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Night Calypso
1938 is a tumultuous year in the small Trinidadian island of El Caracol. In the sultry heat of the summer a young orphan, Theo, is sent to live with the island’s doctor, Vincent Metivier. The doctor knows little of Theo’s past only that it has been troubled and the he now needs love and attention. Yet Theo is not the only one who needs Vincent’s attention. The island is rife with leprosy. Together with Sister Weil, Vincent tries to educate the population about this most taboo of diseases. With war in Europe looming and a feeling of civil unrest building in Trinidad, the staggering beauty of the island is overshadowed by human discord.
- GenresFiction
288 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 2004
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About the author
Lawrence Scott
51 books10 followersLawrence Scott is a prize-winning Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago.
He has been awarded and short-listed for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book and Best First Book in Canada & the Caribbean, twice Long-Listed for The International Impac Dublin Literary Award, The Whitbread Prize and The Booker Prize. He was awarded the Tom-Gallon Short-Story Award.
His work has stimulated critical work into the post-colonial novel’s use of magic-realism, carnival, calypso, her/history, storytelling, dialect/standard narratives, identity, landscape, the body, race, religion and homo/sexuality.
His work has been performed on the BBC. His poetry has been anthologised in Europe and the Caribbean. He travels frequently in North and South America and the Caribbean and has read, lectured and talked about his work internationally.
Books
Biography
Critical Essays
Bibliography
TV & Radio
He was Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies and was a judge for the 2006 Commonwealth Short-Story Competition.
He is A Senior Research Fellow of The Academy at Unversity of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs 2006-2009.
He lives and works in both Trinidad and England, writing and teaching literature as well as creative writing at The City Literary Institute in London, The Arvon Foundation and City & Islington Sixth Form College where he taught for many years.
He has been awarded and short-listed for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book and Best First Book in Canada & the Caribbean, twice Long-Listed for The International Impac Dublin Literary Award, The Whitbread Prize and The Booker Prize. He was awarded the Tom-Gallon Short-Story Award.
His work has stimulated critical work into the post-colonial novel’s use of magic-realism, carnival, calypso, her/history, storytelling, dialect/standard narratives, identity, landscape, the body, race, religion and homo/sexuality.
His work has been performed on the BBC. His poetry has been anthologised in Europe and the Caribbean. He travels frequently in North and South America and the Caribbean and has read, lectured and talked about his work internationally.
Books
Biography
Critical Essays
Bibliography
TV & Radio
He was Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies and was a judge for the 2006 Commonwealth Short-Story Competition.
He is A Senior Research Fellow of The Academy at Unversity of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT) for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs 2006-2009.
He lives and works in both Trinidad and England, writing and teaching literature as well as creative writing at The City Literary Institute in London, The Arvon Foundation and City & Islington Sixth Form College where he taught for many years.
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June 17, 2020I originally read Night Calypso in 2007 because I enjoy tales from the Caribbean peppered with local color and dialect. Here, many Trinidadian colloquialisms are employed and the author uses nature to flesh out his tale. He utilizes native birds, beasts and plant life and references carnivals past and calypsonians of the time. (You will be familiar with Rum and Coca Cola from the late1930s and 40s.) While re-reading this book during the Covid-19 quarantine of 2020 I found a computer to be invaluable to help navigate Trinidadian vegetation and wildlife in lieu of a glossary of local terms and I found the story to be astonishingly timely being we are 3 weeks into the Black Lives Matter renewal sparked by the death of George Floyd. The relevancy of this book, it’s humanity and essentiality were greatly satisfying for me.
So.
A caring and progressive French Creole doctor, head of a leper colony in Trinidad takes in a boy from the friars on the mainland who can not deal with his issues. “..He’s had enough of prayers and exorcisms. It would have to be reason and love now.” The boy, Theo, is unusually reticent. He walks in his sleep and rarely speaks during the day. By night many characters and past voices emerge in his story telling and we know his trauma must be hidden somewhere in these “night calypsos” and maybe his delivery of the recitations led the priests to believe he was possessed. As he comes to trust Dr. Metivier more is revealed as the boy’s purging of his past slowly creeps into the daylight hours in the form of sometimes bizarre play-acting. To the doctor’s credit he remains stoic and more of Theo’s demons seem to be laid to rest after each episode.
