Toronto’s Women’s News Nov. 2002. Vol. 5 No. 10
Curious about Austin Clarke’s work after he was shortlisted for this year’s prestigious Giller Prize, I was in a hurry to read Polished Hoe. Yet with its meandering storytelling structure, deliberate pacing and incredibly lustrous use of West Indies island dialect, this is novel for a reader to submerge in, read carefully and consider for days and weeks afterwards, not rush through.
This is a novel told almost entirely in dialogue, conversation and stories as its protagonist, Mary Gertrude Mathilda makes a statement confessing to the murder of the village plantation manager, Mr. Bellfeels. She has killed him with the plantation hoe her mother has passed down to her, an instrument she’s polished daily and held as a talisman. Although the entire novel takes place over a mere twenty-four hours and begins and ends with the singularly powerful voice and personal story of its protagonist, Clarke manages to engineer the novel as an incredible panorama of the post-colonial experience in the West Indian island of Bimshire.
As Mary-Mathilda accounts for her life and her actions, she tells the stories of her community and the plantation she grew up in. She engages the village Constable and then the Sargeant in long conversations that wind late into the night and delve deeply into these characters’ relationships, passions and desires. The scope of Mary-Mathilda’s experience and island life widens continuously to include powerful commentaries on gender, class, race, sex, power, fractured families, brutalilty, slavery, the history and effects of colonialism and the value of life itself.
In an extraordinary scene suffused with potent sexual tension between Mary-Mathilda and the Sargeant she is confessing to, a life-long friend, Mary-Mathilda ushers the Sargeant into her dressing room and reveals a spying glass wrapped in lush red velour. Although she was born in the village and worked the plantation land, she’s set apart from the rest of the village once she becomes Bellfeel’s mistress and mother of his only son, Wilberforce. She watches the village from her window in the plantation house, seeing the most private of details through her spy glass, just as we the readers are shown the same panoply.
Mary-Mathilda’s story is as expansive and complex as her life and times. She is in her late 50s and has lived through war, poverty, sexual interference and abuse. She’s heard the difficult stories of colonial slavery, she herself has been enslaved sexually as Bellfeels’ mistress and yet her son has grown up with the privilege and education Bellfeels has provided. The novel is neither a mystery nor a simple tale of murder and revenge, but an epic testimonial of oppression, marginalization, and despair.
Mary-Mathilda is among the strongest women characters I’ve encountered in Canadian literature. In some of the final words of her statement, Mary-Mathilda talks of herself in the third person, describing herself as "a woman with a past of strangulation" whose "future ended with each setting of the sun every evening." In her words, the murder is an "act of self-defence mixed-in with the act of sacrifice." This is an impressive work by a highly accomplished Canadian author deserved of recognition indeed.
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