7 - ‘Somebody Kill Somebody, Then?’: The Sweet Revenge of Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe

Summary

Their different instruments of husbandry, particularly their gleaming hoes, when uplifted to the sun, and which, particularly when they are digging cane-holes, they frequently raise all together, and in as exact time as can be observed, in a well-conducted orchestra, in the bowing of the fiddles, occasion the light to break in momentary flashes around them.

– William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica

The weapon and the tool seem at moments indistinguishable, for they may each reside in a single physical object … and may be quickly transformed back and forth, now into the one, now into the other. At the same time, however, a gulf of meaning, intention, connotation, and tone separates them. If one holds the two side by side in front of the mind … it is then clear that what differentiates them is not the object itself but the surface on which they fall.

– Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

Unearthing the Past

The first-person narrative of sexual suffering which remains unarticulated in Cambridge emerges, in The Polished Hoe, in the tale told by Mary Gertrude Mathilda Paul, a mixed-race woman with skin ‘the colour of coffee with a lil milk in it’. This tale spans a period from the early 1950s, when the novel is set, to the time of Mary's childhood and recalls her systematic abuse by Mr Bellfeels, manager of the Barbadian sugar plantation on which she is born.