What We're Reading Now: "Entering the Dragon's Mouth in PLEASANTVIEW" by Mina Hamedi
Structural freedom, experimentation, fluid narration: these all excite me. They signify breathability, movement, controlled play of language, image, and voice. They make you, the reader, complicit. If you miss the tiniest emerald shard, you miss the bigger picture.
The prologue of Pleasantview, Mohammed’s dazzling novel-in-stories, is titled, “The Dragon’s Mouth (Bocas del Dragon).” It is the collective name for the straits between Trinidad and the Venezuelan coast. The first of only two footnotes states: “On most maps it is not translated as plural, but rather as the singular.”
Many made one. Why? A forced change, like the perennial outsider who listens to a conversation between my sister and me. Code switching, Turkish to English, English to Turkish, some Farsi. We are not interrupting; we are building the story together. It is a communal act. Why do you want to change that? How can you demand that we choose one language?
Pleasantview is marked by Mohammed’s sure voice and uncanny ability to embody both the collective and individual stories within a fictional Trinidadian town. Her linguistic experimentation is beautiful and brutal, and it is not an afterthought or adornment. It is raw, it makes you pay attention to each character’s movements, secrets, the food they eat, the objects they covet, the people they love, the dilemmas they want to escape.
Seven stories, with an equally devastating prologue and epilogue, offer glimpses into seven different yet fatally interlinked lives. It is impossible to separate that dramatic build-up—made manifest in a funeral procession through Miss Ivy, the town seer-woman—from the very artform of extempo; a lyrical, calypsonian war. Santimanitay, the mourners cry out, a derivation of the French, “sans humanite,” or “without mercy.” Without humanity.
We are introduced to the first character, Sunil, as he pretends to go for a smoke down the beach from his cell and claws his way across one of those straits to freedom. We meet Mr. Jagroop, a political candidate for the local elections, and his mistress, Consuela, the woman Sunil swims for.
Omar is the son of a Dutch scientist who abandoned him and his mother Josephine when Omar was six. He watches his landlord, Mr. Jagroop and his no-good son Mannie, and works to the bone at the local market.
Mr. H runs Textile Kingdom, hiding his affair with Gail from his wife. Gail cooks meals twice a week from an Italian recipe book. She dreams of keeping the baby.
Corporal Sharpe sits down to review notes, Mr. H in critical condition, gunshot wound to the abdomen. Miss Ivy, in her dark fur, the babysitter by day and seer-woman by night, arrives at the station for her statement.
Kimberley in Barbados, her tongue on the ripples of her roommate Rachel’s sculpted stomach. She remembers the leather backseat of her father, Mr. H’s car. Kimberley was in law school in Trinidad, and Rachel rescued her away.
Ruth and Declan get ready for the church service. Ruth was named Michelle, but that name had “hell” in the middle so she changed it. Church before Declan, three attempts and three miscarriages.
Declan’s sister Judith, and the father of her children, Junior, trying to make ends meet. Junior gets that visa to America. He finds a white woman. Miss Ivy again, getting ready for the wake, remembering the deceased, remembering the badness. Miss Ivy, finally speaking of that badness. Miss Ivy, who was there with Gail the moment she bled.
Each story leads to the other in unexpected ways. Each character is complicit not only in their story, but in someone else’s. I hesitated when moving between stories, so enveloped by the events that I was sure I had missed something important.
I held onto phrases: “Keep moving and stay ahead of this blasted, deceitful moon,” “It was so hard to tell music from noise, the good places from the bad places, the good guys from the bad guys,” and “The darker blue of the troubled waters as men frightened fish and herded them forward, while other men with blue-black glistening skin stood on the shore pulling seine, pulling together to ring in the net, pulling to a rhythm, pulling to the excited voices of children on the beach.”
I held onto the tangible: Consuela and her half-Bible, Gail’s garnet ring, Miss Ivy’s tarot cards, Kimberley’s rainbow ponies, Declan’s t-shirt, Junior’s pricing gun, Omar’s photo of his father and the leatherback turtles, the blue hundred-dollar notes.
I held onto the bodies: the crescendo of an angry slap, swimming through currents, holding a newborn, fingers on a trigger, bare skin, blood, rare laughter, bodies being sold.
Perhaps Mohammed’s intention was to omit the full resolutions we desperately want for these characters and these moments. We are, after all, witnessing everyone and everything at its most heightened. Each story is imbued with a distinct pathos, be it betrayal, hatred, jubilation, confusion, acceptance, or mercy. We are plucked from a cramped family room into a factory office, shoved into a political rally then a funeral procession, invited into a brotherhood and a foreigner’s bed.
The epilogue is set five years after the events of the novel. Those now familiar cycles will continue, the stories will repeat. But Mohammed gives back their language, cadence, rhythm. She shows us how to break those patterns and delve into the water.
Mina Hamedi grew up in Istanbul, Turkey and is of Turkish/Iranian descent. She works at the literary agency, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, where she is building her own list focusing on literary fiction and experimental non-fiction. She is writing a collection about her grandfather, the family company he founded 75 years ago, and the nature of legacies.
