Search results for ""peepal tree press ltd""

"Fauna" is not just a collection of individually rewarding poems but a carefully structured whole. Using metaphors drawn from the fauna and flora of Jamaica and images drawn from painting as the over-arching devices, Bishop explores the tensions between plenitude and emptiness, presence and absence, the nourishing and the poisonous in her memories of the rural Jamaican childhood that has shaped her. There is the lushness of scene, but also the way that 'the smell of mango' will always be associated with childhood trauma, or the richness of avocado contrasted with the allamanda who admits, 'Everything alive develops a defence...Mine is poison; all parts of me are toxic'. There are imagined scenes that are highly focused and there are the blurred images of the father who is always at the edge of the photograph. And from the perspective of New York, Bishop sees herself as another kind of fauna, the Jamaican birds who can be found everywhere. 'In North America three or four species/have been identified from the peculiar way they sing.' This is a moving and heart-felt collection, but Bishop never allows the siren voice of longing for return to become sentimental. Always there is the drive towards the artist's desire to remake the world and to work meticulously at what can be left in, what must be taken out.

Read more less

In "After-image", Dennis Scott displays in ever more refined, pared-down ways the qualities that, in his previous collections, established him as a major Caribbean poet. There is his acute intelligence, seriousness worn lightly, and meticulous craft with sound and the appearance of the poem on the page. There is his resolute integrity as a Black and Caribbean poet with a sense of multiple inheritances who refuses to be conscripted into any sentimental or monolithic stance, who goes 'among the fashionable drums/trying to keep true my own blood's subtle beat'. There is the warm humanity of his poems about love and the nourishment of his marriage. There is his actor's ability to get under the skin of those he observes, to see 'so many tales/ in every silent face', his sense of the masks and rituals, the significance of tiny movements in the interactions between people. Particularly arresting in "After-image", poems drawn from the wealth of manuscripts left by Scott after his untimely death in 1991, and edited by his friend and fellow poet, Mervyn Morris, are those that focus on his own coming death, his hope/confidence that 'when this machine is dead/ the poems it made will flare/ wild...' These are poems vibrant with life, with curiosity about this new journey, 'a certain satisfaction from/ questions articulated', poems of an inspiring courage. Though the world becomes confined to a ward, a body, a tirelessly curious mind, there is no sense of diminution when a vase of flowers on a hospital table brings him 'The surprise of wild flowers!/ Walls fall open, roofs melt/ I too grow upwards.' There are the pleasures of travelling light, 'A small bird, bearing/ news from the front', and the pangs and consolations of not knowing what is to come. He sees the bird that 'shits on my neat/ green/ garden// I do not know/ what will grow', but he also draws peace from the sense of continuation when he watches the ocean and thinks 'Let the sea repeat/ unwatched, its long, salt hymn.' And, there is his poet's wit writing about death the editor in the last poem in the collection, the last two lines left artfully incomplete, of waiting on 'that blue hand that/ could be here, now'.

Read more less

Carib's Leap brings together work from a dozen previous collections, and major new poems including those on the Big Drum Dance of Carriacou, poems that are alight with almost forty years of imaginative involvement with the Caribbean.Laurence Lieberman is an American poet with deep Caribbean affiliations. He has published twelve collections of poetry and three volumes of literary essays.

Read more less

Earl McKenzie was born in rural Mount Charles, St. Andrew Jamaica in 1943. He attended Oberlin High School and Mico Teachers College. Then he lived for some years in the USA and Canada where he obtained a BA and MFA from Columbia University and a Ph D from the University of British Columbia. In Jamaica he taught in several high schools and at Church Teachers College. He currently lectures in Philosophy at the University of the West Indies, Mona. In addition to his poetry in 'Against Linearity' (Peepal Tree, 1993), he is the author of the novel, 'A Boy Named Ossie: A Jamaican Childhood' (Heinemann, 1991) and 'Two Roads to Mount Joyful & Other Stories' (Longman, 1992). His work has appeared in the following anthologies: 'Caribbean New Wave'; 'The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories' and 'Perspectives'.

