"He resented whiteness as a reference point: sometimes he tried to replace it with greed, the drive to control others, and tribalism, but those terms always gave way to whiteness and blackness, and he wondered when he would stop being a shadow of England and a person in his own right."p.159

I buddy read 'Spirits in the Dark' with a friend from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and one of the first things she said about the novel in our discussion was that there is no Isabella Island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It made me wonder why author H. Nigel Thomas chose to fictionalize the setting of the plot, but not any other location referenced in the text (e.g. 'America', 'England,' etc. are all written about by name). I can only assume it's to create the opportunity for generalization, which would only make if the assumed/intended audience was a non-Vincentian one.

Unlike Barbadian author George Lamming's 'In the Castle of My Skin' (referenced by name in 'Spirits in the Dark' as a contentious book read by a primarily white class in St. Vincent that causes trouble among the students when the Black minority of the class support Lamming's representation of a white plantation owner), 'Spirits in the Dark' comes across as having been written for a white audience.

Much of the focus of the protagonist, Jerome's, inner turmoil centers around his identity as an educated Black man struggling to thrive in a recently independent former British colony. Through this lens we see how he is forced to be twice as good as his white classmates only to get half as much (or less). Unlike his white classmates, he isn't able to cut up because while they would risk (at worst) a slap on the wrist if caught, he risks expulsion.

The existence of this sort of caste system is something his white friend and classmate, Peter, tries to empathize with, but cannot. And despite his earnest attempts to express how (what we would now call) 'woke' he is, how much he understands the situation -- perhaps even better than Jerome does himself-- Jerome never rewards him by letting him off the hook as 'one of the good ones' and in fact grows increasingly irritated with him, especially after an exchange during which Peter accuses Jerome of giving him and the other white students 'the cold shoulder.'

It was this exchange that made me suspect the intended audience of 'Spirits in the Dark' was white people. As someone who has been this white person, I can say with my full chest that it is deeply cringe to whine like this, as though anyone owes you their friendship just because you want it and just because you think not being racist entitles you to it. Stop that.

Moving on.

As the novel progresses, Jerome's exasperation and irritation with well-meaning white people begins to metamorphose into flat mistrust and hatred, culminating in him blacking out while having sex with a white-passing colleague. Later, she reveals to him that he tried to choke her. "I can' help how I look Jerome," she says. "and now that yo' tell me yo' choke me that night cause yo' think I White, I think I woulda prefer not to know. I woulda prefer to think of you as a weirdo."(p.159)

What's interesting about this plotline is how it illustrates the complexity of racialized generational trauma. Of course it's not acceptable for Jerome to go around choking out random women he perceives to be white, nor is it fair to instantly mistrust a someone just because they're white (especially when the white people we see him interact with are in large part not bad people), but it is understandable why growing up under a cultural legacy of racialized oppression would result in a hatred of 'whiteness'. And, I mean, yeah. 'Whiteness', conceptually, is something most people should be leery of--white people included.

'Spirits in the Dark' masterfully demonstrates how high a task it is to ask a person to interpersonally compartmentalize very raw feelings of resentment while at the same time not condoning or rationalizing generalized prejudice. 'In the Castle of My Skin' grapples with this push and pull as well, but not as a main plot thread.

Racial tension between white and Black people isn't the only thing 'Spirits in the Dark' is about, though. While we do spend a lot of time on it, we spend just as much, if not more, on the racial tension between Black residents of the island, where in many ways, the racial hierarchy imposed by whiteness is upheld; the closer a person is to 'passing' as white, the better off the are socially. This is most thoroughly explored when a group of Ghanian students arrive on the island for a few weeks of cultural exchange.

We see through their interactions with the islanders how, over the course of many years of colonisation, 'African' has become synonymous with 'backwards' and 'barbaric.' He writes of how the islanders would tell stories of African cannibalism and how 'African' was used as an insult. Whereas, on the other hand, British culture is a bar of civilization to be met: "While he walked the half mile home he thought about bad English and good English and he decided he would speak good
English, the English the librarian spoke. Not the English his mother spoke." (p.6)

And yet, even if he "is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of [Britain's] cultural standards" (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks), he will always be Black.

It is while showing one of the Ghanian boys around that Jerome (and the reader) is first directly confronted with the simultaneous truths that Black people are not a monolith, and yet there are many shared experiences between Black people even when they are from countries with vastly different cultures. And the experience that binds Black people together and forms the backbone of the Black identity is: subjugation under whiteness; a bond through shared historical trauma.

And then, as though these two themes weren't enough for so small a novel, Thomas adds one more layer of complexity: Jerome is gay.

Being rejected by the academic world he loves is one thing; in some ways it's something that doesn't surprise him. But his investment in literature and academia more broadly isolates him from his family (his father often pooh-poohing his son's 'obsession' with reading). He finds it hard to fit in with his 'own people.' Then he begins having sexual thoughts about other boys, something he knows, were he to act upon those thoughts, would at best get him ostracized and at worst...

Jerome can't stifle or hide being Black, but he can stifle and hide the fact that he's gay. And he does. For thirty years.

He tries to find community in the Christian church, but ultimately rejects it when he realizes Christianity is just another tool of subjugation--something pointed out by one of the Ghanaian students at the beginning:

After giving up on faith in a white Christian god, he succumbs to the mental pressure of trying and failing to fit in somewhere and has a nervous breakdown. Then another one. And another one.

In the end, in a last-ditch effort to find peace within himself and to feel a sense of belonging he's been missing his entire life, he decides to join the Esosusu (Spiritualist Baptists), a religious sect that is a fusion of Christianity and West African spiritualism. In order to join, he must first undergo a spiritual cleansing in the form of spending three days more or less isolated in a pitch-black room.

Whether or not his attempt at psychic healing is ultimately a success, I leave for you to discover when you read the novel yourself.