158 KIM ROBINSON WALCOTT

from the former and in a constant struggle for survival with the latter.
Critically, when Busha exclaims in court:

 My grand-daddy built that house, not me! My great-great-great-grand-daddy
 buy dat land... I didn't buy it... I was born into it. Did I ask to be born into
 it? .. I don't take nothing from anybody. I never trouble anybody! Dese
 damn people break me house and nearly kill me ... and why? Because it's
 my fault to be born! Dat's reason enough to kill a man? (201)

 It is a painful moment, reminding one of a similar moment in the short
story "McGregor's Journey" written by the near-white Guyanese writer
Pauline Melville, when a disapproving black crowd cuts short a rare,
meaningful and totally innocent connection between the white McGregor
and a black woman: "Later that night, the police arrested a man.... He was
smashing shop windows .... As the glass exploded in each one, he yelled: 'I
want you to know that I never owned a fucking slave in my life. Never.'" 28
 There is no simplistic black and white of innocence and guilt in the question
of blacks versus whites. Life is unfair. Life is hard. "De times hard on every
man" (28). So that while The Lunatic is on one level a story of the triumph of
good over evil, its more powerful message is one of life's ambiguities; and of
the necessity of compassion, compromise and conciliation in the face of
such ambiguities. "We all owe life and love to one anodder" (224).
 Winkler's refusal to condemn Busha totally to the role of villain in this
novel is a gesture of such compassion; a small echo of the compassion which
Aloysius shows in his own refusal to condemn Busha, his own refusal to
embrace hatred, greed and death over love, charity and life. Winkler's black
protagonist provides upliftment and cause for hope in a lunatic Jamaican
society. And the success of Winkler's depiction disturbs stereotypical
perceptions of the exclusivity of the white West Indian identity held by
nonwhite West Indians.
 Notwithstanding any current trends in Caribbean intellectual thought
towards the Utopian notion of creolitd, race seems to matter more than ever
in our Caribbean society, and the divisions based on ethnicity/race/class
widen steadily. Nevertheless, starting tentatively with Rhys and moving with
increasing certainty through Mendes, Mais, more recently Antoni, and most
especially Winkler, these white West Indian writers break through such
divisions and transcend the limitations imposed on them by history, choosing
not to take the imperial road; and ultimately these writers give one hope of
the eventual possibility of a creole cohesion.



28 Pauline Melville, Shape-shifter (London: The Women's Press, 1990. London: Picador-
Pan Books, 1991) 98.