Set in Trinidad and Canada in the 1950s, this moving and tender love story evokes a memorable portrayal of a brave young woman's struggle between the traditional, collective Hindu society of her parents and her generation's world of individual destiny and responsibility. The village pundit warns Sastra's mother that her daughter's birth signs foretell two possible karmas: one of prosperous security if she keeps to the well-tried path of obedience to tradition, the other of mixed joy and misery if she should attempt to "fly" and follow her own desires. As Sastra finds herself faced with choosing between these two destinies, the novel explores the interaction between accidents and human responsibility, convention and change, and the problematic workings of fate.
This book brings back to life in rich detail the Afro-Guyanese village community of the author's childhood, where there were old people who had been slaves as children and Africa was not forgotten. It was a time when children did not have open access to the world of adults and childhood had not yet disappeared, and perhaps for this reason, the men and women who pass through these stories have a mystery and singularity that are as unforgettable for the reader as they were for the child.
The first Indian indentured laborers came to the Caribbean more than150 years ago, and their traditional values have had to confront a rapidly changing world in 20th century Trinidad. "Highway in the Sun" tells the story of Tiger and Urmilla's first year of marriage away from their extended family and their struggles relating to their new Afro-Creole neighbors in the suburbs of Port of Spain. In "Home Sweet India," Johnny is dismayed by his loss of culture and threatened by the emergence of Creole nationalism, and plans to return to India. In "Turn Again Tiger," Tiger learns that he must not turn his back on his Indian past. These plays demonstrate the choices Indians in the Caribbean must make between tradition and creolization.
A satisfying and original work, this collection of poems offers moving personal insights as it reconstructs a Jamaican childhood from memory. Using striking metaphors drawn from the fauna and flora of Jamaica as well as images of painting as overarching devices, this volume explores the dichotomies of plentitude and emptiness, presence and absence, and nourishment and poison. Never allowing her longing for the island to become sentimental, the poet meticulously recreates her world in these heartfelt poems.
A brave and pioneering treatment of sexual identity in Caribbean literature, this novel, first published in 1960, follows the fortunes of Johnnie Sobert, a Jamaican exile who works in London at a club that caters to black American servicemen. In flight from his dominant, possessive mother, he immerses himself in the bohemian Soho scene and adopts a wisecracking persona as a cover for his deep-seated insecurities. Adding to Johnnie's confusion is the fact that when he is not at work, he navigates a completely different life in Hempstead, where he lives in a bedsitter and carries on an unsatisfying affair with his white landlady, Fiona. These two worlds provide a lively portrait of Britons reacting to the growing presence of blacks and Asians in their neighborhoods, and Johnnie takes lessons from each place. By the time he finally decides to move in with his gay friend, Dick, he is much better equipped with self-awareness--but he has yet to make a decision about where his desires truly lie.
A complex exploration of the cultural conflicts of race and gender, this novel focuses on the journey of a Guyanese woman from her British colonial country to the deeply racist London of the 1950s. Without an extended family support system or an understanding of her new home, she finds comfort in her work with troubled children of fellow black settlers. Confronting racial divides, memories of a cruel childhood, and the oppression of women, this story emphasizes the power of human solidarity beyond ethnicity and gender.
Fans of Loretta Collins's debut poetry book, The Twelve Foot Neon Woman, will not be disappointed with her stunning second collection, set against the natural disasters of Puerto Rico.
This is a moving story of a family's beginnings, growth and, in the context both of time and Trinidadian society, its inevitable dispersal. Savi Naipaul Akal's memoir pays tribute to remarkable parents, so different but equal in importance to their large family. It is an account of family loyalty, sacrifice, and sometimes tensions. Through this focus, the memoir also gives a sharply observed picture of cultural change in Trinidad from colony to independent nation, of being Indian in a Creole society, of the role of education, and her parents' encouragement of herself and her sisters to make independent lives for themselves. The memoir gives an acute analysis of the pressures that led many of the family to emigrate, but also of the good lives made by Savi and her husband that led them to "put down their bucket" and stay. Above all, this memoir offers the pleasure of writing which is elegant and lucid, with a distinctively personal voice.
Newly available after 40 years, this partly autobiographical love affair with the Jamaican language and landscape gives a penetrating look at the racial politics of the 1950s and 1960s and the search for self in a world divided by class. Ramsay Tull is witness to the black racial discontents and the desire for national independence that are threatening the old colonial order; but when a chance comes to study at Oxford University, he becomes immersed in European literary culture and Marxism. On his return to Jamaica, Ramsay becomes actively involved in radical nationalist politics and begins his second journey, away from his middle-class origins and back to a true appreciation of the Jamaican people.
The first book ever to look in-depth at reggae as an artistic form, Natural Mysticism shows how reggae combines politics, sex, spirituality and art, and offers in depth analyzes of leading reggae artists such as Burning Spear, Lee Scratch Perry and Bob Marley.
Offering a poetic landscape that echoes themes of migration, family, love, and loss, this collection of poems reflects the author's personal journey as a woman of Sri Lankan and English heritage. The poems cross oceans and centuries, traveling from colonial Britain to Ceylon in the 15th century and back to Yorkshire in the 20th Century. Elsewhere, time collapses and carries her from a 21st century Leeds back to the flax mills of the 19th century and another poem, based on childhood memories, places her in 1950's Yorkshire but echoes links with her Sri Lankan heritage.
