In its title, Strange Fruit refers to the song of a lynching made famous by Billie Holiday and to the malign persecution that drove Kamau Brathwaite from his New York home to resettlement in his native Barbados. But the title also points to the enigma of beauty created out of that experience of cultural lynching, in poems of urgency, elegance, wisdom and brave humour. Strange Fruit charts a movement from the pain of poems "written along the v/edge & coast of death and carrefour", the despair of sensed erasure and abandonment, of dwindled voice, to a moment of revelation of a living ancestral presence. On the way, what you hear is Brathwaite's distinctive Barbadian nation-voice, his alter-native vision, his creolisms of sound and graphic display, in dialogue with presences of many kinds: icons of survival and resistance such as Louis Armstrong, "teef of sorrow", Bedward, Mandela, Ogou with his prompting to resolve and the visiting sparrows who are "messengers of soul". The urgency comes in the dialogue between a sense of frailty ("the last green slanting curve/ of wind and final bell") and the urge to recreate the world against the loss of memory, the recognition that "o yes we leave - and soon//but what happens to the turn/of spirits left on their wheel & verge/of final shape. the soft concentric runnels of our labour?" The wisdom comes out of the struggle between acknowledging the pain of loss, the fear that the world is becoming a worse, not better place, and the satisfactions to be found in knowing one has resisted. It is a collection full of beauties of form, phrase and sound, such as in the poem "Sleep Widow" where instead of finding comfort, the poet and loved woman "bull-fight like lock-horm logga-head until the evening pools the grief along our edges/ and cools us to this peace", the very sounds in the poem fighting their way towards resolution. This text is performed in the author's SVS-sycorax video style.
Featured title in The Big Jubilee Read. A haunting ghost story by Edgar Mittelholzer.
Ramlochan's poems take the reader through a series of imaginative narratives that are at once emotionally familiar and compelling, even as the characters evoked and the happenings they describe are heavily symbolic. Her poems reference the language and structural patterns of the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction, though with her own distinctive features, including the presence of such folkloric Trinidadian figures as the Duenne, those wandering lost spirits whose feet point backwards.
Wilson Harris's ninth novel, first published in 1970, is a work of the most revolutionary and far-reaching kind of science or speculative fiction. Victor is in search of his father, Adam, once a revolutionary worker who was sent to prison many years ago for burning down the factory he worked in. Since then Victor has lost touch with him, but suspects he is living as a pork-knocker (gold prospector) in the remote Cuyuni-Mazaruni district of Guyana. As he climbs in search of his father, Victor both revisits his past relationship with him and replays his father's trial, which also becomes his own. Victor's search is for spiritual grace, for the compensations of love and the glimmerings of a true understanding of the world he exists in, and the reader is invited to share in Victor's struggling ascent to consciousness, knowing that it can never be other than provisional.
Olive Senior's new collection of stories, The Pain Tree, is wide-ranging in scope, time period, theme, locale, and voice.
This compendium of Edgar Mittelholzer's uncollected writings, compiled and edited by Juanita Cox, brings together his early collection of sketches of Georgetown life, Creole Chips, his speculative novella, The Adding Machine, twenty-four short stories, two short plays, his published and unpublished poetry and essays covering travel, literature and his personal beliefs. This is mostly work written before Mittelholzer came to England in search of publishing opportunities. It shows a writer still deeply concerned with the Caribbean, a writer of playful humour who is committed to entertain, not to preach as his later work tends to do, and a writer who wrote in a variety of genres (speculative fiction, crime, and the Gothic) that contemporary Caribbean writers are rediscovering.
Jacob Ross has been hailed as 'a writer of formidable technical range and emotional depth'.
From headless schoolgirls to talking food and threesomes, pretty much anything can happen in these short stories. Ranging in form from flash fiction to intense psychological drama, magical realism, horror and erotica, the stories can be serious, too.
The title of 'Wife' is both ironic and deeply serious. There are wittily sharp poems on the gender inequalities and potential prisons of marriage, that are in dialogue with poems that celebrate the physical joys of intimacy, and poems that explore the processes of self-creation that take place in the closeness to the male other. Their context is a
A breath of Caribbean fresh air, these poems are humorous, beautifully crafted, and perfectly pitched to their audience. These poems are enhanced by 20 illustrations, 3 in full color. A staple of the schools poetry anthology, John Lyon's poems never fail to stand out for their originality and exuberance.
From well-known and award-winning authors--including Bernardine Evaristo, Fred D'Aguiar, and Leone Ross--to previous unpublished writers, this ambitious and intriguing anthology of short stories showcases each author's most challenging work. These works from writers who are happy to describe themselves as Black British, have a rich variety of styles, forms, and themes, from raw realism, the erotic, and elegant economy, to the fanciful, humorous, and the tender. The contributors to Closure display a keen awareness of the short story form in all its contemporary possibilities as a way of telling and finding a form for the writer's vision. These are stories about the ways in which we do and do not love, unrequited yearnings, the quiet and often hidden violence in our lives, moments of epiphany, and the precious occasions of jubilation and uplift.
Another Crossing tells the stories of an individual life, of a family, of the communities of Chapeltown and Harehills, and of crucial moments in the making of Leeds as a place where cultures meet. In poetry that sings from the page, the collection re-creates places that have been swept away by time, like the house on 56 Cowper Street where Kadijah Ibrahiim's Jamaican grandmother lived, where there was black pride and Victorian respectability, where there were aunts who gave the young girl a cultural education, where her grandfather entertained his friends in the sanctum of the West Indian front room. Or there was her mother's house on Gathorne Mount, a place that moved to the looser beat of reggae, where there was strict discipline, love, good food--and blues parties in the cellar. The poems tell of the days when youths were excluded from school for growing their locks, of the bonfire night riots, police harassment, and overt racism. But they were also the days when black people in Leeds were creating their own culture in music, dance, and dress--shaped by influences from the Caribbean, from Black American music, and from British punk, into something unique. In rhythms that draw from the music being celebrated, with an unerring eye for the details of style that catch a moment, Another Crossing explores the recent past to ask questions about the present: Where has that political fire gone? Where are the energies that danced to a political beat?
In her second collection of poetry, author Tanya Shirley uses a mixture of acute observation, outrage, and outrageousness to present stories that have their finger on the pulse of contemporary Jamaica in all its exuberance and brokenness. Speaking honestly and powerfully about the experiences of women, these poems are written with a lyric and sensual attention to both the public and the private in the Caribbean
Drawing on dramatic monologue, historical narratives, poetry of witness, and an integral intimate-domestic voice, this compilation portrays a visceral emotive patchwork of everyday dramas in the fabric of ordinary life. Written by a poet whose sense of rootedness shapes the dimensions of her work, it delves into a multiplicity of places, characters, locations, landscapes, and languages. From Grenada to the Heathrow airport, these poems are interconnected in a larger diasporic story.
Originally published in 1967, An Absence of Ruins is a poignant portrayal of a man shaped by the colonial education of the Caribbean intellectual class. Orlando Patterson offers a devastating critique of middle-class intellectualism through the self-condemning perceptions of the main character, Alexander Blackman, and the vibrant reality of the world he is unable to embrace--the world of the Jamaican working class. An intensive and inward portrayal of what the world looks like to a man who has been shaped by the deeply entrenched consequences of colonialism, this novel is full of sardonic humor and a nihilism that emerges as a kind of integrity.
Against a soundtrack of world music--from salsa to reggae and jazz--and in a vibrant blend of English, Spanish, and Patois, this collection delivers tender and incendiary hymns of homage to the Caribbean, American, and British metropolises. In a poetic form that is lyrical, narrative, sensual, and often experimental, it offers insight into the urgent social issues impacting the everyday world and its extraordinary people. As they seek connections across boundaries of geography, race, ethnicity, language, gender, age, and economic class, these poems express a hope for the future and the possibility for cultural metamorphosis.
Word has spread that Seduce is dead, and mourners gather for her wake. But with Seduce in her coffin, her memories and consciousness of those around her persist. There are those like Hyacinth who have come to make sure that that "dutty filthy woman" has finally ceased to be the temptation of the husbands of decent, respectable women. Seduce's daughter, Glory, full of thwarted love and shame, hopes for yet fears the rescue of her mother's soul while her grandchildren, Son and Loo, both in different ways marked by their upbringing in a dysfunctional home, search to find something positive in Seduce's life for themselves. Even her former lover, Mikey, comes to make his peace. Set on the mythical Church Island in the Caribbean, upstanding sanctity and the vigorous life of profanity, the old ways and the new, fight over Seduce in the person of Pastor Collins and Seduce's old colleagues in the flesh, the Lampis. In this remarkable debut novel, told in nation-language prose that is poetic, delicate, vulgar, and slyly funny, Desiree Reynolds has powerful things to say about race, class, and the struggle between men and women.
Bringing together previously published works and original poems from poet Edward Baugh--one of the most instantly recognizable voices in Caribbean poetry with his dry wit, poise, and elegance--these stunning poems cover a wide swath of subjects, including race, history, cricket, love, the academic life, and the consolations of natural beauty. With shrewdly analytical eye, additional works look at a modern Jamaica that at once includes the worlds of urbane polish, gated communities, religious enthusiasm, and a black majority still struggling to overcome the wrongs inflicted in the past. Above all, the subject of Baugh's poetry is the poem, and its struggle to come into existence as a moment of clarity in a world of chaos.
A collection of short fiction by international authors, this anthology asks artist émigrés to describe the forces that pushed them to places far away from home--and how they propel their fictional characters on similar journeys. The resulting stories reveal a rich tangle of motives for departure, including romantic dreams, big ambitions, family ties, and flight from poverty and persecution. The contributors include Niki Aguirre, Naomi Alderman, Tahmina Anam, Monica Arac de Nyeko, Brian Chikwava, Junot Diaz, Romesh Gunesekera, Nam Le, and Zoe Wicomb, all of whom explore the complexities of 21st-century migration in locales from Abidjan, Accra, and Cape Coast to Dijon, London, and Los Angeles.
Uniquely pairing Caribbean grievances with political Islam, this intriguing novel begins as a sad story of unrequited love but descends into the nightmare world of a stalker. Told through the eyes of Albert Aziz, a Guyanese Indian Muslim, the story opens with his boyhood memory of falling from a tree and being badly injured, after which he developed an obsessive attraction to a young Chinese girl, Alice Wong, who lived on the same sugar estate. Now, years later, Aziz lives in Canada and has become a highly paid engineer in the nuclear industry. Although he has a new life in a different country, Aziz still nurtures racial resentments about the way he was treated as a child on the sugar estate and has become a supporter of radical Islam. He also begins to fixate again on Alice and tracks her down. He finds that she is divorced and living in England and asks her to marry him. Though Aziz is telling the story, it is clear that Alice's apprehension is slowly mounting as she fears the violence that will occur if she turns him down.
What begins as a romantic tryst in a tropical setting quickly becomes, in this novel first published in 1938, an imaginative exploration of two opposing cultural and economic frameworks in the Caribbean--the dichotomy between the peasant plot, where cultivation and nature mingle, and the estate where land is simply an industrial resource. When Teresa Craddock rebuilds her life on an island resembling Dominica, she rediscovers lost passion by becoming involved with the new owner of an abandoned estate, Derek Morrel. Torn between her desires and the conflict of values with Morrel, the feisty, witty Teresa eventually comes to realize that Morrel's attitudes towards her body and the land are the same.
A bleak portrayal of life on the Dungle--the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat--this beautifully poetic, existentialist novel turns an unwavering eye to life in the Jamaican ghetto. By interweaving the stories of Dinah, a prostitute who can never quite escape the circumstances of her life, and Brother Solomon, a respected Rastafarian leader who allows his followers to think that a ship is on its way to take them home to Ethiopia, this brutally poetic story creates intense and tragic characters who struggle to come to grips with the absurdity of life. As these downtrodden protagonists shed their illusions and expectations, they realize that there is no escape from meaninglessness, and eventually gain a special kind of dignity and stoic awareness about life and the universe.
On an inward-looking island dominated by the Catholic Church, John Lestrade mourns both the death of friends and the inauthentic, suffocating quality of his own life. When he feels he can no longer find solace in his regular means of escape--a room on a hill--he forsakes his self-imposed exile and finds himself drawn to action and defiance. Opening himself up to change, John discovers hope and gleans the possibility of change and an escape from the inauthentic. Originally published in 1968, this intense and minimalist novel engages philosophical ideas, religious tradition, and colonial consciousness.
Told through the memories of John Campbell, an old man whose life goes back to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, this novel is an intensely vivid narrative of the history of Jamaican nationalism. In the present, John Campbell's grandnephew Garth listens eagerly to the old man's story, gathering information and advice for his generation's nationalist movement. First published in 1949, this novel is a pioneering work both in exploiting the rhythms of Caribbean language and recounting the making of Jamaican national consciousness from the perspective of the black majority. It explores the conflict between a violent and peaceful means in the struggle for social justice.
Told in two voices, educated Jamaican English and the nation-language of the people, this dramatic novel tells the story of a well-meaning, middle-class woman and a young boy from the ghetto whom she desperately wants to help. Alternating between the perspectives of the woman and the boy, the story engages with issues of race and class, examines th
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