Essays

The Following Are Interpretive Essays On Zee Edgell’s Work:

Growing up with Beka Lamb

By: Gayle Vanderhorst
Tweetie211@Hotmail.com

            Developing and maturing is a hard process, especially for young girls.  In the novel Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell, Beka Lamb and Toycie Qualo develop.  Beka matures from a lying little girl to a responsible young lady, while Toycie deteriorates emotionally and eventually physically.  Both girls symbolize two parts of Belize’s population; the main culture and those who are outside of that culture.

            As the novel begins, Beka has just won an essay-writing contest at her school.  That night, as she sits in her grandmother’s chair, she begins to reminisce about the long, uphill battle she fought to reach this point in her life.  Seven months earlier, Beka was having trouble with telling the truth.  She lied about small things, such as saying she swept the attic when she really did not.  Her most recent lie, however, is the worst of all.  She told her father that she passed first form when she really failed.  Not only does Beka lie, but she neglects her schoolwork as well.  When Toycie asks Beka why she failed first form she relies, “I fooled around instead of doing my work”(Edgell 35).  Beka realizes that she does not focus on her schoolwork the way she should.  When Beka does her chores, she skips parts of the floor while sweeping, she pushes old newspapers and dirty clothes under the beds while cleaning, and on her way to the market she lingers at Toycie’s house.  However, once Beka tells her father the truth about failing first form, she realizes that she will have to act more responsibly in order to return to school.  She begins by cleaning the attic: “Beka cleaned the attic with feverish energy; here was a way to start, a way to show her family that she could be different” (Edgell 26).  Beka does not skip over parts of the floor and hide the trash like usual.  She cleans with all the energy she has inside of her.  In Phyllis Briggs-Emanuel’s article in The Caribbean Writer, she says this: “The conscientious intensive cleaning that Beka gives the house symbolizes her cleaning of her psychological self and her determination to grow up and accept responsibility which is the hallmark of adulthood.”  Beka is beginning to take her first steps toward maturity.  She realizes that in order to make her parents proud of her she must show them she is responsible.  Beka also begins to take her schoolwork more seriously.  She works endlessly, not even stopping for the National Day Parade: “Beka worked all morning at the table…she had this fear that if ever again she stopped working at her lessons…something terrible would happen” (Edgell 143).  All of her hard work pays off because she passes her exam and moves to the next form.  One of the final signs of Beka’s maturing is the encouragement she offers Toycie when they think she is pregnant.  Toycie is devastated when Emilio says he cannot marry her if she is pregnant.  Beka, however, quickly offers to help.  “I’ll help you if it’s a baby, Toycie.  We’ll live together when I leave school and raise it as best we can, and if it’s a girl, we’ll explain everything carefully about everything so that her life doesn’t break down that way.  And if it’s a boy, we’ll do the same” (Edgell 109).  Beka realizes the importance of positive thinking and also the importance of preventing this from happening again.  She assumes the role that Toycie played for her when she failed first form, the role of comforter.  Beka switching roles with Toycie is the final sign of her transition from a young girl to a young lady.

            Toycie changes also.  Her development, however, is more of deterioration.  At the beginning of the novel, Toycie is a studious, straight-A student.  She has already passed into the fourth form and plans to graduate soon.  Although she is three years older than Beka, she is still a good friend of hers.  When Beka fails first form, Toycie encourages her by promising that they can study together.  Toycie becomes physically mature as well, when she begins engaging in sexual intercourse with her boyfriend Emilio.  It is this maturity that eventually becomes her downfall.  She shows her irresponsibility and immaturity when she becomes pregnant.  Instead of beginning to make provisions for the arrival of her child, she begins to break down mentally.  She allows herself to be led around by Beka and eventually she stops leaving the house altogether.  “…[Toycie] does disintegrate psychologically…and descends into insanity.  This state of psychological disintegration holds Toycie in an adolescent state permanently…”(Emanuel, Caribbean Writer).  Toycie locks herself in her mind and goes insane.  In the asylum she is placed in, she pretends to study all the time.  Her story ends in death one night during a hurricane.  Toycie quickly goes from a hard working student, to a love struck teenager, to a patient in a mental hospital.  She switches roles with Beka and becomes dependent and in need of encouragement.  The changing of roles and eventually her mental demise are the final signs of Toycie’s immaturity.

