Epilogue

Abstract

Pauline Melville’s short story ‘English Table Wuk’, opens with a diverse group of people watching Diana’s funeral on television in Georgetown, Guyana. ‘People’s princess, my arse,’ says one. Another opines, ‘She could have bought Angola, never mind havin’ her picture taken with amputees.’ A few pages later, as they leave, a powercut having curtailed viewing of the funeral, Melville distances the reader from such perspectives: ‘The spectacle of the funeral had filled them with the mild pleasures of righteous indignation and reassured them as to the rectitude and superiority of their own rational politics.’¹ Neither Diana nor the funeral is mentioned again in the story, whose main narrative concerns the seemingly irrational appeasement of the ghosts of English colonists.