IN PLATO’S CAVE
Peepal Tree PressAugust 2020Selected by Jeremy Poynting
Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa, said it best: “A manifesto, a literary criticism, a personal chronicle of literary life, a book of days, a stage wherein famous writers such as Walcott, Thomas, Gunn, Espada, and others become actors, The Undiscovered Country discovers many things, but one thing for sure: Trinidadian author Andre Bagoo is a fearless, brilliant mind. He can take us from the formal critical perspective to new futurist ‘visual essay’, to verse essay, to sweeping historical account that is unafraid to go as far in time as Columbus and as urgently-of-our moment as Brexit – all of it with precision and attentiveness to detail that is as brilliant as it is startling.” — Jeremy Poynting
I don’t remember watching the film the first time.
I remember watching it later that same day, that week, that month, that year, in the years following. It’s safe to say there was an unhealthy addiction to it in our home. We’d neglect our chores and sit around the television under its spell. We could gallivant on the mountains with Julie Andrews, dance in the rain and sing about our favourite things, play with goat puppets, roam the streets of Salzburg wearing curtains. However, at each viewing the film would end at the same moment. Those familiar with the movie will recognise that moment. It’s after Maria flees the house, returns to the Abbey, and confesses to the Mother Abbess her love for Captain von Trapp. Mother Abbess promptly begins to sing “Climb Every Mountain”.
As children, it did not matter to us that we never knew if Maria married the Captain, nor what happened to the Baroness, nor what the significance of the Nazi flag and the Nazi officer wooing one of the girls was. It did not matter that the song never reached its zenith, was interrupted, crudely, by static noise, a strange and sudden moment of pixilated snow, before some other texture, some other film, over which The Sound of Music had been recorded, resumed. Those were the days before you could Google to find out the ending of a film. […]
In our childish way, we adapted. We grew to regard the first few bars of “Climb Every Mountain” as the real ending. Every time we slotted in the video to watch the film, we knew that it was a journey to that song, those few opening notes, that unresolved chord. For years we carried this inside us: The Sound of Music ends with the nun singing.
Why did our copy of the film not have the last act? Was it just an accident? A mix-up in the recording? And why didn’t we, even as children, sense that Mother Abbess had more to say, was yet to reach the climax of her performance? Looking at that fully restored scene now, Mother Abbess sings so hard she almost blows a gasket. What a cruel fate to have been cut off so unceremoniously. It was only years later, when another copy of the movie made its way into our house, that we saw, with horror, the ending.
Nothing has terrified me more.
A world of jejune frivolity was transformed into one menaced by sadistic totalitarianism and genocide. […] If before I could imagine myself as Maria in love, singing on the mountaintops, now I could imagine my young gay self thrown into a ghetto, forced to wear a pink triangle, policed by the state, stripped of dignity in a manner too cruel to contemplate. In her campness, in her chaffing against Catholicism, in her determination to be whoever she wanted to be, Maria became a cipher that helped me intuit both the joys and the dangers of being different. If hers was a story in which she did, eventually, climb the mountain, there was now for me a strange, refracted sense that the uphill journey of growing up gay in 1980s Trinidad was just beginning. I thought: Maria had to flee her own country to be happy, so what about me? ◉
Peggy Wood was in her seventies when she played the role of Mother Abbess in The Sound of Music and could no longer reach the high notes the song demanded. Her singing voice was dubbed by Margery McKay, who, according to Wood, sounded like she had done in her youth.