The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (66 page)

I make no claim to greatness, or even to be capable of it. But I do believe I have a superior capacity for facing truth, though even this I can claim no credit for. For it is the fear of death which makes men reluctant, or incapable of seeing the universe for what it is. And that is one fear I have never truly had to confront.

I did not grieve when Emily died. I had known her in two roles, as wife and as grandmother. She had lived a long life and, for the most part, a happy one. No human can ask for more. The pain I felt was for myself, not for her.

It was harder on me when Adaku passed away last year. She had been ailing for some time – ‘Just age,' the doctors said – and she died on January 1, 2000: my forty-ninth birthday. She was only sixty-seven, and I think that the physical trauma of birthing me deprived her of some extra years. I felt more guilty about that than the other, far worse things I had deliberately done in other lives. She was a loving mother, and even on her deathbed her concern was for me. ‘You will win this time,' were her last words.

Death is inevitable. Even I can finally die. I doubt that my essence, whatever it may be, would survive a nuclear blast; besides, I may only be an extremely long-lived creature, not an immortal one. I have this conviction, though, that the Shadowman is far, far older than me. In my dreams, I sometimes see him standing like a monolith on the ancient African savanna, dressed in his tunic and sandals and armbands, worshipped by creatures who would one day be called
homo sapiens
. Unlike my previous lives, I have never once seen him in this life. I do not know if that bodes ill or well.

I will try my best not to let him kill me. Yet it doesn't matter if he does. I have come to realize that, contrary to popular belief, it is death which gives life meaning. Even the most intelligent people do not realize this, perhaps because the fear of death suspends all rational thought. Keith Smith, Trinidad's most popular writer, once wrote the following in one of his newspaper columns: “The negative perspective is that when yuh dead yuh done, a perspective that every Catholic bone in me finds horrendous because, if true, what is the point? We may as well not have come.”

But consider the following fundamental questions: What is the purpose of life? What caused the universe and why? How can you tell which beliefs are true? How can you tell what is good? All of them are related in two ways: they all deal with the meaning of existence, and they are all tautologies.

In
The Society of Mind
, Artificial Intelligence founder Marvin Minsky points out that such questions are impossible to answer because they are all circular. For this reason, he writes, ‘All human cultures evolve institutions of law, religion and philosophy [which] adopt specific answers to circular questions and establish authority schemes to indoctrinate people with those beliefs. One might complain that such establishments substitute dogma for reason and truth. But in exchange they spare whole populations from wasting time on fruitless reason loops.'

I agree with every statement of Minsky's, except the last one. Minsky, in asserting that given answers save people intellectual agony, unconsciously assumes that because he is intellectually curious everyone else is, too. It is true that ideologies are, and always have been, immensely popular. It is also true that ideologies shape our world. Religions are the favourite ideological systems, closely followed by absolute political creeds. But even secular people adopt religious creeds, in the sense of ultimate values. Literary critics, for example, often base their opinions on assumptions of absolute aesthetic principles. And many people look to science for ultimate truths.

But people do not turn to ideologies for meaning, but for the comfort of certainties. Once they adopt the ideology's beliefs, however, they conflate certainty with meaning. As long as ideology remains separate from action, not much harm is done by this. But, as I have pointed out, most of the evil in this world has been caused by persons who are absolutely sure of their beliefs.

This is one reason why it is neither courageous nor noble to seek meaning through religion. Also, the truly moral person does not act in expectation of reward or punishment. The Christian belief that suffering brings people closer to God, the Hindu belief that karma explains misfortune, and the Muslim belief that Allah determines everything – all these are only ways for people to explain evil and/or weasel out of their moral responsibility to do something about it. Verne Guerin, a minor but talented Trinidadian writer, sums up the atheistic arguments of centuries of philosophers with admirable succinctness: “If there is Someone up there, He's doing a terrible job. But if there's no one up there, we not doing too badly.”

The other ideologies are equally useless. Absolute political creeds like Communism appeal to those who want power, not meaning. Science offers only empirical evidence, the ultimate meaning of the information lying outside its purview.

The hard truth is, only we can create meaning in our lives. But we are reluctant to do so, because that would mean self-responsibility, with all the hard work that comes with self-responsibility. It is much easier to search for answers outside ourselves. But that way will always be unfulfilling, and will always cause much misery. In all my lives, real meaning has come from the so-called ordinary things: family, friends, children, fun, and work. And yet, consciously, most people would probably not describe these things as making their existence truly meaningful. Perhaps part of our problem is that we are not humble enough to accept that our ordinariness is meaningful, and not conceited enough to realize that we are gods who create our own meaning.

And to anyone who wonders why they should have bothered coming, I would recommend these words from biologist Richard Dawkins's
Unweaving the Rainbow
: ‘We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.'

It is quiet outside. The rain has stopped and the frogs are singing. He is near. I am not afraid. I have lived ten lives. I have known great suffering and I have known great joy. In the end, it is only the fact of living that matters.

I did try to locate him. His books were no help. They had been self-published, and the printer had dealt only with a representative, who had herself dealt only with a lawyer who had transacted all business by correspondence.

