Lindsay Barrett’s classic novel ‘Song for Mumu’ to be republished in Britain
By Editor
ONE of Britain’s most innovative and adventurous publishers Peepal Tree Press based in Leeds has announced its purchase of the right to republish Jamaican-Nigerian author Lindsay Barrett’s ground-breaking novel, Song for Mumu, which was first published in 1967. According to the company’s managers, the title was always on the list of novels it wanted to republish, and they are delighted to have at last managed to contact the author in Nigeria to agree to a new edition.
Peepal Tree’s managing editor, Jeremy Poynting says he “has long admired Song for Mumu as a work of intense poetic imagination which finds new ways of exploring fundamental aspects of Caribbean reality: its histories of pain and suffering, the breach from Africa, the tensions between city and country and ways of subverting the dominance of the plantation and Eurocentric culture. In the Caribbean Modern Classics series, it joins the work of Wilson Harris and Denis Williams in breaking out from what Harris called the ‘novel of manners’, a dominant trend of conventional realism in the Caribbean novel”.
Peepal Tree Press is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary since its founding in 1985. Since that time, it has published almost 500 titles, with a focus is on what George Lamming called the Caribbean nation, wherever it is in the world, though it is also concerned with Black British writing which draws on different heritages. Its output is roughly balanced between fiction, poetry and non-fiction, including creative genres such as memoirs and academic titles in the humanities focused on publishing the work of new writers and sustaining subsequent writing careers, but also on recuperating important books from the past.
Song for Mumu is a first novel by the young Jamaican writer Carlton Lindsay Barrett, also known as Ese-Oghene. The form is allegoric because it draws heavily on folklore and the supernatural; the language is lyrical because it has the qualities of a song, a ritual lament. One might compare Song for Mumu to a modern version of a classical tragedy, compounded of violence and destiny, memories and desires of the blood. It is set in “the Green”, a Caribbean countryside whose life has been violated in the past by slavery, and the city, a civilization without love. The protagonists are Meela, a farmer’s daughter, the embodiment of innocence and sensuality, and Mumu born of the union between Meela and her cruelly insane young husband Scully. Scully dies, abandoned in the asylum. Meela and Mumu, beautiful doomed women of the ‘green world’, go to the clamorous and brutal city, where they live on the brink of unrecognized disaster. Eventually Meela, her spirit fired by religion, returns home, and after many lovers Mumu follows her — to die. Mother and daughter lie buried in the same bloody grave. Their fate and that of their people are commented on by a sibylline chorus of River Women. Song for Mumu is a story magnificent in conception, carried through by the author’s brilliant sense of individual and historical plight.
In 2009 Peepal Tree launched its Caribbean Modern Classics series, now with over 50 titles. Several of its authors have won major international awards. This is the company Barrett’s Song for Mumu is set to keep. Mr. Barrett, who would make Nigerian home away from his native Jamaica since the 1960s, will be 84 years on September 15, 2025. He has expressed excitement at the development about his novel, as a generation of younger readers will have the opportunity to read him many years after it was first published in London in 1967 by Longman. Barrett quickly melded into Nigeria’s cultural milieu soon after arriving the country aged 25, and has lived in parts of Nigeria ever since and made a life.
Barrett’s artistic oeuvre spans critical essays, journalism, photography, prose, drama and poetry (A Memory of Rivers: Poems Out of the Niger Delta) published in 2009. In the early years of path-defining Mbari Artists Club, Barrett was once its secretary in Ibadan and was there in the heady days of the making of Nigeria’s literary giants like Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, with JP Clark actually persuading him to visit Nigeria for the first time in the 1960s. Barrett came and made Nigeria home ever since.
