Margaret Laurence completed the first full draft of This Side Jordan, a highly topical novel about Africans and Europeans in the Gold Coast, in 1957 – the year the colony gained independence as Ghana – and it was published in 1960. Thus we look at it now through two dense and different screens of events: Laurence’s own later achievement in the cycle of Canadian novels that began with the publication of The Stone Angel in 1964; and the changes that have taken place in Africa since 1957 and have forced us to reconsider what Laurence herself described as “the predominantly optimistic outlook of many Africans and many western liberals in the late 1950s and early 1960s,” an outlook she saw reflected in her books on Africa.
This Side Jordan was the first work – and in many ways a tentative one – of a major literary career, and also a book that, if we see it as merely topical, deals with events long superseded. But, unlike many such apprentice books reflecting a lost past, it is a novel that continues to be read in its own right and not merely because of Laurence’s later and better-known books. And there are excellent reasons for its tenacious survival when so many novels inspired by the breakup of the British Empire are already forgotten. This Side Jordan remains important for two reasons: for its peculiar insights into the changes going on in the outlook of Africans during the 1950s and in their relation to the Europeans; and for its relationship to Laurence’s other writings.
This Side Jordan was Laurence’s first published book, though some of the short stories about Africa that were collected in The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963) had already appeared. With the latter collection, and The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963), arguably the best travel book ever written by a Canadian, it forms a closely knit group projecting the seven years of experience, in Somaliland and in Ghana – experience of strange places and of her own often unexpected reactions to them – that really started Laurence off as a writer. She had indeed been writing since her teens, but in Africa took place the happy conjunction of time to spare and an environment that from the beginning engaged her imagination. As she herself observed, “I was fortunate in going to Africa when I did – in my early twenties – because for some years I was so fascinated by the African scene that I was prevented from writing an autobiographical first novel.”
Laurence used her African experiences and first impressions so intensively and with such empathetic imagination that, by the time in the early 1960s when she turned to her mythical Canadian community of Manawaka, she no longer had the sense of a need to write about the continent that had once so commandingly preoccupied her, and none of the major characters in her Canadian novels is shown as having been anywhere near Africa. Yet, though the experience of Africa itself seems to have become encapsulated in Laurence’s memory, the links between This Side Jordan and the later novels are in a formal way very clear.
This Side Jordan not merely took the place of a thinly disguised fictional autobiography as its writer’s opening book. It also showed itself as something more than a mere apprentice’s exercise by the audacity with which it handled the vital conjunction in the mid-twentieth century of the African tribal consciousness and the European rational and individualized consciousness.
In appearance at least, This Side Jordan is a realistic third-person novel, a “well-made” book rather neatly arranged around an African couple, Nathaniel and Aya Amegbe, and an English couple, Johnnie and Miranda Kestoe. The place is the Gold Coast capital of Accra, and the time is the eve of independence; with a touch of rather obvious symbolism, Aya and Miranda have children in time to anticipate the birth of the new state.
The appearance of a deliberately integrated structure is deceptive, as the reader begins to anticipate when he finds his attention engaged by individual scenes – a market, a night club, a noisy religious procession – which are richly evoked and at times divert one’s attention from the flow of the narrative to admire the local colour on the way. And in fact, as Laurence herself has stated, she wrote the novel in a series of episodes, beginning with the final scenes, and only after a great deal of writing did she see the novel as a whole and realize that there was a natural order to it.
Laurence had already, it seems, adopted the practice that she developed in her later novels of conceiving the characters first and allowing the action to take its shape from their interaction. In fact, though the novel is told by an anonymous narrator, we actually see everything through the alternating viewpoints of the two leading male characters, and we observe the other people in the novel, however important they may be, through their eyes; the pattern of alternating chapters, devoted to African and European points of view respectively, is perhaps somewhat mechanical in effect, but nonetheless effective in a novel where the theme of opposing cultures is dominant and the issues, at that moment in colonial history, are clear and straightforward.
