2008-01-20 Earthy Warm-Hearted Jamaican Satire

Originally published ten years ago, this short novel by Jamaican writer Winkler is a both a slapstick imagining of heaven and a wry look at the nature of god and faith. The title is Jamaican patois for "ghost" or "spirit" and that's exactly what middle-aged village shopkeeper Taddeus Augustus Baps becomes at the beginning of the story. Shocked by his sudden demise, he wanders his village until another duppy shows up to escort him to heaven -- which is not reached by floating up to the pearly gates, but by taking a minibus out to a canefield, and then crawling through a drainage pipe...

This more or less sets the tone for the rest of the book, in which Baps discovers that each country has its own Heaven, and in the Jamaican version, people basically get to do what they love (which in Baps' case means administering order to a village shop quite similar to his old Earthly one) -- including more or less unlimited sex (rendered in the patois as "grinding"). Baps managed to befriend God (who takes the form of a lightning bug), and together they travel to America with a wandering duppy atheist philosopher (who thinks everything he's seeing is in his head).

On this trip, Baps learns that Heaven can take many different forms, as the ultra-pious American duppys wander as robed shepherds to flocks of fat sheet, fed by thrice-daily showers of manna. Perhaps most disturbing to Baps is the absence of grinding in the American heaven, as men and women have their respective genitalia ("hoods" and "pum-pums") "caulked" shut! The Americans are also quite aggrieved (as is Baps to a certain extent) that there is no Hell and that sinners and saints live side by side with no advantages given to those who lived a pious corporeal life. This leads to some discussion as to why this is so, and moreover, why God permits bad things to happen to people. Baps is granted the power to create a world as an experiment and finds that it's not quite so easy to remove pain and misery from humanity.

The overall message is a gently satirical and warm-hearted poke at both Jamaican and American societies, all wrapped up in a very earthy package, with plenty of discussion of grinding, batties, hoods, and pum-pums. Those not already familiar with Jamaican patois may need to refer to one of the many online patois dictionaries to get into the flow, but it's not that thick. A simple glossary at the front would have been a nice addition to the U.S. edition of the book.