The Tomorrow-Tamer (30 page)

In a typically honest and direct manner, Laurence was admitting how difficult it was for the outsider, the “stranger,” to accomplish what she had tried to do, and admitting how limited she felt her success had been. While stopping short of a disavowal of the African books and what they contained, she suggested that their real importance lay in the lessons she had learned writing them.

I had decided I could never get deeply enough inside the minds of African people–or, at least, I'd gone as far as I personally could as a non-African–and had a very strong desire to go back and write about people from my own background, people whose idiom I knew and whose concepts were familiar to me.

Yet
The Tomorrow-Tamer
deserves better than this. It is more than a literary signpost which set Laurence's feet firmly on the road home to Manawaka, and more than a piece of reporting, a record of Africa and Africans at a decisive moment in their history. No, these stories have lasted because they are
profound and moving meditations upon the words “change” and “stranger,” and because they are a living testament to Laurence's gift for embodying in the flesh of her characters such poignant abstractions.

The word
stranger
obviously awakened in Laurence strong feelings. A passage from Exodus, “Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt,” is quoted in “The Rain Child”–a verse which years later she returned to for the title of her collection of essays,
Heart of a Stranger
, in which she reflected,

for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to gain entrance to their minds and feelings, to respect them for themselves as human individuals, and to portray them as truly as we can. The whole process of fiction is a mysterious one, and a writer, however experienced, remains in some ways a perpetual amateur, or perhaps a perpetual traveller, an explorer of those inner territories, those strange lands of the heart and spirit.

The whole cast of “The Rain Child” is, for instance, a cast of strangers. There are the obvious ones, foreigners such as Hilda Povey, futilely trying to coax an English rosebush into bloom in an inhospitable environment, while her compatriot, Violet Nedden, doubly exiled because she recognizes that in Africa she is an alien teaching an “alien speech,” finds herself dreading retirement in a Britain which has, in the years of exile, become nothing more to her than an “island of grey rain.” Then there are the “outcast children.” Yindo the garden
boy, a Dagomba from the northern desert, forced to speak a hesitant pidgin because no one understands his language. Ayesha, the former child prostitute, returned from Lagos because someone there recognized her speech as Twi. Finally, Ruth Quansah, raised and educated in Britain, an English girl with a black skin, ignorant of the language and customs of her homeland, rejected by her African classmates and, eventually, by her English friend, David Mackie, who has taken up the task of “showing Africa to her as she wanted to be shown it–from the outside.” Her father, Dr. Quansah, knows his daughter's pain because he is suffering it too. As he confesses to Violet Nedden, “I still find most Europeans here as difficult to deal with as I ever did. And yet–I seem to have lost touch with my own people, too.”

This isolation, this losing touch, this failure to connect, for Laurence crystallizes the essence of the stranger. Knowing the frustration of her own struggle to enter fully the minds of her own characters, to
connect
with them, and through them to establish a connection with her readers, gave Laurence insight and sympathy for the alienated. She knew, as every writer does, how hard-won and desperately fragile all such ties are.

In
The Tomorrow-Tamer
change is seen as a threat to precarious ties of every kind. Any alteration in the equation necessarily produces an alteration in the result, and the result most often is an individual cast adrift in a cold and comfortless universe. This is most likely to be the plight of the more vulnerable African, but it is a fate which can befall the European too. The European narrator of “The Drummer of All the World,” who knew Twi better than he did English at the age of six, who was suckled by an African nurse, who learned all the proverbs and parables of Ghana, and, when his
missionary mother lay sick, who prayed to the Ghanaian gods, returns after an education in England to find a country transformed by the rush to independence. “The old Africa was dying, and I felt suddenly rootless, a stranger in the only land I could call home,” he laments.

Political change is a destroyer and orphan-maker, but an even greater danger is religious change. Among Canadian writers working in the last half of the twentieth century, Laurence was an anomaly–she took religion seriously, and nowhere in her fiction is this seriousness more evident than it is in
The Tomorrow-Tamer
, a god-driven and god-haunted book. Will Kittredge, trying to explain to his friend Danso why the missionary, Brother Lemon, does not want to live in the middle of an African shanty town, says that the people there are a threat to Brother Lemon and everything he is. But, as Danso points out, that only makes it even. In this world of shades and omnipresent gods, a loss of faith means a rending of the most fundamental and meaningful connections, not only a separation from God, but a psychological separation from the community of all believers. Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “If you have no ties to either mankind or to God, then you
are
an alien.”

The link between change, strangerhood, and loss of faith is nowhere more clearly drawn than in the title story of the collection. There the arrival of strangers (European engineers and administrators, urban African workers) to construct a bridge near a small secluded village has dire results. At each step in the construction the villagers are certain that the gods will exact a terrible punishment for the sacrileges committed. When their holy grove is destroyed by earth-moving equipment they are left utterly bewildered.

So the grove was lost, and although the pleas were made to gods and grandsires, the village felt lost, too, depleted and vulnerable. But the retribution did not come. Owura did not rise. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

In their bewilderment, there are always those who will seek new allegiances, new meanings, new spiritual links. Kofi, a young villager chosen to work on the bridge, attempts to interpret the modern steel miracle in the light of what he has been taught by the fetish priests and the elders. In a discussion with the other villagers, Kofi declares that there is something in the bridge, something as strong as the old god Owura. He goes further and decides that

The other bridgemen might go, might desert, might falter, but he would not falter. He would tend the bridge as long as he lived. He would be its priest.