A boy is killed on a government minister's orders as part of his mission to clean up the country and others made complicit must explore their consciences; a youth gets ready to play his role in the country's lucrative kidnap business; a sister tries to make peace with the parents of the white American girl her brother has murdered; a gangster makes his posthumous lament. Trinidad in all its social tumult is ever present in these stories, which range across the country's different ethnic communities, across rural and urban settings, from locals and expatriates to the moneyed elite and the poor scrabbling for survival. What ties the collection together is Sharon Millar's achievement of a distinctively personal voice: cool, unsentimental and empathetic. If irony is the only way to inscribe contemporary Trinidad, there is also room for both generous humor and the possibility of redemption.
Smartt's new chapbook collection advocates a revolutionary decampment from the madhouse of desires "reigned in" to protect a precarious and code of Caribbean respectability. These poems sing, dance and love passionately - from the hazardous terrain of same-sex loving in Jamaica, to the manipulation of straight marriage conventions in Barbados.
In 1765, Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, a Bengali secretary employed by the East India Company, traveled on a mission to Britain to seek protection for the Mogul emperor Shah Alam II. The mission was aborted by the greed and duplicity of Robert Clive, but it resulted in this remarkable account of the Mirza's travels in Britain and Europe. This is an entertaining, unique, and culturally valuable document of those journeys.
Offers a memoir of eight years that were dominated by the awakening, eruption and grumbling aftermath of Montserrat's Soufriere. This title gives an account of the impact of the eruption on the life and viability of this small Caribbean island. It is also an account of the processes of stress, loss, grieving emptiness and the rebuilding of self.
Songs of frustration and defiance from African slaves and displaced Indian laborers are expressed in a harsh and lyrical Guyanese Creole far removed from contemporary English in these provocative Caribbean poems. An insightful critical apparatus of English translations surrounds these lyrics, shedding light on their meaning, while at the same time cleverly commenting on the impossibility of translating Creole and parodying critical attempts to explain and contextualize Caribbean poetry. Twenty years after the initial release of this work, the power of these poems and the self-fashioned critique that accompanies them remain a lively and vital part of Caribbean literature.
When Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, belief and scepticism, and vision and analysis engage in profound and lively debate. Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their careful craft of prophecy; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on - a sense of wonder, of spiritual empowerment and the conviction that the world cannot be understood, or accepted, without embracing visions that challenge the way it appears to be.
Issues of caste, slavery, racism, and the immigrant experience in the early 19th century are addressed in this novel. Rohini and Vidia, a young married couple struggling for survival in a small, caste-ridden Indian village are seduced by a recruiter's persuasive talk of easy work and plentiful land. They sign up as indentured laborers to go to British Guiana and discover their harsh fate as "bound coolies" in a country only just emerging from the savage brutalities of slavery. In their problematic encounters with the Afro-Guyanese, hostile to immigrant labor, they confront the truths of their uprooted condition and learn to live with their fate.
Writing from a place somewhere between Trinidad and Brixton, from a vantage point that is at once insider and outsider, these poems from acclaimed poet Roger Robinson lead to a state of alienation and unbelonging in black British London. Such a changing reality is all too evident to the periodic returnee, who is conscious of both his growing difference and the fragility of his memories of the world he has known. But these are far from bleak and alienated poems as the very fear of loss generates a drive to re-create the remembered world in all its richness, humor, and sensuality. Displaying a faith in a human capacity for regeneration, these stirring works shape new concepts of home by the very rewarding act of re-creating memory through stories that are gracefully and elegantly rendered.
This novel that echoes the styles of Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul follows a young Guyanese engineer appointed to help save and shore up a Kent coastal village's sea defenses, and his relationship with the old woman with whom he lodges. Learning more about the village's history through his relationship with Mrs. Rutherford, the narrator discovers that underlying the village's Englishness is a latent violence that echoes the imperial past, forcing him to not only reconsider his perceptions of himself and his native Guyana, but also to examine the connection between land and memory.
After 20-year-old Thomas Inkle is left the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the West Indies, he is rescued by Yarico, a Carib woman who takes him as her lover. Their erotic encounter, which has a profound effect on both, is explored with poetic, imaginative intensity. Amongst the Caribs, Inkle is a mere child whose survival depends entirely on Yarico's favor and protection. When he is rescued and taken with Yarico to the slave island of Barbados, however, she is entirely at his mercy. Loosely based on a popular narrative in the 17th and 18th centuries, this version of the tale's mythic dimensions are reinterpreted from both a female and a black perspective, engaging the reader in the psychological truths of the characters' experiences while laying the past bare as a text for the present.
After years in Europe Peter returns unexpectedly to his West Indian home to renew contacts with people from his past.: former lovers, schoolmates, and teachers - his mother and the wife he had more or less abandoned. The island has changed with it: not always for the better.
Winner of the Guyana Prize, The Language of Eldorado has been long recognised as an outstanding work of Caribbean poetry. Its beauty lies in its ability to convey complex ideas through concrete images that work on the reader both sensually and intellectually. Its focus is the relationship between language, landscape and the history of human settlement in Guyana. The collection is dedicated to Wilson Harris whose challenging and paradigm-changing ideas on these matters deeply influenced Mark McWatt's own thinking.
The broadcaster behind BBC Radio 3's "Jazz Line-Up" presents the first in a two-part musical odyssey culminating in the present day, with this first volume beginning in Tudor times and tracing how black music in Britain has responded to empire, colonialism and the new freedoms of post-war Britain.
The story of a Trinidadian orphan, who falls in love with a nun, gets adopted by a thief and must make a nest in the expanse of madness around him.
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