In this collection, Millicent Graham focuses on memory and the idea of home, while questioning the very nature of home as both a physical and emotional space. There are comforts--the landscape, the vegetation, the food, the playground, the hand of parents, the romantic escapades--and there are the disquiets--the bullying, the violence, the fearfulness, the failure of memory, the losses. In these very intimate poems, Graham marks out a distinct poetic territory for herself with an immediately recognizable voice, an assured handling of language and image, and the sensation that she is adding to the corpus of Caribbean poetry in important ways. Graham, has, in this book, made good on her indebtedness to her fascination with the elliptical and image-heavy verse of Tony McNeill, and the lyrical, lushness of story and memory in the poetry of Lorna Goodison. It is possible to see an army of poetic influences in these two Jamaican poets, and Graham carries all these influences inside of her, while sounding only like herself. Her work is guided first by her desire to write her home, both the actual and physical world of Jamaica, and her other home, her equally rich imaginative and poetic home.
Wit and engaging language lighten the heavy subject matter of the poetry in this collection, based on a former ad man's true-life experiences of redemption and a developing conscience after leaving the advertising business. The poems take on the world of consumerism and address issues such as overconsumption, commercialism, mental health, spirituality, politics, the environment, and global justice. Poet Sai Murray makes powerful connections between the monopoly capitalist control of global commerce, the threats of the food industry to human health, and the danger to the increasingly fragile ecology of the planet. He utilizes a variety of styles--from autobiographical confessions and dramatic monologues to parodies of the language of the Red Tops, clichés of political rulers, and Facebook trivializations of community--to express his desire to cauterize the deceits of language and to convey his vision of a world with equality, liberty, and fraternity.
An iconic novel from a rebellious and politically active author, this story follows Jack, a sculptor and blacksmith, who idolizes the Biblical Samson as a figure of man's independence. Deciding to carve a mahogany tribute to Samson, however, becomes a more complicated affair when Jack's wife leaves him for another man. The end result is a sculpture of a blinded Samson leaning on a young boy for support. As life imitates art, Jack is struck by lightning and left blind, forcing him to rely on his friends to survive. After leading him on a journey to discover just how reliant on humanity he really is, Jack's blindness ultimately drives him to his final act of independence: his own suicide.
Personal heartbreak and public political trauma collide in this moving poetry compilation. While the poems struggle with sadness, a sense of acceptance transcends the pain as the poet explores a mixed heritage background. Sudden twists of anger and tragedy are tempered only by the poet's compassion, and the overall effect is both compelling and cathartic. Hauntingly compelling, this collection will appeal most to those interested in LGBT studies and diasporic literature.
Chronicling the events that took place in Grenada from 1951--when workers revolted against the white owners of the sugar and cocoa estates--to the U.S. invasion in 1983, this revised and expanded edition follows headstrong Angel and her mother Doodsie as they experience the deposition of the old, corrupted leadership with conflicted emotions. As their community struggles for independence, the political conflicts in Grenada tear long-term relationships apart, provoke fratricidal killings, and allow an outrageous breach of sovereignty. Seamlessly moving between these serious events and the warmth and tensions of family life, this celebrated novel offers an informed account of the revolution and a richly developed vernacular.
A lively illustrated masterpiece, this is the gripping story of a natural disaster and the 13-year-old Kingston boy who lives to tell the tale. While holed up in their home, Joe Brown, his sister Mary, and their parents wait for the eye of the hurricane to pass over their home. Outside, a terrifying wind turns trees to splinters, darkness swallows the land, and torrential rains lash the roof. Celebrating Jamaica's resilience in the face of natural disasters, this account follows the family as they huddle, worry, wait, and hope--together.
From the 1930s through the dawning of a new century, these tender and moving stories underscore living life with style and hidden steel despite one's circumstances and warn against disregarding the past struggles of others. Doux Thibaut negotiates a hard life on the Caribbean island of Paz, confronting the shame of poverty and illegitimacy, the haz
The Sleepers of Roraima first published in Great Britain in 1970; The Age of the Rainmakers first published in 1971.
