At an ever-increasing rate, coloured people of all parts of the world (Asia, Africa, America) are now writing and publishing novels fully equal to the rest of modern literature. Here J. C. Sturm describes some of their most recent successes.

‘A Brighter Sun’—Samuel Selvon.
Allan Wingate. 1952.

‘In Chaguanas, a sugar-cane district halfway down the western coast of the island, the biggest thing to happen, bigger even than the war, was Tiger's wedding’. The island is Trinidad, and Tiger is an Indian boy of sixteen about to marry Urmilla, a girl no older than himself, whom he has never seen. They set up house in a market-gardening district four miles from the capital Port of Spain, and Tiger began his struggle to become a man. He rented land, planted crops, sold vegetables and saved money. He learned to smoke and drink rum and to entertain visitors. Then because of his growing discontent and vague ambitions he learned to read and write and to find his way about the big city. When the Americans came and planned a new highway through his property he gave his garden up without a word and signed on gladly as a labourer, for wasn't this something big, something important to the whole island, something that would last?

Tiger and Urmilla kept to themselves and made a few friends in the village. There were Rita and Joe, the negro couple who lived next door, and Tall Boy, the Chinese shopkeeper, and Sookdeo, the old Indian who died when the Americans took his garden, and Boysie, the young Indian who was saving up to go away.

Indian, Negro, Chinese—three groups of people, with different backgrounds, outlooks, customs, even different food. And Samuel Selvon, himself an Indian born in Trinidad thirty-two years ago, knows and understands them all. His book is not only a moving story of a young couple's struggle to make the best of a poor lot, but also a sharp and detailed picture, beautifully written, of the mixed population that is Trinidad.

‘Nectar in a Sieve’—Kamala Markandaya. Putnam. 1954.

Miss Markandaya, a young Indian journalist and writer, was born in Southern India, and travelled extensively in Europe as well as her own country before going to England. This is her first book.

Rukmani leaves her parents to marry a farmer in a distant village. The young couple make their home and rear a family in a two-roomed mud hut, and grow rice and vegetables on rented land. When the harvest is good there is enough food for themselves and the children and the rent collector, and perhaps a little money for something special like the Festival of the Lights. But when the rains come too soon or do not come at all, and the paddy will not grow, only the strongest or the most unscrupulous survive. A tannery is opened in the village. It is noisy and smelly and bad for those who work in it. It takes the market place, then the young people, even the land of the small farmers. Rukmani and her husband go to the city, but life is no easier there among the beggars in the temple or the workers in the stone quarry, and they are too old to adapt themselves to new hardships.

This story and the way it is told is strikingly similar to the West Indian novel, but where Samuel Selvon writes of poverty and hard work and lack of education and opportunity, Miss Markandaya shows us starvation, and work without hope (like nectar in a sieve), and people living without things we consider the barest necessities of life. She is not concerned with the interactions between different racial groups, but with the sole inheritance of the small Indian farmer—the problem of how to keep alive.

‘Go Tell It On the Mountain’—James Baldwin. Michael Joseph. 1954.

James Baldwin, the son of a Harlem clergyman, was born in New York city in 1924. He became a

preacher when he was fourteen, but gave it up three years later, and is now living in France, at work on his second novel. I doubt if anyone reading this book could pick it to be the author's first novel. Mr Baldwin knows exactly what he wants to say, and says it powerfully, sometimes shockingly, using a tricky method of flashbacks into the pasts of his main characters with complete success.

It is the story of John Grimes, a young Harlem negro approaching manhood, his family, and the small but fanatical religious sect to which they belong. John's father, a man bent on erasing a violent youth with an equally violent religious faith, is head deacon in the church. John's mother, a young widow who married again more for security than for love, is nearly always late for the morning service. John's aunt Florence takes her sickness to the altar, and remembers only the fear and oppression and cruelty of the Deep South where she was brought up. And Roy, John's younger brother and the last light in his father's despairing heart, is more interested in the roaring city streets than in saying his prayers. John himself fights a losing battle against his father's domination and the public religious conversion that is expected of him.

Although Mr Baldwin has much to say about a certain kind of religious experience, it is not really the main theme of his book. Nor is the colour-bar, though this plays a large part in some of the characters' lives. He is primarily concerned with the emotional life of his own people: the range and depth and strength of the feelings that always lie behind the face of their everyday living.

‘Blanket Boy's Moon’—Peter Lanham, based on an original story by A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, Chieftain of Basutaland. Collins. 1953.

Truth is sometimes worse than fiction, and from one point of view the South African writer is fortunate: his raw material is so obvious and ready to hand (twenty-four hours in Sophiatown would fill a book), but any worth-while novel about social conditions must contain much more than shock tactics or purely descriptive writing, no matter how good it is. The author should try to give the bewildered or incredulous reader some insight into the problems that lie behind his story, and some understanding of why his characters, black, white or coloured, act and feel as they do. This is the task that Mr Lanham, with the help of A. S. Mopeli-Paulus, has set himself in writing the life-story of a young man of the Basotho people.

Monare leaves his wife and family in Basutoland to seek his fortune in Johannesburg, the ‘City of Gold’, and having found a small measure of it, returns home only to become involved in a ritual murder. Fear and remorse force him to flee to