‘Exorcism’ encompasses the thought of the times, the months leading up to World War II and how it drags these southern islands into the world conflict. The patients of the colony are ministered to by a convent of holy women and their Mother Superior is especially dogmatic in adhering to old ways just as the previous doctor was faithful to old methods of treating leprosy. This doctor, much admired by the Mother Superior was consistent in using painful injections of the largely ineffective Chaulmooga Oil and not very interested in new ideas of hygiene or the underlying sources of nerve damage to patients, which Dr. Metivier and his assistant were researching. She goes to lengths to keep her sisters protected from the world, even censoring incoming mail, but the world intrudes. The assistant, Sr. Theresa Weil, daughter of a Catholic woman and a Jewish doctor is especially adept at helping the doctor research the disease in this time at the advent of antibiotic therapy. She becomes the object of blatant anti-Semitism from a fellow nun. Sr. Theresa or Madeleine has a long journey to make alongside the doctor. News from her native France is sporadic at best as she worries about her father as Hitler comes to power.
Dr. Metivier consoles Sr. Theresa and deals with his own tie to the war in the form a brother who is a fighter pilot. He deals with his own privileged past as his caring for Theo rouses past memories and he gets drawn into the fights for social justice on this small island since he is re-thinking medicine and leprosy patient care where new drugs are unavailable for his lowly patients. His accidental cohorts in rabble-rousing are the East Indian pharmacist Singh, with whom he is somewhat at odds and the perpetually positive local fisherman Jonah. These men are born of uprising and believe communistically that all men deserve dignity and happiness, even those in a leper colony. Through their interactions we meet numerous patients in varying stages of illness and come to recognize their humanity. Singh and Jonah are calling for better conditions on the island of lepers, dragging the level headed doctor with them. Mother Superior does not adapt well to change and resists their efforts even banning the men from attending a meeting with the governor’s representative from the mainland. (Without spoiling anything, an uprising results from the visit. It isn’t pretty. In fact it’s horrific.) In what seems to be an inhumane mindset she firmly believes in strict separation of the sexes, quarantine even within the colony despite the married status of some patients and in denial of the fact there have been deaths as men attempted to swim the bay to the women’s side of the island. There is a negation of basic humanity once patients have contracted the dread disease. We get other glimpses of life in the colony where some patients simply want that humanity acknowledged and others where they, like our world today, are willing to fight for it, riot for it. We meet Ti-Jean a boy on crutches, the doctor’s special pet whom he is using to educate the other patients in the need for hygiene, conscientious bandage changing and changes in the way the disease is treated. (Ti-Jean and Theo become known as ‘the doctor’s boys.’) We meet patients who pull friends across the ground on galvanized tin sleds, elderly ladies of great faith and dignity and wisdom, girls who jump rope-the single legged ones doing the rope spinning: there is no attempt made to play down the ravages of leprosy, but the grim aspects of lost limbs and rotting flesh in the most severe cases is treated with quiet dignity for the most part but the horror is always present: the horror of the disease and the horror of human nature.
The book flows like the swells on the ocean rising and falling in significance. One tale rules for a time only to swerve in a different direction and be overtaken by another. A black American GI enters the story when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and the U.S. enters the war and we are again diverted. The straight line of growth for the protagonists take many twists and detours. Mysteries of nature from grand whales to micro sea turtle hatchlings allow us to diverge into metaphor for a time then return to harsh reality only to veer again. Masks are shed, pasts left behind, futures forged against the backdrop of what many consider to be an island paradise. Slowly Theo’s story is being laid to rest. His breakthroughs seem to coincide with incidents within the island’s society and in the larger happenings of the world war, which he follows faithfully by radio. His is a lifelong journey but he treks on in a 50 year circuit. Dr. Metivier’s tale is poignantly fulfilling and Madeleine emerges as her own person.
Again, this is a story of importance and prescience considering what I felt while reading it in 2020. “If you abuse people this much they will abuse themselves and others.”
So.
A caring and progressive French Creole doctor, head of a leper colony in Trinidad takes in a boy from the friars on the mainland who can not deal with his issues. “..He’s had enough of prayers and exorcisms. It would have to be reason and love now.” The boy, Theo, is unusually reticent. He walks in his sleep and rarely speaks during the day. By night many characters and past voices emerge in his story telling and we know his trauma must be hidden somewhere in these “night calypsos” and maybe his delivery of the recitations led the priests to believe he was possessed. As he comes to trust Dr. Metivier more is revealed as the boy’s purging of his past slowly creeps into the daylight hours in the form of sometimes bizarre play-acting. To the doctor’s credit he remains stoic and more of Theo’s demons seem to be laid to rest after each episode.