Set in Jamaica, this novel discusses the island's story of slavery and independence from a personal perspective, shifting from an 18th-century narrative to one in the 1980s. Leigh McCaulay left Jamaica for New York at the age of 15 following her parents' divorce. In the wake of her mother's death another 15 years later, she returns to the island to find her estranged father and the family secrets he holds. As Leigh begins to make an adult life on the island, she learns of her ancestors: Zachary Macaulay, a Scot sent as a young man to be a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation in 18th-century Jamaica who, after witnessing and participating in the brutality of slavery, becomes an abolitionist; and John Macaulay, a missionary who came to Jamaica in the 19th century to save souls and ended up questioning the foundations of his beliefs. Leigh struggles with guilt and confusion over her part in an oppressive history as she also encounters the familiarity of home and the strangeness of being white in a black country. Examining themes of homecoming, belonging, love, and redemption, this novel--loosely based on the author's own family history--explores how individuals navigate the inequalities and privileges they are born into and how the possibilities for connectedness and social transformation occur in everyday contemporary life.
In these truthful, strange, funny, and tragic short stories set in Barbados and the United States, a path is woven through the joys and suffering of women's lives--from breast cancer, madness, and abortion to love, magic, and a deep connectedness between women--leading always to remarkable, unexpected places. These believable characters' voices rage, weep, and laugh through stories that are sometimes in the form of letters, conversations, whispered secrets, or raw cries for help. Themes of race, gender, and sexual orientation are key to these stories, as is the interplay between modernity and the African traditions of the Caribbean. Also explored are the connections between spirituality and the supernatural and between sanity and madness.
Set in multiracial London, this new novel from Peepal Tree's most popular writer is a comedy about identity, community, growing old (and people and dogs). Beneath the laughter lurks a bittersweet sense of human fragility and impermanence.
The third in a quartet of poem-dialogues between Kwame Dawes and John Kinsella, begun in 2015 with the critically acclaimed 'Speak From Here to There' (2016), and followed by 'A New Beginning' (2018), Tangling With The Epic explores commonalities and difference, of the power of poetry and creativity
Strange, fantastic, poetic and captivating, Anthony Joseph's time-bending novel tells the story of Raphael, butcher and would-be author. Many of his characters have lost patience and gone off to do their own thing. But miraculously, the novel that he's been writing for forty-one years, in 100 chapters of 1000 words seems to suddenly write itself...
Seni Seneviratne delves into her father's experience of WW2, the only non-white signalman in a platoon stationed in North Africa. Sparked by a collection of photos, the poems explore the mix of male camaraderie and casual racism of that experience, but also the deep affection hinted at in the way the photographer has framed "Snowball" in his lens.
"Reader, my 'library' is not what it sounds", says the columnist Raul Butler-Singh, writing a piece in the Trinidad Guardian in 2077 to argue that making heterosexuality illegal "may be attended with some inconvenience". Like his character's borrowing from J. Swift, Anton Nimblett raids his library and tampers artfully with its sound. In "Spouter Inn", he reimagines the classic opening of Moby Dick (where Ishmael shares a bed with Queequeg and has the best night's sleep ever) and imagines the tattoed harpoonist's backstory that Melville never wrote. In "Something Promised", Nimblett makes the ultimately odious Mr. Slime in George Lamming's classic In the Castle of My Skin into quite a different kind of person, a gentle gay man who reflects, "Nobody never ask, What it is that make Mr Slime happy, eh?" In "Perseverence Village", David Das shares much of the outward circumstance of V.S. Naipaul's Mr Biswas - except that his most profound experience is a gay sexual encounter in his teens. But Nimblett does not only revisit the absences of past fiction; a wide range of characters are caught in the midst of their missions for self-knowledge, such as Anglican Joyce who wonders how much she has actually chosen her path away from her Spiritual Baptist roots, or Errol who discovers that "If a man pays close enough attention, he finds there is a place, one place, where he is most himself" - which for Errol is his taxi. These are stories that repay close attention. Nimblett is a writer who listens for the background notes, who knows "people not easy, not even the people who look like you", who knows "you would get fool if you believe simple is easy, or simple not important". Whether set in rural Trinidad or urban New York, these stories will enhance Anton Nimblett's reputation as one of the most generous and humane of observers of human life, male or female, gay or straight.
