The Colour of Forgetting

Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Paz, reminiscent of Grenada, this book creates and occupies a space between epic poetry and the novel in the way its sequence of interludes bring into focus the lives of family and community through time. Moving from the days of slavery through to the 1980s, it conveys a powerful sense of place, of both attachment and confinement, of the meaning of land in relation to the island's smallness, and the ever-present danger of communal violence. Through the novel comes the voice of three generations of the women the islanders know as Carib, warner women, whose prophecies of disaster are dismissed as madness, but who have an unerring sense of what is to come. Signalled in her title, Merle Collins has much to say about the nature of memory and the fatal nature of amnesia when it comes to the lessons of the past.