Abstract
Human bones and their disappearance have been allied to a tragic and heroic theme in the history of Grenada, the birthplace of the writer Jacob Ross. Julien Fédon, the leader of the short-lived rebellion against British colonialism in 1795 – much inspired by the Haitian Revolution – disappeared and his bones were never found. In 1983, Maurice Bishop, then leader of the Grenada revolution, was murdered in a coup, along with his comrades. Days later the US invaded. Bishop’s remains, along with those of several of his comrades including the pregnant Minister of Education, Jacqueline Creft, have never been traced or revealed.
During the ‘Revo’ (1979–1983) Ross, from an agricultural working family, who won a scholarship to study in Paris, worked as a cultural officer in the Ministry of Education. Creft had been his schoolteacher as well as an inspiration to him as he became a vibrant young poet who read his creative and revolutionary message at rallies and meetings throughout Grenada, inspiring many with the fire and brilliance of his words.
So these echoes resonated as I read his new novel The Bone Readers. Its ostensible genre is a Caribbean detective story, but this is no ‘Death in Paradise’. The narrative features a young, contemporary plain-clothes officer – a public eye perhaps – trained in London, and a now-times search linked to a cold case concerning the disappearance of his mother, victim of an anti-government protest in 1999 which was suppressed as a ‘rape riot’. But all through the novel’s events, other moments of history are speaking out, for they can never be silenced.
Ross writes with the humour, lucidity and the grittiness of vision of a Caribbean Walter Mosley; his protagonist is an anti-hero of the law’s quest for the truth of dark events long passed. Michael ‘Digger’ Dawson is a young and determined seeker who never gives up on his pursuit. ‘Digger’ is the ideal sobriquet for him: he is relentless and tenacious, a descendant of his island’s revolution thirty years before, which, as he reflects, was enough ‘to frighten the hell out of Ronald Reagan in my mother’s time; enough to have him put an aircraft carrier on our horizon and launch Blackhawk helicopter gunships and F16 bombers to pound us into the sea. Small island my arse.’
There are other reminders of ‘the upheavals of ’83’ which still cast a dark shadow over the novel’s plot. Digger’s investigation takes him to Fort Rupert in the island’s capital where he reflects that ‘a whole government had died within its colossal walls, and there remained the abiding memory of terrified school children leaping from its ramparts to die at its feet’. Or he goes to the coastal village of Beausejour, ‘where U.S. marines had left the bodies of five local boys by the roadside’. Such references are few, but enduring and prominent for, as Digger delves into the past, he begins to uncover and understand in his very blood that ‘bones have their own language’ and speak their own history like the griots of old.
Ross is a master-writer and in The Bone Readers he skilfully employs a genre through which he moves beyond that genre’s confines. In this, he expresses a deep yearning not only for the truth of a crime as yet unsolved and the characters involved within its story, but a will, too, to eventually know and fathom the truth of the implosions and confusions in the long march of his own nation’s brave and tragic history.