THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 29, 1995 TAG: 9510270732
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY EUGENE M. MCAVOY
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
THE SUN, THE SEA, A TOUCH OF THE WIND
ROSA GUY
Dutton. 305 pp. $22.95.
Jonnie Dash, the protagonist of Rosa Guy's new novel, The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind, is forever awakening - sometimes from the depths of drunken stupor, often from the chasm of mental illness she refers to as her ``madness.''
In this exploration of the roles of racism, sexism, politics and poverty in the development of a woman's identity, and by extension, the identity of nations, Jonnie struggles to escape the miseries of her past and awaken to the discovery of her self. Her journey, however, fails to live up to the literary expectations one would have for Rosa Guy, a co-founder of the Harlem Writers Guild, who has been lauded by critics nationwide.
Too much confusion and pain unite in too much melodrama. Before the novel's present action begins, Jonnie already has survived more than a lifetime of misery - her parents' death, a loveless youth in her aunt's home, the passing of her teens as a runaway, the death of a fellow runaway and the disappearance of her protector. She has been raped by a Catholic priest, left by her husband for a woman who can do real ``bumping and grinding,'' and abandoned by her Haitian lover. The final attack on her sanity is the death of her only child, Emanuel. Broken by the loss of her son, Jonnie survives from day to day on the fringes of her culture, sustained only by her paintings of ``the most fabulous penises in the world.''
Yet even success, the sale of one of her paintings for a half-million dollars, is hollow. Jonnie is incapable of living, let alone enjoying, a life of wealth. So, alone and depressed, she flees to Haiti to reunite with Gerard, her lover from 20 years before. She finds that he is no longer the dashing intellectual she remembers. Within days, she leaves his home for a brief stay at the Old Hotel near Port au Prince. But even in the capital she is an outsider - the only black in the Old Hotel, a light-skinned black among the natives, too outspoken, too wealthy, too independent to submit to the dominance of money-hungry Americans and power-hungry Haitians.
For four weeks, she watches from the periphery, incapable of stopping the white tourists and ``Baby Doc'' Duvalier's ton ton macoute from raping the impoverished island. And as her world grows more mad with each passing day, she tries unsuccessfully to make sense of a hopeless life. When a young Haitian boy, however, appeals to her for help in escaping physical and sexual possession by the American counsel, she discovers courage and sense of self. She finds her purpose.
The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind has its strengths. The parallels between Jonnie's struggle and Haiti's struggle ring clearly throughout the novel. From the first nation in which black slaves earned their independence, she learns of true strength, a strength of soul that survives self-hatred and, despite oppression, grows into love and self-respect. Like the slaves before her, Jonnie breaks free of white and male dominance and enjoys a freedom that even fear and poverty cannot steal. Guy's descriptions of Haiti, its history and its people are generous and sincere, billowing with a poetic promise much of the book fails to deliver.
Were this simply Jonnie's story, the tale of a woman's discovery of her identity and freedom from the abuses of ``these mother's children calling themselves men,'' Guy would have a stronger novel. But her heavy-handed push for social importance renders the book an often incoherent meandering through good intentions. Unfortunately, her style and structure cannot support those intentions.
An incessant stream of rhetorical questions to convey Jonnie's confusion weakens Guy's prose and blurs the lines of the only character she defines well. Her other characters are simply caricatures, illustrating with varying degrees of success the many facets of an ill-articulated political ideology.
Though often interesting and occasionally thought-provoking, The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind is ultimately too self-conscious to succeed as ``serious'' literature. Despite its aims and unlike its heroine, it remains less than what it should and could have been.
- MEMO: Eugene McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk. by CNB