Book Review: The Letters of Margaret Mann

I don’t normally win anything but recently I’ve been surprised to come up trumps on a couple of competitions through Twitter. The book related one was to an Orange Prize/Grazia magazine event at the Southbank Centre, where the author Sadie Jones was one of the speakers, and she is on the list of author’s I would like to hear talk about their work. Completely embarrassingly, I had totally forgotten about entering this competition, though the truth is more that it never even crossed my mind that I’d win. By the time they contacted me, I had already confirmed a trip to Mayfair to the Trinidad & Tobago Embassy. They were hosting the London book launch of The Letters of Margaret Mann (with the Cazabon-Mann watercolours of 19^thcentury Trinidad) edited by Danielle Delon. So I decided to stick with it. From a food point of view I definitely made the right decision, the Southbank Centre’s not at all known for the quality of its food, where as the food of Trinidad, which is a wonderful combination of the best of Caribbean and Indian cuisines, is delicious.

About the book

Margaret Mann was an English woman, who grew up in Guernsey. While still a teenager, she married Gother Mann, a solider in 1845. Three years later, when he was transferred to Trinidad, she and their first-born daughter went with him. Mr Mann was also a civil engineer, so he operated both as a soldier and worked on ‘the completion of the Government Buildings, the future ‘Red House’, San Fernando and Savana Grande (the future Princes Town), as well as several minor ones’ on the island. The Manns, now also with their second child, a son, came back to Guernsey in 1851.

Margaret Mann was still only in her late teens and early twenties during her five years on Trinidad, but she lived the life of well-off gentry. She had brought with her a Guernsey woman to look after her daughter, and she employed young Portuguese indentured labourers from Madeira as domestics, as well as former slaves, to help run her home. Her time was spent writing letters to her mother, sisters and mother-in-law.  The letters were about her everyday life: the development of her children, parties, gossip about friends, who were all of the British elite, including her husband’s boss – the governor Lord Harris, who ran the island.

Trinidad is the most southern island of the Caribbean chain of islands (with Jamaica at the most northern point just over 1200 miles away), just seven miles from Venezuela at its closest point. With its oil fields Trinidad is also the richest of the Islands and has a thriving corporate sector. It’s the site of a key part of the University of the West Indies (there are many UWI sites throughout the Caribbean, but the other two main campuses are in Jamaica and Barbados. Trinidad’s other culturally important points is that it can claim two Nobel Laureates for Literature – the writer VS Naipaul and the poet Derek Walcott. Walcott lives and works in Trinidad, but was born in St Lucia. Both the leading contemporary artists Chris Ofili and Peter Doig are now also based in Trinidad. I think though, that it would be true to say that Trinidad is best known throughout the world for its music – Calypso, and its annual Carnival.

That is why this book has been published, as I understand from the presentations at the book launch, Trinidad has developed a campaign to show of its cultural talents and encourage more people to visit. Part of this strategy includes the Bocas Lit Fest,  that began this year. Across four days, at the end of April, the literature festival celebrates books, writers and writing of the Caribbean and the rest of the world. The centrepiece of the Bocas Lit Fest is the OCM Award for Caribbean Literature. Open to both published and non-published Caribbean authors, this year’s winners included Derek Walcott, Edwidge Danticat  and Tiphanie Yanique.  The overall prize of $US10, 000 went to Derek Walcott. Here is the full list of prize winners.  

Chris Ofili was the 2011 artist in residence at the Bocas Lit Fest and he has donated an edition of the one of his prints, which the festival organisers are selling to raise funds for the 2012 Lit Fest. Contact the organisers through their website – www.bocaslitfest.com

  

The publication of the book The Letters of Margaret Mann has been corralled into this cultural strategy for Trinidad. 'The Letters’ have come about because the editor, Trinidadian arts and publishing entrepreneur, Danielle Delon, was preparing and researching a film about the celebrated 19^th Trinidadian painter Michel Jean Cazabon. He was from a mixed race family from the French Caribbean island of Martinique. As rich plantation owners his parents were able to educate him at private school in the UK and he studied painting in Paris, where he became famous and regularly had exhibitions at the Salon du Louvre. The connection is that while researching her film, Danielle realised that Margaret Mann had painting lessons from Cazabon in 1849. And it was she who made the links between 'The Letters' at the Bodleian Library and Trinidad. Also it seems that in the art history world there is some debate about whether some of the paintings are Margaret’s or Cazabon’s.