Having taken this leap into apostasy, he ventures an even more daring one. Standing high on the exposed steel of the bridge he is granted another vision. When he sees for the first time the new road that connects his village to the outside world, the desire to be the priest of the bridge withers inside him. A more secular wish replaces it, a wish to leave the village, rejoin the bridgemen, and continue the work of building bridges. Suddenly he is filled with a sense of his own power.

Exultant, he wanted to shout aloud his own name and his praises. There was nothing he could not do. Slowly, deliberately, he pulled himself up until he was standing
there on the steel, high above the forest and the river. He was above even the bridge itself. And above him, there was only the sky.

It is as if Kofi has, in a matter of months, compressed a journey which took Europe centuries to complete. In that moment of self-exultation, he becomes, psychologically, a European. Significantly, it is also the moment of his death, a death interpreted by the other villagers according to the old religion. The bridge sacrifices its priest to appease the river god.

In the imaginations of characters such as Kofi, or Adamo in “The Voices of Adamo,” in their struggle to make sense of a perplexing, ever-changing world, we can find analogies with their creator's own struggle to write truthfully and honestly. In their attempts to understand a foreign civilization they mirror Laurence's own attempts to enter the mind of the fictional “other.” The Kofis, the Dansos, the Adamos, the Tettehs, are doubtless driven to do this through necessity, but upon reflection we may conclude that so are we.

Change makes strangers of us all.
The Tomorrow-Tamer
is, after all, ironically titled. There is no taming tomorrow. Over two thousand years ago Heraclitus stated, “Everything flows and nothing stays.” More than most writers, Laurence felt this truth in her very bones, and it was to the image of the Heraclitean river that she turned for the beginning of
The Diviners
, the last of her novels.

The river flowed both ways. The current moved from north to south, but the wind usually came from the south, rippling the bronze-green water in the opposite direction. This apparently impossible contradiction,
made apparent and possible, still fascinated Morag, even after the years of river-watching.

Margaret Laurence knew that life is like the river, fluctuation and contradiction. But she wished to remind us that the exigencies of a world in flux do not exempt us from a simple human duty, the duty to imagine and re-imagine, to strive with compassion to plumb the hearts of our fellow strangers. This, more than anything else, is what
The Tomorrow-Tamer
is about.

 

BY MARGARET LAURENCE

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963)

Dance on the Earth (1989)

 

ESSAYS

Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists

and Novelists 1952–1966 (1968)

Heart of a Stranger (1976)

 

FICTION

This Side Jordan (1960)

The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963)

The Stone Angel (1964)

A Jest of God (1966)

The Fire-Dwellers (1969)

A Bird in the House (1970)

The Diviners (1974)

 

FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

Jason's Quest (1970)

Six Darn Cows (1979)

The Olden Days Coat (1979)

The Christmas Birthday Story (1980)

 

LETTERS

Margaret Laurence–Al Purdy: A Friendship in Letters

[ed. John Lennox] (1993)

 

TRANSLATIONS

A Tree for Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose (1954)

 

THE AUTHOR

MARGARET LAURENCE
was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, in 1926. Upon graduation from Winnipeg's United College in 1947, she took a job as a reporter for the
Winnipeg Citizen
.

From 1950 until 1957 Laurence lived in Africa, the first two years in Somalia, the next five in Ghana, where her husband, a civil engineer, was working. She translated Somali poetry and prose during this time, and began her career as a fiction writer with stories set in Africa.

When Laurence returned to Canada in 1957, she settled in Vancouver, where she devoted herself to fiction with a Ghanaian setting: in her first novel,
This Side Jordan
, and in her first collection of short fiction,
The Tomorrow-Tamer
. Her two years in Somalia were the subject of her memoir,
The Prophet's Camel Bell
.

Separating from her husband in 1962, Laurence moved to England, which became her home for a decade, the time she devoted to the creation of five books about the fictional town of Manawaka, patterned after her birthplace, and its people:
The Stone Angel
,
A Jest of God
,
The Fire-Dwellers
,
A Bird in the House
, and
The Diviners
.

Laurence settled in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1974. She complemented her fiction with essays, book reviews, and four children's books. Her many honours include two Governor General's Awards for Fiction and more than a dozen honorary degrees.

Margaret Laurence died in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1987.

 

“The Drummer of All the World,” copyright © 1956 by Margaret Laurence; “The Perfume Sea,” copyright © Macmillan and Co. Ltd 1960; “The Merchant of Heaven,” copyright © 1959 by Margaret Laurence; “The Tomorrow-Tamer,” copyright © 1961 by Margaret Laurence; “The Rain Child,” copyright © Macmillan and Co. Ltd 1962; “Godman's Master,” copyright © 1960 by Margaret Laurence; “The Pure Diamond Man,” copyright © 1963 by Margaret Laurence; “The Voices of Adamo,” copyright © 1962, The Curtis Publishing Company; “A Gourdful of Glory,” copyright © 1960 by Margaret Laurence.

Paperback edition copyright © 1970 by Margaret Laurence
Afterword copyright © 1993 by Guy Vanderhaeghe

First New Canadian Library edition 1993.
This New Canadian Library edition 2008.

First published in 1963 by Macmillan & Co. Ltd.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher–or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency–is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Laurence, Margaret, 1926-1987

The tomorrow-tamer / Margaret Laurence; with an afterword by Guy Vanderhaeghe.

(New Canadian library)
Originally published: 1963.
e
ISBN
: 978-0-7710-4630-8

I. Title. II. Series.

PS
8523.
A
86
T
6 2008    
C
813'.54    
C
2007-906235-0