The Kaywana Trilogy by Edgar Mittelholzer

First published:Children of Kaywana, 1952 (U.S. edition, 1952); The Harrowing of Hubertus, 1954 (Hubertus, 1955); Kaywana Blood, 1958 (The Old Blood, 1958)

Type of work: Historical romance

Time of work: 1616-1953

Locale: British Guiana

Principal Characters:

• Kaywana, a Guianese woman of mixed Amerindian and English blood
• Adriansen van Groenwegel, a Dutch trader and Kaywana’s lover
• August Vyfius, a Dutch trader and Kaywana’s lover
• Willem van Groenwegel, the son of Adriansen and Kaywana
• August Vyfius, Jr., the son of August and Kaywana
• Laurens van Groenwegel, the brother of Willem
• Hendrickje van Groenwegel, the daughter of Laurens
• Aert van Groenwegel, the brother of Hendrickje
• Ignatius van Groenwegel, the nephew of Laurens and the husband of Hendrickje
• Hubertus van Groenwegel, the son of Aert
• Dirk van Groenwegel, the great-grandson of Hendrickje
• Patrick Baxter-Hough, the grandson of Dirk

The Novels

The Kaywana Trilogy comprises Children of Kaywana, Hubertus (later republished as Kaywana Stock, 1959), and The Old Blood. All three novels are set in British Guiana (modern Guyana), a South American territory which was inhabited by Amerindians before the first European settlers, the Dutch, arrived in the early seventeenth century. The action begins in 1616 and, over a period of almost three and a half centuries, traces the course of social, political, and economic events while the colony changed hands many times between Dutch, French, and British rulers, until it finally became British in 1802. Often, these changes were rapid and unexpected, as during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, when the colony changed from Dutch ownership to British, to French, back to Dutch, and finally back to British. The turbulence and instability created by these changes are fully reflected in Edgar Mittelholzer’s accurate observation of purely historical episodes, and his invention of characters whose eccentric or unusual psychological features of personality seem to match the unstable conditions in which they live. The pattern in all three novels is to furnish scenes of authentic history as a milieu for characters engaged in unusual, romantic, and sometimes perverse relationships.

Children of Kaywana opens with the earliest Dutch attempts to establish trading posts and plantations in Guiana, or “The Wild Coast,” as they called it then. The Dutch resist many attacks from Spanish, French, and British rivals, and are able to establish their administration over the whole country, comprising three counties Essequibo, Berbice, and Demerara by the middle of the eighteenth century. Yet there is no real stability, and they have to contend with riots among their own soldiers and unrest among the African slaves, who provide labor for their sugar and coffee plantations. The action of Children of Kaywana ends in 1763 with the detailed account of a full-scale rebellion led by two slaves: Cuffy and Akkara. By Mittelholzer’s account, the rebellion gives rise to scenes of inhuman abuse and bloodshed. It is not that Mittelholzer alters history; rather, he supplements it with invented characters, relationships, and preoccupations that probably fulfill his own subjective expectations of past events as much as they objectively dramatize these events.

Hubertus records a similar version of historical events from the end of the 1763 rebellion to 1797, and The Old Blood continues Mittelholzer’s account from 1797 to its conclusion in 1953. The events in Hubertus are relatively peaceful, although unrest among the slaves continues and erupts again in 1823 in The Old Blood. Gruesome scenes are once more in evidence. In suppressing the rebellion, the authorities leave black corpses dangling from temporary gibbets erected on the roadside. The heads of decapitated slaves are also left stuck onto posts by the roadside. Although quite credible within the distantly undemocratic atmosphere of nineteenth century West Indian slave society, the scenes of violence and brutality appear excessive in their variety, regularity, and intensity. When the slaves are emancipated in 1833, however, there is a period of relative calm under continuous British rule, until the dominance of plantation owners and their heirs is decisively broken by the introduction of elections based on universal adult suffrage in 1953.

