"If you observe anything in life closely enough," says the author, "nothing is as straightforward as it looks." She writes of "The complexity of life, isolated on an island. The intensity of it, magnified sins and honesty changing colour before your eyes." Tide Running is about innocence and its twin opposites, experience and guilt, but it never settles for a simple account of either side.It explores both the continuum of Creole language and the moral continuum that well-intentioned people of all backgrounds inhabit where innocence cohabits with guilt; where the best hope may be self-knowledge. Bella, the wife, shocked at her own behaviour, questions her responsibility and a central section includes the stark words: "Guilt. Us."The book suggests political as well as ethical implications, as this mixed-race Caribbean woman married to an Englishman wonders whether she and her husband are "taking advantage". Kempadoo herself talks of the Caribbean countries as "still so young and immature in terms of leadership and social politics and government". Her title becomes clear: "The unsteady, uncontrived mess of a growing society... Calm and laid-back on the surface but deep undercurrents stirring.
Strong tides running."The impact of American television is another issue the book stages wittily but urgently. Baywatch and Oprah, soap operas and gangster films and the advertising with them, shape island dreams. The setting is Tobago, often billed as the region's last "untouched" paradise, but the novel identifies "The national dream of Tobago for young and old alike, rich and poor Fila, Hilfiger, Adidas and now FUBU".The island is sought after as a "haven from Trinidad city life" promising "crime-free living and the blue Caribbean sea," and shown as in many ways delivering that promise. But times are changing: "it's only the music that's rough here and it's the same rangatang, bad-boy, gangsta-cussin' rhythm as everywhere". The lyrics of rap artists are interwoven in the narrative, but Kempadoo worries about the black American model. She is interested in crossing social barriers, but says that "the identity that the young black people in the Caribbean have taken up from black America is segregating them even more."These serious dimensions of the story are delivered unobtrusively, in a good-humoured narration. Like the Trinidadian novelist Sam Selvon, whom she acknowledges as a model, Kempadoo writes hilarious comic scenes, as well as lyrically sensuous ones: "We rolled in the time we spent together Romped and splashed around in it...
The days shifted shape like sand and we walked softly on it." It is all part of her project to celebrate the region and its people, as well as examining the problems. She relishes the "language and the laid-back pace" and the way you are "reminded all the time of your connection to the climate and the natural side of life" the feel of the sea on the skin, or a parrot fish, "Yellow-ring eye looking at you, mouth crunching, paint-on green lips, look like a fat lady smiling while she eating" .Observation was a habit inculcated early on. The seventh of nine children, Oonya like her siblings was educated at home by her mother, a teacher, until O-levels loomed. They would follow a curriculum with all the usual subjects, but when it came to English there would be a choice of creative writing. The tasks her mother set usually meant being sent outside to sit under a tree and then come back and write about what had been observed, or to watch village people and listen to how they talked.
