition. It is a story told among friends for the pleasure of the telling.
Joanne Haynes was born in Trinidad in 1966. She was educated there and studied Government at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. She is the mother of two boys, a freelance writer and broadcaster, and founder of Pepperpot Productions, a multi-media company focusing on writing for children. She was a finalist in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition of 2002-3 and also the 2005 winner of the Derek Walcott/Trinidad Theatre Workshop Children's Literature Prize. Walking is part of the Macmillan Caribbean Writers series.
