A Swarthy Boy

A Childhood in British Guiana

This account of a boyhood and adolescence in New Amsterdam and Georgetown contains some of Mittelholzer’s finest writing, both as a finely grained portrayal of a colonial society’s immersion in the prisons of race and class, and of an inward-looking writer’s charting of his own mental growth. Resonances with James Joyce’s Dubliners.

Edgar Mittelholzer’s autobiography, first published in 1963, which covers the first eighteen years of his life, was his first return in writing to about his native Guyana, of memory and imagination, for a good many years. Born into a household that regarded itself as European, Mittelholzer writes with vivid feeling about what it was like to be a boy whose “swarthiness” was anathema to his bigoted father. In the process, Mittelholzer gives an account of his family that is frank and searching and an account of the role of race, class and gender in small-town colonial life that is unrivalled in its perception. A Swarthy Boy is also an attempt to trace the origins of the man Mittelholzer thought he had become, the division he felt within himself between the sensitive soul and the militant fighter, the Idyll and the Warrior – a division that he portrays in a good many of his most intimately observed characters. Despite being written only a couple of years before his fiery suicide, A Swarthy Boy was written with zest, not a little humour and some affection for the world he left to become a professional writer in Britain.

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