Interwoven with the historical events are episodes in the biography of the van Groenwegel family. The original ancestor of this family is Kaywana, daughter of an Amerindian woman and an unnamed English sailor. Kaywana has children by two Dutch lovers, Adriansen van Groenwegel and August Vyfius. It is the descendants of these children who form the principal characters in the novels of The Kaywana Trilogy. The turbulence of their relationships among themselves and with others fully matches the turbulent atmosphere that surrounds plantation society, with its rigidly authoritarian structures and inhuman distinction between masters and slaves. Typical incidents involve rivalry, intrigue, mystery, threats, revenge, suicide, murder, and obeah, or black magic. Some sexual incidents strongly reflect a situation in which enforced repression frequently provokes unlicensed indulgence: hence the frequent examples of violation, incest, rape, seduction, masochism, castration, flagellation, and mutilation. The opening section of Children of Kaywana, aptly named “A Jet of Fire,” sets the exact tone of the action that is to follow. Kaywana lusts after Adriansen and August, and she defies the medicine man Wakkatai, whom she suspects of poisoning her daughter. Her own daughter survives, but Kaywana kills Wakkatai’s daughter in revenge. Later, both Kaywana and Wakkatai are killed in a battle between the Dutch and Amerindians. While the second novel concentrates mostly on the problems of one character, Hubertus van Groenwegel, it reflects the conditions of a society that is identical to the one seen in Children of Kaywana. In the third novel, however, Mittelholzer depicts the gradual erosion of this old plantation/slave society and its feudalistic mores, which are slowly overtaken by more democratic practices of the mid-twentieth century.

The Characters

The Kaywana novels contain more than two hundred characters, of whom less than half are directly connected to the van Groenwegel family. Despite the variety of individuals within the family itself, two types of characters are generally recognized: those who are strong or dominant, and those who are weak and passive. Most of the van Groenwegels exhibit a combination of these traits, but there is no doubt that the one most admired is the one embodied in the family motto: “The van Groenwegels never retreat,” or “The van Groenwegels never run.”

The tough, fighting spirit behind this tradition can be traced back to Kaywana, the matriarch of the clan. Her Amerindian name “Kay” meaning “old” and “wana” meaning “water” links her firmly to the society in Guiana and to its struggle for survival under harsh, chaotic, colonial conditions. This society in which the Dutch vie for power among themselves, among other Europeans, and among the Amerindians, breeds ruggedly individualistic and self-sustaining values. In struggling constantly against her own people, and against Europeans, Kaywana exhibits striking qualities of defiance, resolution, hatred, and revenge. Although passionately loyal to her lovers and blood relations, she is fiercely hostile to their enemies, as shown by her outlandish passion toward Adriansen and August, and fierce defiance of Wakkatai. Kaywana is a product of Guiana in the throes of colonial occupation. In these circumstances, she is bolstered by an almost fatalistic belief in the inherent cruelty of the natural order.

Of Kaywana’s descendants, none expresses this belief more faithfully than Hendrickje, daughter of Laurens, and great-granddaughter of Kaywana. Hendrickje is a good example of the inbreeding that exists among the van Groenwegels, encouraging family pride in the “old blood.” On her mother’s side, Hendrickje is descended from Kaywana and August, while on her father’s side, she is descended from Kaywana and Adriansen. Another possible influence on Hendrickje is the fact that her grandmother on her mother’s side is an African slave. The introduction of “impure” African blood into the family is a source of anxiety for later generations of van Groenwegels. In Hendrickje’s case, her main attitude toward the family is pride in the strength of her van Groenwegel “fire blood.” She frequently counsels her grandchildren to observe the family tradition: “Never surrender. Never retreat.” Hendrickje has a reputation for unyielding defiance and aggression. She is totally intolerant of weakness, and one of her descendants describes her as “that cruel, arrogant, beautiful magnificent harridan the queen of the van Groenwegels.” Her reputation is supported by unspeakable atrocities which she habitually inflicts on her slaves and which are recorded in letters passed on to her descendants. Like her ancestor Kaywana, Hendrickje remains stubbornly defiant to the end, which is for her very bitter indeed: In the 1763 rebellion, the slaves gain their revenge, and hack Hendrickje to death along with several of her grandchildren.