The five years worth of letters had been kept by the Mann family and were eventually donated along with many other family papers, to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where they now form part of the special collections. This is the first time that they have been published. Danielle has done a marvellous job turning the letters into an accessible read for today’s readers. If you get a chance to hear Danielle talk about the book, then don’t miss it.  She talks about Margaret in a wonderfully humorous cut eye/side eye kind of way. Danielle’s an inspiration for her dedication and research in getting the book published. If you do hear her, it is unlikely that you’ll not buy the book.

Reading the book itself is a conflicting experience. It does give a flavour of Trinidad, at a time when only largely the formal and official records exist. The big issue is how does a nation construct a history when there is scant information available. No one can argue that to hear the voice of a young mother and her preoccupations is not a good thing. It is very much ‘one’ true story of the Caribbean that connects our untold story to Britain and the British. That’s got to be a good thing right? It is reassuring to know that some people here did have the opportunity to understand what life was like in the Trinidad at that time. On the other hand I guess that I feel that I sort of know a good deal of the life style described here, it is after all the kind of stuff regularly explored in many Victorian novels and in Sunday evening TV dramas. Margaret Mann is of her time, with the aspirations and attitudes of an upper-class snob who could be anywhere in the British Empire. I don’t think that she’s very interested in Trinidad, nor does she give any real insight about her world.  She does however write well and ‘likes to chat’ – as my mother would have said.  I find myself reading between the lines of her letters trying to work out for myself what life would have really been like for those who were not part of the British elite during that first decade without slavery in the British Empire.

'The Letters’ has been published by the National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad, and so it is in that large catalogue format that you get at ‘national art institutions.’ I think that they’ve done this to show off the photographs of the paintings at the end of the book – a few are by MJ Cazabon. However I think that this format loses the intimacy of the letters, which were probably written, often in a rush, on much smaller sheets of paper. It’s also heavy and a bit unwieldy to handle. Unfortunately I only had enough cash with me at the book launch to buy the paperback copy, I would have much preferred the hardback version. I am already a bit disappointed on how the cover has creased.

  

Excerpts from The Letters of Margaret Mann

When Margaret arrived in Trinidad in 1847, slavery had been abolished for 13 years, but the country was still part of the empire and attitudes to race and colour was as you’d expect of that time. At the book launch Margaret was quoted as being ‘Blind to the people… she never got close to them.’  Here she is describing the people of Trinidad – today you can only marvel at how the whole world came to the Caribbean:

‘Whenever she (her toddler daughter Alice) finds a picture of an Eastern man or woman she at once says “Da Coolie” recognising the features and perhaps the style of dress; as to colour they are much the same as the Negros and mulattoes.

They are only beggars here and Alice imitates their way of asking alms exactly, “A-la-mama-a-la-mama-“ Some of them are graceful figures with beautifully formed arms and hands, tiny feet and ankles with large, found, silver bracelets and anklets which contrasted beautifully with their dusky skins and the long, sleek raven black hair combed perfectly straight over the shoulders, the dress generally being a short petticoat and a sort of mantle or scarf over one shoulder leaving the other shoulder and arm entirely bare.

The men wear either white turbans or red skullcaps, the latter the most becoming. The mixture of races here is certainly striking. There are, of European nations, English, French, and Spanish in great numbers. Portuguese from Madeira, liberated Africans, Coolies from various parts of India and Yankees, besides the coloured native population varying in colour from ebony to gamboge [a yellowish colour] with intermediate shades of every possible variety.

Just for a little bit of inter-island mischief – here’s Margaret describing the benefits of Trinidad.  Danielle read it delightfully at the book launch, and since neither St Kitts or Jamaica is mentioned it makes me smile to set it out here:

However Trinidad is a very nice place and I would not seem to complain of it, for how superior it is to Barbados where there is no scenery to admire and the fear of hurricanes continually on your mind during the rainy season; to St Vincent with its burning Soufriere; to St Lucia with its French population and swarms of snakes among which the rat-tailed serpent deserves to be particularly mentioned as there is but one cure and that a doubtful one for his bite, viz, blowing up the wound with gunpowder; to Demerara (now British Guyana) with its swarms of mosquitoes.

In fact, Trinidad is superior to everyone. Grenada is a lovely spot and I believe the most healthy of all the islands, but the Engineers’ quarter is a little bit of a place, not two white ladies in the town and the greatest possible difficulty to get supplies. So what with the magnificent scenery around us, the large airy comfortable quarter allotted to us, the absence of almost all venomous animals for there is no snake here whose bite is deadly, and the nice society. I think we may consider ourselves very well off, not to speak of the £365 a year which Gother’s (Mr Mann) Colonial situation brings him.