Here's a book you may not have heard of, then again.  Bauxite Sugar and Mud.

http://www.amazon.com/Bauxite-...8-1944/dp/1896754457

I know someone who lives on the island off of New Bruinswick, she lives next to the author. It was she who introduced the book to me several years ago.

Also found this write up;

THE DILEMMA OF BELONGING

A Book Review

by Frank Birbalsingh

Patricia Wendy Dathan, Bauxite, Sugar and Mud: Memories of Living in Colonial Guyana 1928-1944, St-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, Shoreline, 2006, pp.220, ISBN 1-896754-45-7
Wendy Dathan’s Bauxite, Sugar and Mud: Memories of living in Colonial Guyana 1928-1944 is a memoir of her family’s expatriate community in Linden, Guyana, during the sixteen years mentioned in the title. Joshua Whalley – Wendy’s father – left England in 1928 to work as an accountant for a bauxite company in McKenzie (re-named Linden), in British Guiana (now Guyana), which was well known for its sugar industry and muddy rivers.

Linden was then a remote outpost sixty five miles up the Demerara river, and accessible only by boat to Georgetown, the capital city. Joshua’s wife Gladys joined him in 1929 and Wendy, their first child, was born in 1934. Today, not only have many names in Guyana been changed, but the country is no longer a British colony, the bauxite company Wendy Dathan (nee Whalley) knew has been nationalised, and her white expatriate community, named “Watooka” after a nearby creek, completely lost in the mists of time.

It was the demand for bauxite during World War One that first led to serious geological exploration for the ore in Guyana. The Demerara Bauxite Company (DEMBA), a subsidiary of the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) was incorporated in 1916 and their first shipment of bauxite made in 1917; but when ALCOA shifted its interest to the US market, the Montreal-based Canadian Aluminum Limited (ALCAN) that employed Joshua Whalley took over mining operations at Linden.

ALCAN made a crucial contribution to World War Two: “almost all Canada’s military aircraft built between 1940 and 1945, 16,000 of them, were built of aluminum supplied by ALCAN,” (p.145) and Dathan’s account of German U-Boat attacks on Allied shipping in the Caribbean catches the drama of an almost forgotten saga of sinking ships and tragic loss of life as well as (bauxite) cargoes during the war.

These well-researched details are matched by an insider’s first hand report on Guyanese living conditions and the culture shock the author’s parents faced when showering with brown-coloured water from the Demerara river, or waging constant warfare against an army of insects such as ants, scorpions, moths, cockroaches, and every variety of snake from the over-sized water camoodie or boa constrictor to the smaller but poisonous “fer de lance” and labaria or the deadly Bushmaster, Guyana’s answer to the Indian cobra.

No wonder the Watooka rule of thumb was: “if it moves kill it”(p.54); and when all of this is added to standard provocations of tropical heat, humidity, and mildew, not to mention the threat of malaria and yellow fever, it is not hard to understand why Dathan’s mother, who left a sleepy English provincial town for a place literally crawling with tropical exotica, never ceased to regard Guyana as “That Awful Place” (p.13).

Despite the historical value of such information, however, and many nostalgic details about Guyana’s bauxite industry, the Botanic Gardens, an overland trip to Kaieteur Falls, acquaintances such as the Italian Dr. Giglioli who eradicated the scourge of malaria from Guyana, and his French-Canadian wife, even about familiar British imports such as Eno’s Fruit Salts, Ovaltine and Reckitt’s Blue, the outstanding achievement of Bauxite, Sugar and Mud is its analysis of “white mores” (p. 31) in the colony, and its sensitive reconstruction of the author’s childhood in Linden.

For this Dathan relies on sources such as an unpublished journal written by her mother, and the diary of an American friend, Carolyn Harder, who also lived in Watooka; and to enlarge the scope of her analysis, Dathan throughout compares her observations to those in books about colonial societies, for instance, two volumes by Raymond Smith and Michael Swan both titled British Guiana, and Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days and his novel A Handful of Dust.

The larger context of her research makes Bauxite, Sugar and Mud relevant not only to Guyana but to British colonies in general, for instance, when Dathan writes: “in the Guiana of 1929 the colour bar was complete, making most Whites treated as superior beings, irrespective of rank, job or background, class, education or personality” (p.31). Such racial segregation may be voluntary rather than legislated, but it gives an impression of Watooka as an apartheid community under siege. Dathan notes too that: “the [black] servants are not allowed even to reproach the white children,” (p.130) and that Watooka children are taught only by white teachers.
Besides, she later comments: “there were no local books that told us things that were rooted in what we could see and understand around us, and no one told us that this was really home because it was where we were really living” (p.166).

This hits the nail squarely on the head; for the imposition of a foreign culture and its language, values and education system on a colonised population tends to create a crisis of identity in that population. But Dathan had one foot in Guyana through her birth, and the other in the colonising culture through her parents, which explains the poignancy of her “cri de coeur” in pleading: “I had as much right to feel as Guyanese as anyone … even with my alien white skin and overlord political inheritance. Yet I was never allowed… I belonged nowhere” (p.166).

We are moved by this plea partly because of a childhood aura of confessional integrity and truth in Bauxite, Sugar and Mud, for example, when the author speaks with unforgettable affection of nurses who: ”rocked us [white Watooka babies] to sleep in their warm brown arms” (p.119) or with envy of: “the music and rhythm and mystery and romance” (p.119) in their [her nurses’] lives. Yet, living now in Canada, and having visited Guyana as an adult, Dathan surely cannot miss the irony of tens of thousands of her fellow [black] Guyanese who, for entirely different reasons than herself, now live in Canada or other foreign lands, where they face a crisis of identity with all the pain and poignancy of her own.
(The Editor of the Arts Forum Page, Ameena Gafoor, can be reached on E-mail: theartsjournal@live.co.uk or Telephone: (592) 227 6825.