            Beka and Toycie represent the separation of the cultures in Belize.  This is expressed in an article in Caribbean Passages.  “The central movement of Beka Lamb is an integration of disparate isolated elements into a greater rational whole, with Beka…embodying this…development; her friend Toycie is a poignant representative of those who are marginalized or left behind” (Patteson 59).  Beka represents those who are part of the mainstream culture.  She has the support of her family as well as their history.  By knowing where she comes from she has a better understanding of where she is going.  When Beka fails first form her father has two things to say, “…we gave you a better start than anyone in this family on both sides ever got…nobody at home here ever asked you to come first.  We would have been satisfied with a pass!” (Edgell 24).  Beka’s family is her anchor.  They let her know she is not alone.  Toycie, by contrast, represents those who do not have a place to belong for one reason or another.  Their cultural background may be so diverse that they feel lost, or their education places them above others in their class.  Toycie realizes her separation when she says to Beka, “But you’re still luckier than me.  You have Miss Lilla, your Daddy and Miss Ivy…my own mother scarcely writes to me anymore…[my father] went to Panama to work…but he never came back…” (Edgell 59,60).  Toycie acknowledges the fact that she is alone.  She has no anchor to keep her grounded and offer her support.  All she has is school, but even that is taken away once Sister Virgil finds out she is pregnant.  Toycie does not have a family as an anchor, so she floats out to sea mentally and physically.

Beka Lamb is a growing up story.  Beka grows and matures into a responsible young lady, while Toycie’s immaturity becomes evident.  Through Zee Edgell’s vivid story, not only is the growth of two young girls witnessed, but an inside look is also given to the lines separating the cultures in Belize.     

Hold Fast To Your Religious Beliefs

By: Starvel Drake
Superstar_427@Hotmail.com

The Festival of San Joaquin by Zee Egdell is focused on Luz Marina, a Mestiza woman who killed her husband in self-defense.  After being cleared of a murder charge and being released on three-year probation in the summer of 1990, she returns to San Joaquin determined to gain custody of her children and start her life over.  Along the way, she is faced with people that can’t let go of her past, poverty, and vengeance by her deceased husband’s family, the Casals.  This novel, which is based on a real incident of a Belizean woman arrested for the murder of her common-law husband, is Zee Edgell’s third novel.  The Festival of San Joaquin addresses the plight of Mestiza women, and it deals with domestic violence in a insightful manner.

Holding onto spirituality is hard for domestic violence victims, but Luz Marina held strong to her faith despite her unfortunate circumstances.  She is able to successfully do this because she had a relationship with God prior to having a relationship with her husband Salvador, which gave her a strong foundation in her faith.  The police found Luz Marina in the Church of San Joaquin the night of Salvador’s murder; she may have been repenting.  While she was in jail, Luz Marina sang hymns that asked for God’s forgiveness, and she kept an ongoing list of thing to pray for.  After she was released from jail, she continued to acknowledge God regardless of the tribulations she faced.  She remained faithful to God and prayed only to Him, although it was hard for her at times; Luz Marina believed the words of God in the Bible.  Unfortunately, she paid close attention to certain scriptures and neglected those that would have prevented her from submitting to an ungodly man.

Luz Marina obeyed her common-law husband as she would obey God: “I believed that the man is the head to which the woman’s body is united, just as Christ is the head of the church” (Edgell 16).  She allowed Salvador to have complete dominion over her life and her body without ever questioning his actions.  Luz Marina agreed not to leave the house because it angered Salvador, although she missed taking walks in the garden and shopping in the plaza.  Once, Salvador padlocked the doors and barred the windows so Luz Marina couldn’t leave.  She never understood why something so simple upset him, but she continued to obey this rule.  Even Christians ask God for understanding through prayer when they don’t understand why He allows them to be faced with adversity.  If Luz Marina was obeying Salvador as she would obey God, she should have questioned him about the adversity he was causing in her life. 

Why didn’t Luz Marina confront Salvador?  According to Dr. Julie Cleare, who works at a counseling unit for abuse victims, domestic violence victims fear the situation might worsen if they speak out (Thomas 7).  Numerous times throughout the novel, Luz Marina held her tongue so she wouldn’t upset Salvador.  In the beginning of The Festival of San Joaquin, Luz Marina wanted to see a bamboo in flower but Salvador objected.  He darkened his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, and told her to forget about it.  “Not wanting to spoil Salvador’s mood,” she looked away from the bushes (Edgell 3).  When Salvador claimed that Luz Marina’s wedding dress blew out the window into the river, she accepted his story without any questions.  Luz Marina didn’t confront him because she didn’t want to start an argument, which usually led to a fight.

Apart from church, Luz Marina and Salvador rarely went anywhere together in public.  Salvador’s financial contributions helped start Esperanza Evangelical Church, and he was an active member.  He collected donations for the church on Fridays and Saturdays, and won the confidence of the pastor and the congregation.  Nevertheless, this same man physically and mentally abused his wife.  Salvador had the ability to diminish a person and reduce him to non-beings in his world; he knew he had this power, and he didn’t hesitate to use it.  It must have been difficult for Luz Marina to seek comfort in her faith when the person causing her pain was sitting beside her in the pew.  Nevertheless, Luz Marina expressed the same kind of love for Salvador that Christ expressed towards the church, unconditional love.  Throughout the novel, Luz Marina was “realistically portrayed as having never stopped loving Salvador and hoping for a normal family life with him” (Bishop 1).  During her sessions with the psychiatrist Dr. Majorie Anne Douglass, she never spoke ill of Salvador because in San Joaquin they believed speaking negatively about the deceased was wrong.  Instead, Luz Marina shared comforting memories of him, like the recipes she would prepare to “tempt Salvador to eat his meals at our house” (Edgell 12).  She was able to overlook his faults because the Salvador she loved could be “kind, gentle, generous, and helpful” (Edgell 48).        

            There is a Bible scripture that says, “Wives, be subject to your husbands”; however, before and after that, “there’s a reference to Christ’s relationship with the church, which is one of love, kindness, care, and comfort” (Thomas 1).  This relationship was the example Salvador was supposed to follow.  There are passages in the Bible that address male dominance, but sometimes often people take them out of context to serve their own purposes (Thomas 1).  Salvador’s male dominance transformed into male violence, which some males perceive as the power they need to “come across as a real man” (Thomas 6).  If Luz Marina might have paid closer attention to the scriptures describing Christ’s relationship with the church, which is the model for husbands to follow, she would have realized Salvador’s behavior wasn’t coinciding with Christ’s example.  Therefore, she didn’t have to obey him as she would obey Christ. 

Works Cited

Bishop, Margaret. “Domestic Violence in Belize.” The Sunday Observer. Belize, (July 1, 1997): 2. 

Edgell, Zee. The Festival San Joaquin. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1997.

Thomas, Rachel G. “Spiritual Comfort Can Help Heal Some Wounds.” The Standard    Times. 4 June 1995. (14 May 2000).

<http://www.s-t.com/projects/DomVio/spiritualcomfort.HTML

The following is a poem written by a Bowie State
 University student in response to Zee Edgell’s works:

Edgell

By Kendall Stewart

Zee Edgell was born in Belize City in 1940

She is an excellent author who has always been loved and supported

She studied to be a journalist in Kingston, Jamaica and London, England

Although living away from her home she has always kept her eyes inland

Her first two novels were Beka Lamb and In Times Like These

Both novels usually started with the history of her native country Belize

Her new novel The Festival of San Joaquin opens on the steps in Belize at a Court

The new novel is about the life and death struggle a woman encounters with no support

The third novel is significant to her development as a writer

It helps to reflect the cultures of other ethnic groups, which makes her future brighter

Her next novel is said to be about an underprivileged Belizean boy

She wants to show that he is sometimes his worst enemy and not to deploy

Mrs. Edgell is a fascinating woman with a flickering past and a bright future

She excels not only as a writer, but also as a wife mother, and nurturer

As a reader, one can only pray for more of her thought provoking work

Her work not only gives her story, but it also gives one the historical worth