The stranger than fiction true story of Boysie Singh - Robber, Arsonist, Pirate, Mass-Murderer, Vice and Gambling King of Trinidad.
This book, based on a conference organized by Friends of Mr Biswas, explores the writing careers of Seepersad Naipaul and his two sons, Vidia and Shiva, within the supportive but sometimes painful closeness of family connections--synergies that V.S. Naipaul sometimes laboured to conceal, as the publishing history of his father's collection of short stories and Letters between a Father and Son both show. Essays by Brinsley Samaroo and Aaron Eastley focus on Seepersad Naipaul's importance as a journalist who revealed hidden areas in Trinidadian society, who boldly creolised reporting styles and showed his sons the possibilities of combining fiction and non-fiction. Arnold Rampersad, in his moving essay on his journalist father, Jerome, further makes the case for a tradition of Trinidadian newspaper writing that achieves literary quality. Some of the essays find new things to say about V.S. Naipaul: Andre Bagoo writes on his fascination with gay sexuality and cinema; another essay deals with the themes of sadomasochism and incest. Robert Clarke provides a visual dimension to the book in a photo essay on the St James district of Port of Spain, which contains 26 Nepaul Street, the house for Mr Biswas, and J. Vijay Maharaj writes on the complementary art of Shastri Maharaj.
In using an epigraph from the 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, for years incarcerated in the madhouse, Nicholas Laughlin stakes his case for a poetics that is located between a radical innocence of risk and a knowing familiarity with the histories of poetic forms. On the one hand, knowing that "The less you know, the less mistaken", Laughlin's poetry has room for the accidental, the punning slip and the puzzlingly axiomatic ("You bruise a grammar before it bruises you.") Like the brilliant Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill with his "mutants" (retained typos), for Laughlin "Errors are not accidents". On the other hand, Enemy Luck is almost an encyclopaedia of ingenious devices and forms: cut-outs that hint at kidnapping threats; a poem that resembles the often mystifying chapter summaries of the 19th-century novel (in which...); visits to geographical territories mutated from a Wilson Harris novel; found fragments; lengthier extracts from a variety of sources, from Strabo to Oliver Goldsmith, whose meaning is changed by their new contexts; translations where the original is absorbed into a characteristic Laughlin voice; an index to some fugitive travel narrative that invites the reader to construct their own story; seemingly absurd narratives that make perfectly good sense; seemingly realistic narratives that mystify like an Escher building; a cast of personas from Cousin Hermes to King Q. Here is a collection that invites us to active reading, to picking up clues, to inserting ourselves into the dialogue between the poems. Above all, Nicholas Laughlin challenges us to think about the expectations and accumulated experiences we bring to the shaping influence of a variety of literary forms - and helps us to deconstruct them.
