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The Children of Sisyphus is the story of Dinah, a prostitute who lives and fails to find love on the Dungle, the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat. Trapped by patriarchy and male passivity, and cursed by one of her rivals, Dinah is forced into a panicked flight to save herself. But involvement with a revival church and the favour of Shepherd John, who proposes a new life outside Jamaica, leads her to the delusion that she has found escape and meaning, a lived lie that has tragic consequences.
In Patterson's brutally poetic existentialist novel, dignity comes with a stoic awareness of the absurdity of life.
Introduced by Kwame Dawes.
Orlando Patterson was born in Jamaica in 1940. Having studied at the University of the West Indies and at the London School of Economics, in 1970 he took the position of Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard, where he is now John Cowles Professor of Sociology. The Children of Sisyphus received the First Prize for Fiction at the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts in 1966. His other novels are An Absence of Ruins (1967) and Die the Long Day (1972). He was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Government of Jamaica in 1999.
In Jamaica, much as her grandparents, middle class black Jamaicans and her parents in England, might not have liked it, Princess meets and spends time with her obscure Cousin Nothing, called Conut. She introduces her to the flora of Jamaica and in particular, to one plant which obeys certain divine principles and which is available to humans to make artifacts for their comfort. Accordingly they begin to make a mat and as they twist straw and bend it into intricate shapes, Conut tells her the family history so that their creation becomes for her a mat of anthropological template. The resulting shape presented to her teacher, earns her an A and the comment that she has managed to project the West Indian family as a fractal rather than fractured as the published literature sees it.
Every girl gets a scholarship to a London University but asks to be allowed to take it up in Jamaica. Here she completes graduate work and gets an assistant lectureship but more, she inherits an old house from Conut, from which she commutes to the university in Kingston. Under-stimulated by the academy, she chooses to continue the family study which she had done as her end of high school project and to do so by crafting the information into the mat, which mat becomes for her a shield against spiritual and physical evil. Making the mat of ancestors takes her into the history of young English men kidnapped and transported to Jamaica for illicit sexual activity, of Jamaican women launderers in Panama, of a African Jamaican/African American marriage in Panama which produces children brought up in Virginia USA, and who become the first Negroes to; of two females who escape Governor Eyres violence in Morant Bay and re-settle in a free village in St Ann.
This work is not only a fictional family history but is also a comment on anthropological methodology, and African systems of thought.