From the CRB archive: fiction by Phyllis Shand Allfrey

by Nicholas Laughlin on August 8, 2010

Phyllis Shand Allfrey

Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Photograph courtesy Papillote Press

The 2010 Nature Island Literary Festival, which opened in Dominica on Friday, closes this evening, and one of today’s events is a tribute to three of Dominica’s literary pioneers, featuring readings from the work of Jean Rhys, J.R. Ralph Casimir, and Phyllis Shand Allfrey. So today’s excursion into the CRB archive, all the way back to our August 2004 issue, is “O stay and hear”, a short story by Allfrey, published with an introduction by her biographer, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert.

“The name of Phyllis Shand Allfrey evokes contradictory images,” Paravisini-Gebert writes.

Born in 1908 into a family of white colonial officials in the colony of Dominica, she built a political career through an alliance with the labour unions and peasantry that threatened the interests of her own class and race. A promising writer whose first novel, The Orchid House (1953), opened bright prospects for a successful literary career in England, she renounced all expectations in order to return to the Caribbean in 1954 to found the Dominica Labour Party. A committed Fabian Socialist who worked indefatigably to uphold voting rights and safeguard the peasantry’s participation in Dominican politics, she found herself expelled from the party she had founded and excluded from island politics when the demands of black nationalism made it expedient. She found a place for herself in Dominican society, nonetheless, as a newspaper editor and spokesperson for the political opposition, roles that allowed her a lasting public life and through which she eked out a meagre living.

Towards the end of her life, Allfrey attempted to collect a number of her short stories, some published in various British journals in the 1940s and 50s, into a book, “but illness, poverty, and eventually death conspired against her efforts to claim her position as a pioneer among women writers in the Caribbean.” Nearly twenty years after her death, a selection of this short fiction was published by Papillote Press under the title It Falls Into Place.

Paravisini-Gebert comments:

Like her published and unpublished novels, these stories have a strong autobiographical foundation. Allfrey wrote best about what she knew well — that which she had experienced herself or come to know first hand — and her subjects follow the trajectory of her peripatetic career. Writing from a profound sense of her own West Indian identity, Allfrey centres her plots on the epiphanies that result from chance encounters between characters of different cultures, classes, outlooks, and — above all — races. As a writer, she was endlessly fascinated by the transformations brought about by juxtaposing perspectives that clashed — and occasionally crashed.

“O stay and hear” is an upstairs-downstairs story about the English wife of an estate owner in Dominica and her maid and cook, and the small secrets, evasions, curiosities, and revelations that characterise their relationship. The tone is whimsical and teasing, but not far off — as near as the forest that one imagines fringes Madame-là’s rose garden — lurk the shades of history that were Allfrey’s subject, those clashing and crashing perspectives.

They are walking in the flower garden, and what are they singing? Something rather merry and mocking; the veering breeze blows up a few words now and then to the ears of a lady behind green bathroom blinds. Now the lady raises a long pale arm and applies a little soap to it, at the same time peeping through the slats without raising from her cool bath water.

Samedi après-midi,
Madame-là tombait malade:
Voyez, cherchait l’Abbé . . .

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Polly Pattullo August 9, 2010 at 2:00 pm

Thanks very much for choosing to feature O Stay and Hear, from It Falls into Place by Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Just to say that yesterday – at Dominica’s Nature Island Literary Festival and Book Fair – the reading from Allfrey was “Breeze” (also from It Falls Into Plac. This is a rich and telling story in which the little girl from the big house is confronted by the wild girl from the streets. Lots of detail evoking, no doubt, Allfrey’s own childhood in Roseau.

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