Gordon RohlehrâEUR(TM)s critical work is outstanding in the balance it achieves between its particularity and its breadth âEUR" from the detailed unpacking of a poemâEUR(TM)s inner workings, to locating Caribbean writing in the sweep of political and cultural history âEUR" and the equal respect he pays to literary and to popular cultural forms. His âEURArticulating a Caribbean AestheticâEUR? remains a stunningly pertinent and concise account of the historical formation of the cultural shifts that framed Caribbean writing as a distinctive body of work. Indeed, along with Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter and Kenneth Ramchand, no critic has done more to establish the subject of Caribbean writing and its distinctive aesthetics. These essays, written between 1969 to 1986, first published in radical campaigning newspapers such as Tapia and Moko, and first collected in 1992, were the work of a young academic who was both changing the university curriculum, and deeply engaged with the less privileged world outside the campus. Rohlehr catches Caribbean writing at the point when it leaves behind its nationalist hopes and begins to challenge the complex realities of independence. Few critics have written as clearly about how deeply the colonial has remained embedded in the postcolonial. What shines in RohlehrâEUR(TM)s work is not merely its depth, acuity and humanity, but its courage. He writes when his subject is still emergent, without waiting for the credibility of metropolitan endorsements as a guide to the canon. âEURMy Strangled CityâEUR?, a record of how TrinidadâEUR(TM)s poets responded to the upsurge of revolutionary hopes, radical shams, repressions and disappointed dreams of 1964-1975 is an indispensable account of those times and the diversity of literary response that continues to speak to the present. And if in these essays Trinidad is RohlehrâEUR(TM)s primary focus, his perspective is genuinely regional. His native Guyana is always present in his thoughts and several essays show his deep interest in the cultural productions of a âEURdreadâEUR? Jamaica, and in making insightful comparisons between, for instance, reggae and calypso.
Breanne Mc Ivor is a bold new voice in Caribbean fiction. The Trinidad of her stories is utterly contemporary but also a place defined by its folk mythologies and its cultural creations, its traditions of masking and disguises. Her stories confront the increasing economic and cultural divisions between rich and poor, the alarming rise in crime, murders and an alternative economy based on drug trafficking. Their daring is that they look both within the human psyche and back in time to make sense of this reality. The figure of the loup-garou, the violent rhetoric of the Midnight Robber - or even cannibalism lurking far off the beaten track - have become almost comic tropes of a dusty folklore. In Mc Ivor's stories they become real and terrifying daylight presences, monsters who pass among us. Her great gift as a writer is to take us to unexpected places, both to seduce us into a kind of sympathy for her monsters of greater and lesser kinds, and sometimes to reveal a capacity for redemption amongst characters we are tempted to dismiss as shallow, unlikable human beings. The problem, in a world of masks and disguises, is how to tell the difference. In these carefully crafted stories, with room for humor, though of a distinctly gothic kind, Breanne Mc Ivor reaches deep into the roots of Trinidad folk narratives to present us with very modern versions of our troubled selves.
Contemporary poetry from Black British and British Asian writers.
An anthology of the very best contemporary Caribbean short stories, edited by Jeremy Poynting and Jacob Ross.
Set in a colonial Caribbean country in the post-war years, Stranger at the Gate is a classic Caribbean novel with the narrative drive of Hemingway, the sense of fate of classical Greek tragedy, a sensuous appreciation of Jamaica, and an acute, if indulgent, portrayal of the white and light-brown landed and commercial elite.
In a collection that encompasses both Siri and the trickster god Anansi, in his travels from West Africa via the Caribbean to Black working class communities in the Midlands and North East of England, Degna Stone demonstrates not only how well she tells stories, but also of her awareness of the difficulties of communication, where "You know what he's saying / but not what he's getting at", or where the injunction against lying doesn't count in every situation. But if human interactions are at the heart of her poems, she also writes with telling precision about both place and animal nature. Not since Ted Hughes has anyone written so totemically about the crow, ominous, but also emblematic of tenacity, boldness and a harsh kind of beauty. When the poet declares, "I want to be as black as the crows", it is much more than an embrace of blackness in resistance to prejudice.
A novel written in the form of a screenplay, Cut Guavas is a rigorous fictional exploration of fanfiction, politics and Planet of the Apes.
"When Speak from Here to There was published in 2016, it was seen as doing something quite new: two poets recognised as being at the top of their game in, respectively, Australian and Caribbean poetry, had risked, in the words of Will Harris, the almost daily "structure of call-and-response, each utterance...filtered through the other." Karen McCar
Indira Gabriel, recently abandoned by her lover, embarks on a project to reinvigorate a dilapidated bar into something special. Like a Trinidadian Cheers, a rich cast of characters come together in this warm, funny, sexy, and bittersweet first novel.
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