This Side Jordan departs from the orthodox third-person novel in developing the interior monologue in a way that anticipated Laurence’s richly varied experimental renderings of awareness and memory in the books of the Manawaka cycle. Later on, in an address, “Gadgetry or Growing: Form and Voice in the Novel” (1969), Laurence expressed doubts about the effectiveness of what she had done in This Side Jordan.
As far as voice is concerned, I think now that the novel contains too much of Nathaniel’s inner monologues. I actually wonder how I ever had the nerve to attempt to go into the mind of an African man, and I suppose if I’d really known how difficult was the job I was attempting, I would never have tried it. I am not at all sorry I tried it, and in fact I believe from various comments made by African reviewers that at least some parts of the African chapters have a certain authenticity. But not, perhaps, as much as I once believed.
The African chapters not only have authenticity. They carry conviction in a surprising way when one considers that Laurence lived only five years in Ghana, and, while she was there, mingled mainly with Africans who were already largely Europeanized. The crucial passages in these interior monologues are those in which Nathaniel’s tribal myths – those of his ancestors and his own early childhood – clash with the Christian myths and values imposed on him from the time he went to mission school as a small boy. In this sense Nathaniel is the type of the educated African at the end of the colonial era in the late 1950s.
What is especially interesting is that Laurence does not attempt to treat tribal beliefs as rationally comprehensible concepts; rather she materializes them as visions and voices in what seems to be a bicameral mind in the process of detachment from the world of myth.
One can get a sense of Laurence’s intuitive originality by reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a controversial book in which Julian Jaynes traces the rise of rationality in the ancient world through the breakdown of the myth-making mentality, a change he attributes to the influence of massive external catastrophes impinging on ancient myth-dominated cultures. But Jaynes did not publish his book until 1978. Laurence was already putting forward similar ideas two decades before him in her portrayal of Nathaniel Amegbe struggling with the voices of myth and custom that echo in his mind as he makes his way through a world irrevocably changing under the influence of colonialism and its aftermath.
This Side Jordan is a brilliant imaginative grasping of what must indeed have been going on in terms of changing awareness in the minds of many Africans of this period. In terms of Laurence’s work as a whole, it takes on importance as the first of her explorations of the various uses of the interior monologue as a means of giving fictional form to the way our minds work as they mingle memory and present perception in the great tapestry of the retrospective consciousness.
This Side Jordan was the best of a number of novels published during the 1960s by Canadians who had lived and served in West Africa, and it can still be read as a valuable fictional document of the times. But, more than that, Laurence carried out the unusual feat of writing a vividly topical novel that would turn, as time went on, into what seems now a valid work of historical fiction. This, I think, is because she wrote about people – both Europeans and Africans – who remembered the past vividly and lived the present fully, but who also looked to the future that has been unfolding in Africa since the book’s publication. Some of them – mainly Africans – looked to the future with a naive optimism, and some were still too trapped in tradition to look anywhere but into the past; others, particularly the older European merchants, anticipated with dread the collapse of the paternalistic establishment they had created. Yet others, less naive, saw the future in more realistic terms, like the ruthlessly climbing young Englishman, Johnnie Kestoe, who sees in the rapidly changing course of events the setting for his own career, and Victor Edusei, the realistic and English-educated African journalist, who utters to Nathaniel a prophecy in which we see Laurence in the late 1950s foreseeing with remarkable accuracy the course that events in Ghana and so many other of the liberated African states would take once these countries gained their independence.
You put your faith in Ghana, don’t you? The new life. Well, that’s fine, boy. That’s fine for you. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s a dead body lying unburied. You wait until after Independence. You’ll see such oppression as you never believed possible. Only of course it’ll be all right then – it’ll be black men oppressing black men, and who could object to that? There’ll be your Free-Dom for you – the right to be enslaved by your own kind.
Of course one does not count political foresight among the necessary virtues of a novelist. But, taken with Laurence’s evident understanding of the role of myth and custom in primitive societies, its presence does indicate the kind of many-sided sensitivity to the total nature of a community that makes for successful social realist fiction. In this and other ways. This Side Jordan is not only the first chronologically of Laurence’s novels but also a book that, despite all the vast differences in setting and action, anticipated almost all that Laurence eventually achieved in her Manawaka novels.