February 2004Issue 364



Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack

First published in 1980, Austin Clarke’s memoir of his education in 1940s Barbados is, on the surface, an uncomplicated and affable tale of a colonial boyhood. But captured in its pages – and typified by that splendid title – is a laser-sharp portrait of the stratifications and petty tyrannies of the colonial system and the daily idiocies brought about by imposing a structure of English rules and attitudes on a small Caribbean island.

Clarke’s book opens with his admission, as a scholarship boy, into the prestigious Combermere School, an establishment which prepared boys for careers in the Civil Service or the Law with a strict regime of Latin and French, Pythagoras’ theorem and flogging. In his wonderfully vivid account of wartime Barbados, Clarke exposed the faultlines of colonial Bajan life. Black and white, shortage and abundance, the poor in their shacks and the Governor in his mansion; the tensions of the imperial system are ever-present. Barbados is a society pulled between its imperial ties and the lure of consumerist ‘Amurca’.

The book ends with the boys sitting the Senior Cambridge Overseas Examination, a terrifying ordeal that determined a boy’s life: sending him forward into a lucrative job or pitching him back into the poverty of his village. Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack is packed with sharply observed characters and written with a joyous and sprightly conversational rhythm. It is both a wry and perceptive critique of the colonial system and a sharply observed account of childhood.

Signal Books Ltd, 36 Minster Road, Oxford, OX4 1LY, England. Ian Randle Publishers, 11 Cunningham Avenue, Box 686, Kingston 6, Jamaica.

Product information
by Austin Clarke
Star rating
***
Publisher
Signal Books/Ian Randle Publishers
Product number
ISBN 1 902669 70 3/ 976 637 108 3




Language Tools
Powered by Ultralingua

Join over 30,000 people just like you. Get e-mail updates about new content, action alerts, contests, and more!

other articles
FROM THIS ISSUE

You get proud by practising
A poem by Laura Hershey, poet and disability activist.

Strong & smart
Teacher Chris Sarra is turning upside-down ideas about what Aboriginal kids can and can’t do.

I was born white
Mark Minchinton undertakes a journey back to his – and his country’s – Aboriginal roots.

Equality Watch: Race & Ethnicity

Betrayal
Two years after the liberation of Afghanistan, are its women really free? Report from Mariam Rawi.

recently
IN THIS COLUMN

Natural Selection
Szperling's short, punchy novel paints a vivid pen-portrait of the savage and amoral nature of this stratum of Argentinean society.

Thursday Night Widows
Nominally a thriller, Thursday Night Widows is less concerned with the 'whodunnit' aspects of plotting than with a psychological dissection of a social class obsessed with bickering and petty jealousies as the pillars of their world dissolve.

2666
It takes a singular talent to make a book of 1,000 pages that is as hard to put down as it is to pick up. Despite its size, 2666 retains the agility of a thriller.

Working
A graphic adaptation of the book by Studs Terkel by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle.

Murder In The Name Of Honour
A grim but compelling reading – a fitting testament to all the women killed who had sex outside marriage.






Voices from the margins:

Multimedia: video, podcasts, and more.


Subscribe to NI now!