As the main character in a novel whose original title was “The Harrowing of Hubertus,” Hubertus undergoes extraordinary torment and inner turmoil because of the conflict he feels between the harsh family traditions that he has inherited and his belief in Christian compassion and selflessness. In the main, the conflict manifests itself through Hubertus’ sexual longings, particularly for his female slaves. As he confesses, to satisfy his sexual desires is to offend God. Yet he feels that there is a “mad beast” in him which he has inherited with the “slime” of his family. To his mind, his family has saddled him with unrestrained lusts, and he envies his English wife for her restraint. Whether his opinion of his wife or of himself is totally or partially imagined, Hubertus remains a tortured portrait of guilt, self-pity, and masochistic inner self-flagellation.

Dirk van Groenwegel, who appears in The Old Blood, is the great-grandson of Hendrickje. Dirk is the last of the traditional, plantation-and slave-owning van Groenwegels. Radical changes take place during his lifetime. Unrest among the slaves increases sharply partly, no doubt, as a result of the educational and preaching activities carried out among the slaves by missionaries from the London Missionary Society. The first big upheaval is the 1823 rebellion, which is quickly followed by the abolition of slavery in 1833. Dirk reacts to these changes with a mixture of anger and regret, consoling himself with nostalgic recollections of his “old blood” and with theories of heredity that exalt the persistence and toughness of the van Groenwegel family. Perhaps it is some of this toughness that enables him to survive the passing of the old feudalistic order and to face the emergence of a new society in which free blacks can buy plantations on which they were formerly slaves.

The minor characters in The Kaywana Trilogy are too numerous to mention, but two the leaders of the 1763 slave rebellion, Cuffy and Akkara, deserve mention because they are today regarded as national heroes in independent Guyana. In Children of Kaywana they appear to be bloodthirsty and trigger-happy, interested mainly in revenge. Their desire for revenge is quite plausible in the circumstances, but as in so many of Mittelholzer’s characters, plausible traits are presented in such extreme fashion that they often appear morbid, exaggerated, or excessive.

Critical Context

The novels of The Kaywana Trilogy collectively represent Mittelholzer’s most distinguished achievement in a writing career which produced twenty-five books, twenty-three of which are novels. These novels are set in various parts of the West Indies as well as in British Guiana. Some are set in England, to which Mittelholzer immigrated in 1950, and where he died by suicide in 1965.

The reconstruction of three and a half centuries of any nation’s history would be a daunting task for most writers. For Mittelholzer, it was even more daunting because there were very few sources on the history of British Guiana when he was writing. His main source was J. R. Rodway’s three-volume History of British Guiana (1891). It is a measure of Mittelholzer’s distinguished achievement as a novelist that, out of such meager resources, he was able to incorporate innumerable characters and incidents, changes of location (within British Guiana), and different historical periods into a smoothly flowing, coherent narrative that both dramatizes history and provides entertaining action. As fictionalized history containing a rich variety of dramatic incidents, colorful or even perverse characters, and a narrative of most palatable fluency, the Kaywana novels constitute a rare and inspired feat of imaginative reconstruction. Since he had no local literary tradition on which he could rely for models or techniques, Mittelholzer’s achievement is essentially that of a pioneer, blessed with a brilliant and fertile imagination, versatile writing skills, and prodigious energy.

Mittelholzer was the first novelist in the region of the English-speaking Caribbean to produce so many novels. He was also the first novelist to explore the history of his homeland in such scope and depth. Most important, Mittelholzer was the first novelist from the English-speaking Caribbean to consider seriously such universal themes as the nature of political organization and sexual behavior. If The Kaywana Trilogy reveals some imbalance in the presentation of these themes by focusing on their more lurid aspects, it is partly the result of Mittelholzer’s having to supplement the dearth of historical sources with the prodigal inventions of a romantic imagination. In the process, he has also created three novels which are unsurpassed in West Indian literature for their combination of vividly reconstructed history with vigorously romantic action.

Bibliography

Birbalsingh, F. M. “Edgar Mittelholzer: Moralist or Pornographer?” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature. No. 7 (July, 1969), pp. 88-103.

Guckian, Patrick. “The Balance of Colour: A Reassessment of the Work of Edgar Mittelholzer,” in Jamaica Journal. IV (March, 1970), pp. 38-45.

Seymour, A. J. “An Introduction to the Novels of Edgar Mittelholzer,” in Kyk-Over-AI. VIII (December, 1958), pp. 60-74.