No one at the university had ever heard of him. His address, as I said, was false. The phone number he had given me was registered to a business named ‘Incarnations Unlimited'. That was also the name on the cheques he had paid me with. If I had been called upon to prove Adam Avatar had ever existed, I could not have done so.

In a sense, therefore, publishing this account cannot betray any confidence, professional or otherwise.

I do, however, have one other reason for deciding to do so. As Adam correctly pointed out, my own beliefs are no more amenable to argument than were his. So I do acknowledge the possibility that I am, in a technical sense, deluded. Since this possibility exists, I have a duty to my patient.

If everything Adam Avatar wrote is true, then one of two things happened when he met the Shadowman on New Year's night. He defeated him, or the body he inhabited was killed. In the former case, he would have wanted this document to be published. That, I now know, is why he wrote it.

In the latter event, I still have a responsibility to publish his account. For it may be that twenty, thirty years from now, some young, green-eyed person will read it and, as they do, experience a strange recognition.

And, perhaps, begin to remember.

The End

Kevin Baldeosingh was born in 1963 in Trinidad. He was educated at the University of the West Indies, where he also got a BA. He is a novelist and newspaper columnist. He writes two weekly newspaper columns: a satirical column in the
Weekend Independent
and a slightly sarcastic one for the
Trinidad Express
.

In twenty years as a professional writer he has written over 2,000 newspaper articles, over 30 periodical articles and papers, 20-plus short stories, and three novels:
The Autobiography of Paras P
(1996),
Virgin's Triangle
(1997) and
Adam Avatar
. In 2007, his one-act play,
The Comedian
, was one of the four winning plays in the National Drama Association playwriting contest. He was also one of 15 prizewinning finalists in a 2007 international essay competition, organized by US-based “TRACE International” (a non-profit organization that develops and promotes anti-bribery programs), on official corruption and how to prevent it.

He is a co-founder and chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago Humanist Association, the only organization of its kind in the Anglophone Caribbean. He is also vice-chair for ASPIRE (Advocates for Safe Parenthood: Improving Reproductive Equity), a lobby group seeking clarification and updating of Trinidad and Tobago's laws on abortion, with the aim of reducing the health risks and maternal mortality associated with unsafe illegal abortions. He was regional Chairperson for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada/Caribbean) for 2000 and 2001.

ISBN: 9781845230753; pp. 232; pub. 2009

Raymond Ramcharitar's vision is rooted in Trinidad, but as a globalised island with permeable borders, frequent birds of passage, and outposts in New York and London. One of the collection's outstanding qualities is that it is both utterly contemporary and written with a profound and disturbed sense of the history that shapes the island. As befits fiction from the home of carnival and mas', it is a collection much concerned with the flesh – often in transgressive forms as if characters are driven to test their boundaries – and with the capacity of its characters to reinvent themselves in manifold, and sometimes outrageous disguises. One of the masks is race, and the stories are acerbically honest about the way tribal loyalties distort human relations. Its tone ranges from the lyric – Trinidad as an island of arresting beauty – to a seaminess of the most grungy kind. It has an ambition that challenges a novel such as V.S. Naipaul's
The Mimic Men
, but is written with the anger and the compassion of a writer for whom the island still means everything. In the novella, “Froude's Arrow”, Ramcharitar has written a profound fiction that tells us where the Caribbean currently is in juxtaposing the deep, still to be answered questions about island existence (the fragmentations wrought by history, the challenges of smallness in the global market, race and class divides) and scrabbling for survival, fame and fortune.

ISBN: 9781845231880; pp. 168; pub. 2011

These stories present, in writing that is both meticulous and poetic, a Caribbean world of unparalleled natural beauty, and societies that seethe on the edge of chaos, where crime encompasses both the rulers and the ruled, and where representatives of the state are as out of control as the youth Cynthia witnesses hacking off the hand of an old woman in a casual robbery. We enter this world through the perceptions of both those struggling for survival at the base of society and members of the old elite facing the consequences of past privilege in the reality of present insecurity. The stories stare hard into the abyss, at times taking us to hallucinatory places where nothing is certain. What is certain is the energy and precision in the stories' subtle edge of moral rigour in exploring the inner lives of those who fail to see that their “minor” deceits and evasions contribute to the “fire in the city”. In such sympathetically drawn characters as Nello, the former car-thief now trying to do the right thing, or the memorably eccentric Dr Edric Traboulay with his intimate relationship to the natural world, we are offered glimpses of possibility. This is fiction that calls a society to see itself clearly, though about the revelatory power of writing the author is modestly ambivalent, as the powerful title story so shockingly reveals.

‘The sense of place is fabulous, interweaving vistas of landscape and seascape, local fauna and flora, architecture, politics, inhabitants, history… all of which creates an atmosphere of longing and despair – despair at the impossibility of ever achieving what is longed for… The stories play nicely with the disjunction between place as redemptive and place as punitive/purgatorial. The sense of foreboding that pervades all of the stories is impelled by this tension… the work is “postcolonial” in the very best sense of that critical label.'

Lois Parkinson Zamora

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