MORE TIMES AND THINGS

                                                                                                                                                                        

Excerpt: A hungry man is an angry man. An entire nation was in hunger. A hundred thousand had taken to the streets in protest against the Establishment. They’d marched for bread and the right to work. A hungry nation showed itself to be a violent nation…  

 

 

Excerpt: Rajiv was listening to Jamaican politics and civil misery. But this attentiveness was accompanied by the bass drums, which had taken an insane glee in pounding the tender tissues of his brain. He stared at his books in frustration, in growing anger. After a while, he was pacing his house, swearing, cussing under his breath. I – man George must be mad. Rajiv would go and talk some sense into the fellow. Then it struck him that George must be filled with hate, that his only weapon of revenge against Kaise bane was Bob Marley!

 

MORE TIMES AND THINGS - an anthology of eight stories penned by novelist, Sharlow Mohammed, takes you on a journey of time, a collision course between the way it used to be, the new way, and a battle fought for traditional values versus the contemporary, the psychodrama between a man and his society…          

                                                                       __________ Marie Blair

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Adult Trade Paperback: ISBN 0-9744096-2-6

Send cheque/money order to:

Sharlow Mohammed                   For Further Information, Contact:

Main Road,                                 Sirens Publications

Longdenville.                               2942 North 60th

Trinidad, West Indies                  Lincoln, Nebraska 68507 U.S.A.

Scroll for Contents:                     Phone: 402-310-2837

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Before returning from a break to writing my novels, I would hone my pen at some local incident, or personal experience. The eight stories which compile this anthology were written over a period of twenty or so years, and today are of even greater relevance.

  Bruit (Noise) is a powerful enough scourge to devastate and to destroy a village; and the academic ambitions of a young man. It is the bane of an education system; a plague on any society seeking progress.

I had believed my own experience to be extreme and somewhat original, until quite recently, I came upon the following excerpt in a Readers Digest published near a quarter century ago. No other than Mr. Willoughby could have defined this scourge more accurately. Gratefully and thankfully, I use his excerpt, and without permission.

 

From: A Journey through Love, by John Willoughby

A wise stranger has said that Noise is the ultimate insult!!

It belittles us!!

It gives us nothing at which to strike back. It kills

what is left of many things that we have loved:

music, beauty, friendship, hope and excitement,

and the reassurance of Nature.

Traditionally, noise is used to ridicule,

to embarrass, denigrate, and curse.

While Silence is used for worship, respect ... and

love!!

 

  Nostalgia is no more than an illusion, a fetish in the mind of the beholder. Mustapha’s failure to see the changes wrought by time in his childhood love, sees Sarah as unchanged as when he left her. Any (im)precision of the mind to envisage still ends in disappointment.

  Baksheesh (Bribe) is a sad incident. Though I have left out most of the gory and violent details, it yet remains so.

 

   Datura – an amazing experience with a hallucinating drug, potent enough to mirror the most profound depths of the subconscious.

 

   Teacher Pani is a personal experience. It is also an injunction against the authorities to provide for its citizens, one of the basic necessities of social democracy.

 

  In The Exporters, the cutexed fingers in The Young and the Restless is a vague symbol of cultural oppression which translates into economic rape and social disfigurement.

 

  A Cross is not yet a fully blown Leech. And a leech sucks the blood of a society until it is dead. He was before God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, the law: “Thou shalt not covet thine neighbours goods.”

 

   Outcast is about an extant phenomenon long before Cain slew Abel. The evil is not so much about cultural primogeniture or natural jealousy, as it is of the innate failure of parents to love and deal with their offsprings fairly.

Sharlow