I first learned about magical realism after completing the first draft of my debut novel. To my surprise, I discovered it has nothing to do with the kind of magic used in the Harry Potter series. Such magical characters, living in a world outside of our real world, relate to the fantasy genre. Rather, magical realism is an acceptable element of literary fiction used by award-winning authors like Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967); Isabel Allende (The House of Spirits, 1982), and Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987). The more recent experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, winner of the 2017 Booker Prize, also falls into this category of literary fiction.

These award-winning novels are all grounded in the real world. The magic refers to an extraordinary element in the story—from folklore, mythology, or the supernatural (such as ghosts or spirts)—described as a matter-of-fact occurrence. No explanation given. Some literary scholars have suggested that magical realism is a natural outcome of post-colonial writers seeking to make sense of two realities: the conquerors and the conquered. I don’t quite see it this way.

As I see it, during centuries of violent colonialism, the oppressed colonized peoples must’ve clung to their numerous ancestral gods and spirit beings, not only for fortitude but also to retain their humanity. In the final stanza of his long ten-stanza poem “I Come from the Nigger Yard,” from his 1954 poetry collection Poems of Resistance from British Guiana, Guyanese poet Martin Carter (1927-1997) writes:

I come from the nigger yard of yesterday
leaping from the oppressors’ hate
and the scorn of myself.
I come to the world with scars upon my soul
wounds on my body, fury in my hands
I turn to the histories of men and the lives of the peoples.
I examine the shower of sparks the wealth of the dreams.
I am pleased with the glories and sad with the sorrows
rich with the riches, poor with the loss.
From the nigger yard of yesterday I come with my burden.
To the world of to-morrow I turn with my strength.

The “nigger yard” of the protagonist Richard Cheong in my novel Under the Tamarind Tree, lies in his birthplace of Beterverwagting, a village on the East Coast Demerara, about ten miles from the capital of Georgetown. The name comes from the Dutch words “beter verwachting” which literally means “better expectation.” About 408 acres (165 hectares) in area, the land was owned by Baron Von Gronigen, said to be the last remaining Dutch plantation owner at the time.

After emancipation in 1834, the slaves in the area decided to buy the land. In 1840, after pooling their meager wages—given for safekeeping to one man who hid the Dutch guilders in a hole at the bottom of a tamarind tree—sixty-two ex-slaves purchased the land from the Baron. By then, the land had become unproductive. During Richard’s life, Beterverwagting was the feeder village for the adjacent sugar estate La Bonne Intention, then owned by a British company.

In the pre- and post-colonial world in which I grew up, the legacies of African slavery followed by indentureship still haunted us all. The ghosts of early white slave masters still roamed the land once occupied by cotton and sugar plantations. Even the giant silk cotton trees, known as the jumbie tree or Dutchman tree—are believed to house the spirits or jumbies of early Dutch colonizers. Those who dared to cut down the silk cotton tree in the captioned photo, to expand the road, lost their lives. Fear of the avenging Dutch spirit forced road builders to circumvent the tree.

During the years I lived in Guyana, I heard many first-hand stories from individuals who had seen a ghost or signs of its presence. When I worked at the University of Guyana Library (1979-1980), one of our librarians told us of her encounter with the ghost of a white man, dressed in the attire of the 1800s, outside the Ladies’ Restroom. A few students also reported similar encounters. We had no reason to doubt their stories. Imagine my trepidation whenever I had to check the two floors, filled with rows of bookshelves and large reading/working tables, at the end of the night shift.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of grandmother’s funeral. The woman who had raised Mother and her two younger siblings had passed away after years of some debilitating sickness. Whenever Mother took me on a visit, grandmother was always seated in a rocking chair in her dimly lit bedroom. In the days after her burial, Auntie Baby, Mother’s baby sister who was then living at her adopted parents’ house, told Mother of hearing grandmother’s rocking chair creak in the stillness of the night.

The familiar sound had unsettled Auntie Baby, a devout Catholic: “Why her spirit still around?”

Father, too, had his own encounters with those who had passed on. He told us kids about hearing someone call his name, while he lay reading in the drawing room at nighttime. Whoever had called out to him was nowhere in sight.

In my childhood innocence, I once asked our neighbor Auntie Katie why I couldn’t see spirits.

“Only children born with caul over their eyes can see spirits,” she told me.

While plotting my debut novel, Under the Tamarind Tree, I had no plans for including the ghost of the protagonist’s eight-year-old brother Eddie. When immersed in the creative process—”in the zone” as some writers call it—I’ve found that unexpected characters can appear from nowhere, demanding to be heard. I regard this occurrence as originating from my collective ancestral consciousness. I share below the excerpt from my novel during which Eddie’s ghost first makes his presence known to his older brother Richard.

The Setup:
At the end of an exhausting Easter Sunday picnic and kite flying, Richard reclined in his favorite lounge chair listening to a Frank Sinatra long-playing record. His wife Gloria and their three daughters have already gone to bed. His mind churned with his father-in-law’s latest interference in wanting a say in how he should spend his hard-earned lifetime savings.

Excerpt from the Unexpected Event (Chapter 9, p.44):

Frank Sinatra sang “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
Boysie.
So close to his ear he heard his childhood name whispered. It was Eddie’s voice. His eyes flashed open. He jerked upright, looked around. There was no one.
He lay back in the chair.
Is you Eddie? You haunting me now?
Is okay, Boysie, Eddie said. I watching over you.  

Eddie’s voice startled me. I knew then that Richard’s guilt for his brother’s death had to be resolved through this direct contact with Eddie’s ghost. I know such guilt. My six-year-old brother could’ve died after being hit by a car while in my care. At the time, I must’ve been ten years old. Richard was thirteen.

When I submitted this chapter to my writers’ critique group, comprised mainly of white Americans—only myself and another woman were non-white—one of the members objected to Eddie’s ghost.

“This is not the critique group for ghost stories and fantasies,” Tod told me.

“It’s superstition,” said another male member. “God is dead. Death is the end.”

“Let’s see how the story evolves,” said the female leader of our group.

I made no objections. Perhaps Richard’s story would reveal the world, of the colonizer and colonized, in which I had grown up.

Then, I knew nothing about magical realism and, it would seem, neither did the other members of our group. A month later, before the beginning of our next meeting, Tod approached me with an apology.

“If Charles Dickens could have three ghosts in A Christmas Carol, who am I to object about your ghost?”

Eddie’s ghost, inspired by my mischievous six-year-old brother who almost died in my care, also became an important character in providing backstory for Richard’s contentious relationship with his oldest sister and antagonist, Mildred Gomes.

In storytelling, our fictional characters or beings from the Other Side can also become real and authentic to our readers. Just go with the flow.