Turn Again Tiger

Standing on the hill gave him a feeling of power. He hated the cane. Cane had been the destiny of his father, and his father's father. Cane had brought them all from the banks of the Ganges as indentured laborers to toil in the burning sun. And even when those days were over, most of them stayed shackled to the estates."

Samuel Selvon's Turn Again Tiger is an enjoyable work with great humor, continuing the tale of Tiger, a creolized Trinidadian of Indian descent. Tiger, comfortable in Barataria, agrees to help his father run a new sugarcane estate in the valley, in a small, forgotten corner of Trinidad called Five Rivers. Given false information on the job, Tiger agrees to help his father and moves to this new village, trying to figure out how to be a man along the way. 

According to Naipaul's review of the novel, Turn Again Tiger appears to be a sequel to an earlier work by Selvon, which probably explains his origins in the canefields, his relationship with Sookdeo, the man who taught him how to read, as well as Tiger's fraught relationship with the estate (and by extension, white people, the race all Trinidadians see as God). In his review of the novel, Naipaul seemingly characterizes the novel as a typical or formulaic "Race, Sex, and Caribbean" anti-colonial text, which has some veracity. 

While the central white character to the novel, Doreen, who inspires so much of Tiger's internal turmoil and frustration, is not given the complexity or depth of other characters in this novel (the entire village becomes a character, except the white overseer, Robinson, who, as a symbol of the plantation and colonialism does not mingle with the masses but controls from behind the scenes), one could ask why should the two white characters be centered in a narrative about a multiracial, poor community? Or, on another note of importance, why does this novel include powerful collective women's voices, but reaffirms patriarchal cultural norms and power relations in Five Rivers?

In another way, this novel could be compared in intriguing ways to Mr. Naipaul's Guerrillas or The Mimic Men, which all feature interracial relationships between West Indian men and white women. In Selvon's narrative, the white female body becomes, in a way strangely reminiscent of Jimmy Ahmed's sexual conquests or the fascinating character in Salih's illustrious novel, a way in which the colonized male subject reverts the established order. Naipaul, unlike Selvon, however, includes these white women characters' inner desires and political contradictions in the aforementioned novels. Strangely, much like Ralph Singh or Jimmy Ahmed, Tiger seems to share similar sexual frustrations related to the colonized West Indian, but Naipaul was more dismissive of this aspect of Selvon's novel.