Alicia Conroy Revisits “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival”
Alicia L. Conroy writes and teaches in Minneapolis. She’s just published her first short story collection, Lives of Mapmakers, with Carnegie Mellon University Press. Later this summer, Minneapolis readers can hear her read with Patti Frazee at The Loft Literary Center (July 26); later she’ll read with Melissa Fraterrigo at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City (July 28).
How to choose between so many old friends? My life as reader and writer would be so much poorer without “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, “The Cask of Amontillado” by Poe, “Wingless” by Jamaica Kincaid, or “In the American Society” by Gish Jen, to name very different tales. Since those writers have had their due, I’m going with “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival” by Pauline Melville. I’ve been a big fan of Melville since 1999, when I read her second story collection, The Migration of Ghosts. Perhaps because she writes in Britain, Melville, who draws on her British and Guyanese heritage in her work, isn’t well known in the U.S.
One of the things I love about Melville’s stories is the deft and moving way she handles the clash of cultures; her characters are part of a broad and complex canvas. Melville is a precise jeweler of concise but evocative language. Most of the stories in The Migration of Ghosts range from serious to somber, but “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival” engulfs me in its world and makes me laugh out loud. I want to keep reading sentences to anyone around me.
The story sets things in motion with the first sentence: “The shop isn’t built that would sell a leotard Mrs da Silva’s size.” The occasion requiring such garb is London’s Carnival parades, in which competing teams, made up mostly of West Indian immigrants, vie for costume and dance prizes. The story starts on Carnival day with amply-sized widow Mrs da Silva, longtime matriarch of the Rebel War Band, on her way “to be garbed in a giant shimmering copper tent.” There’s a very economical backstory about Mrs da Silva’s recent romantic disappointment, which the Carnival season, “the beginning and end of the year for her,” begins to ease. Armed with this context, we’re off to a topsy-turvy day at the parades.
30 June 2006 | selling shorts |