‘Exorcism’ encompasses the thought of the times, the months leading up to World War II and how it drags these southern islands into the world conflict. The patients of the colony are ministered to by a convent of holy women and their Mother Superior is especially dogmatic in adhering to old ways just as the previous doctor was faithful to old methods of treating leprosy. This doctor, much admired by the Mother Superior was consistent in using painful injections of the largely ineffective Chaulmooga Oil and not very interested in new ideas of hygiene or the underlying sources of nerve damage to patients, which Dr. Metivier and his assistant were researching. She goes to lengths to keep her sisters protected from the world, even censoring incoming mail, but the world intrudes. The assistant, Sr. Theresa Weil, daughter of a Catholic woman and a Jewish doctor is especially adept at helping the doctor research the disease in this time at the advent of antibiotic therapy. She becomes the object of blatant anti-Semitism from a fellow nun. Sr. Theresa or Madeleine has a long journey to make alongside the doctor. News from her native France is sporadic at best as she worries about her father as Hitler comes to power.
Dr. Metivier consoles Sr. Theresa and deals with his own tie to the war in the form a brother who is a fighter pilot. He deals with his own privileged past as his caring for Theo rouses past memories and he gets drawn into the fights for social justice on this small island since he is re-thinking medicine and leprosy patient care where new drugs are unavailable for his lowly patients. His accidental cohorts in rabble-rousing are the East Indian pharmacist Singh, with whom he is somewhat at odds and the perpetually positive local fisherman Jonah. These men are born of uprising and believe communistically that all men deserve dignity and happiness, even those in a leper colony. Through their interactions we meet numerous patients in varying stages of illness and come to recognize their humanity. Singh and Jonah are calling for better conditions on the island of lepers, dragging the level headed doctor with them. Mother Superior does not adapt well to change and resists their efforts even banning the men from attending a meeting with the governor’s representative from the mainland. (Without spoiling anything, an uprising results from the visit. It isn’t pretty. In fact it’s horrific.) In what seems to be an inhumane mindset she firmly believes in strict separation of the sexes, quarantine even within the colony despite the married status of some patients and in denial of the fact there have been deaths as men attempted to swim the bay to the women’s side of the island. There is a negation of basic humanity once patients have contracted the dread disease. We get other glimpses of life in the colony where some patients simply want that humanity acknowledged and others where they, like our world today, are willing to fight for it, riot for it. We meet Ti-Jean a boy on crutches, the doctor’s special pet whom he is using to educate the other patients in the need for hygiene, conscientious bandage changing and changes in the way the disease is treated. (Ti-Jean and Theo become known as ‘the doctor’s boys.’) We meet patients who pull friends across the ground on galvanized tin sleds, elderly ladies of great faith and dignity and wisdom, girls who jump rope-the single legged ones doing the rope spinning: there is no attempt made to play down the ravages of leprosy, but the grim aspects of lost limbs and rotting flesh in the most severe cases is treated with quiet dignity for the most part but the horror is always present: the horror of the disease and the horror of human nature.
The book flows like the swells on the ocean rising and falling in significance. One tale rules for a time only to swerve in a different direction and be overtaken by another. A black American GI enters the story when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and the U.S. enters the war and we are again diverted. The straight line of growth for the protagonists take many twists and detours. Mysteries of nature from grand whales to micro sea turtle hatchlings allow us to diverge into metaphor for a time then return to harsh reality only to veer again. Masks are shed, pasts left behind, futures forged against the backdrop of what many consider to be an island paradise. Slowly Theo’s story is being laid to rest. His breakthroughs seem to coincide with incidents within the island’s society and in the larger happenings of the world war, which he follows faithfully by radio. His is a lifelong journey but he treks on in a 50 year circuit. Dr. Metivier’s tale is poignantly fulfilling and Madeleine emerges as her own person.
Again, this is a story of importance and prescience considering what I felt while reading it in 2020. “If you abuse people this much they will abuse themselves and others.”
August 3, 2016
I enjoyed this book as I grew up knowing about the leper colony but not it's history and my grandpa was the dentist for the nuns when they were returned to Port of Spain. Very broad in scope and well written but much allegory, the second world war equated with the confusion and disorganisation of the leper colony and not enough attention paid to colonial intentions.
March 7, 2014
A slow start but a wonderful story.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews