The Gospel According to Diane
This week’s Guardian BookShelf spotlights Diane Bertrand’s memoir “The Gospel According to Diane – Between Vestibule and Altar”. I was mesmerised by this memoir in its nascent stages in a workshop held by Earl Lovelace before the pandemic. Bertrand has the literary ability to mesmerise the most hardened atheist – her storytelling is that compelling.
“The Gospel According to Diane – Between Vestibule and Altar” is the story of a girl growing up in a village parish of Indian Walk in south Trinidad amidst a large Catholic family, so devout that her parents converted their family home into a church “where a procession of holy men celebrated Mass for a tiny but fervent congregation.” Bertrand’s parents were leaders in that community. Her father was the headmaster of the government school in Indian Walk and her mother attended not just to her eight children (in itself a herculean feat) but looked after the village parish as she would her own blood.
Bertrand’s narrative device of delightful and honest personal vignettes covering 44 years demonstrates how her parent’s values of kindness, service, hard work, and integrity took priority over material gain (though that came too, alongside a sound education) and was embedded in her family life.
Woven into Bertrand’s story is an abiding faith that a higher power is at perpetual play and, alongside that, a sense of wonder and resolve that sometimes reads like magic realism, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. Despite its religious nature, this memoir has no traces of sanctimonious preaching or dogma. Bertrand wrote this memoir as a road map for her children, Olivia and Mathew, but “The Gospel According to Diane – Between Vestibule and Altar” is more.
This memoir is a masterpiece of immense cultural and historical significance in new world islands, a people still searching for a centre in the aftermath of brutal colonial arrivals when entire languages, cultures, and histories were stripped. Somehow in the telling, we remember that our essential humanity and goodness transcends the trauma of arrival.
The following is an excerpt reproduced with full permission of the author.
“Bow Legs! Pop Eye! Blackie! Darkie! Big Bottom! Big Teeth, Plum-seed head!”
These were a chain of insults thrown at me daily by my cruel classmates. When I complained, Mummy collected and strung them together like beautiful pearls, triumphantly hanging them around my neck. The children in my class emerged from homes made of Tapia walls and Lipay floors. Every night, they fell asleep in their abject poverty to cussing lullabies and physical beatings, which made their restless sleep the safest hiding place. Yet in the mornings, they picked up from where they left off the day before, turning up for school, their bare feet coconut-oiled and shining, ready to share the abuses of the night before with their classmates.
Being the Principal’s daughter gave me a special helping of the ugliest names they could muster, designed to topple the invisible pedestal on which they had placed me. Complaints to my mother were met with compassion and empathy as she explained the difficult circumstances of my classmates’ lives, “Her father is unemployed, and it is tough for the family; she does not mean to be so unkind, poor child.”
However, just at the point when I wanted to accuse Mummy of not defending me, she played her masterstroke, “It is not important how your classmates see you… they only see the surface. What matters is who you are below the surface, in your heart and soul. Child, can’t you see how unimportant those names are?” Or at another time, “She is calling your large, beautiful eyes’ pop eyes’?” My mother’s voice dropped dramatically to a hoarse whisper, her tone incredulous, as if my classmate was the craziest person in the world. “You mean she does not realise that large eyes are beautiful? “Ahhhhh, poor ‘diable’ she is just a child; she does not know better, have some compassion for her.”
She always sprinkled her speech with patois words when she wanted to convey the enormity of a situation. “When you get older, you will see just how beautiful your eyes are! Then these names will not matter.” Mummy’s slow, consistent dismantling of the sting of the insults meted out every day, coupled with heavy servings of love and compassion towards my classmates, neutralised the effect of the verbal bullying.
After a while, I stopped repeating these incidents of the schoolyard. At that early age, I felt myself looking at my tormentor and imagining the chaos and terror of the night before. I imagined Christmases without presents and special treats, and instead of resentment and woundedness, I felt sorrow and outrage for the things my tormentor lacked. The narrative was reprogrammed successfully in my head, and so had my response to it.
End of Excerpt
Diane Bertrand retired from corporate life in 2019. She is currently the President of the Shrine Committee of Our Lady of Montserrat in Tortuga, Trinidad. Bertrand leads pilgrimages across the globe seeking the Face of Christ under the auspices of her Spirit Journeys Pilgrimage Group.
IRA MATHUR is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023. www.irasroom.or