Read more less

Delores Gauntlett's poems give a real sense of what it means to be a contemporary Jamaican in 'this hard country', a land 'spinning on the edge of nerves', where 'shocking news is the norm'. Mostly alluded to, this Jamaica of dread is directly approached in a number of poems: a brother held at gunpoint, where it is the mental wounds that sap , or in the careful euphemisms of describing the mother unable 'to rise from the day/of her son's affliction at the boot of authority'. Her collection also bears witness to what enables Jamaicans to endure, the ties of love, friendship and family, though here too she writes without sentimentality of the prisons that people make for themselves and the fragility of such ties. But Gauntlett is much more than a reporter of tribulations. Hers is a concern with 'the code-breaking edge of thought', with the capacity of the poem to get inside the 'thisness' of being, to demand reflectiveness as 'each phrase's after-image/ trails in the mind to be later held to the light', or to return down old lanes with new understandings.Delores Gauntlett is Jamaican. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including [i]The Caribbean Writer[/i], [i]Poetry News[/i], [i]Kunapipi[/i], [i]The Observer Literary Arts[/i], and [i]The Jamaica Journal[/i].

Read more less

A group of sixth formers vandalize an exclusive Georgetown club on the day of their school leaving, coincidentally also the day of their country's independence. Several of their parents think a lesson is in order and the semblance of a trial is organized. The sentences they are given are suspended provided that they fulfil the task set by their English teacher, who has interceded on their behalf. Each must write a short story that says something about the newly independent Guyana. Years later, Mark McWatt, one of the group, is handed the papers of his old school friend, Victor Nunes, who has disappeared, feared drowned, in the Guyanese interior. The papers contain some of the stories, written before the project collapsed when the group realized the trial was a hoax. As a tribute to Victor Nunes, McWatt decides to collect the rest of the stories from his friends. "Suspended Sentences" is a tour-de-force of invention. The stories, entertaining in their own right, whether supposedly written by eighteen year olds or in later adult life, work not only like Chaucerian tales to reveal their teller, but have an affectionately satirical take on the nature of Guyanese fiction making. By ranging across Guyanese ethnicities, gender and time in the purported authorship of these stories, McWatt creates a richly dialogic work of fiction. And when McWatt apparently slips some of his own biography into a brilliantly comic story of betrayal (that ends in the victim's suicide), but told by another member of the group, the implications of the collection's subtitle, 'Fictions of atonement' become teasingly ambiguous.

Read more less

Based on the experiences of a lecture and reading tour in South Africa, these poems deal with the state of a society just unfreezing from apartheid, but in indirect ways which illuminate by their obliqueness."The poems deal with that landscape, each one like a sharply etched woodcut, ranging from a fine tribute to a poet caught 'under the strong shaft of the Johannesburg sun' of this politically volcanic city, to a 'frozen image' of sacred ibises in Durban's Botanical Garden. None of his poems is tendentious, but each is tense with quiet intensity."Mario Relich, Lines ReviewSudeep Sen lives and works in New Delhi & London. He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS.

Read more less

With engaging illustrations by Paul Harris, Janet Jagan's first collection of children's stories has tales of animals, of Guyanese children, Amerindian legend, and the title story which recounts the rural childhood of her husband, then the President of Guyana."It is a very positive document as reading material for children and its appearance is made infinitely more important because of the literary wasteland that so many Guyanese have inherited where the habit and value of reading became alien to many local children... The author has a consistently clear, confident, neat and mature style in her narration which the most discriminating reader will appreciate. This is fortified by her talent for crisp and lively dialogue even where plots are slight... the very moving story of "Kathy and the Ring" is one of the most memorable in the book, which is effectively illustrated by Paul Harris who never fails to capture the correct expressions and give life and character to the various animals."Al CreightonJanet Jagan has served Guyana for over fifty years as a politician and as editor of The Mirror newspaper. She was the first woman President of Guyana.

Read more less

Cyril Dabydeen brings a poet's vision to these stories which span the crossing between the Caribbean and North America. They have a surface of gritty realism, but move inwards to explore the hidden dreams and latent capacities of his characters. Whether in the unsettling landscapes of rural Berbice in Guyana (with its ferocious crocodiles and even a spliff-toting Rasta), the wilderness of the Canadian North, or the urban melting pot of Toronto, Dabydeen's characters are memorably alert to what makes them feel either at home or alien in their various landscapes. Ranging from the extremely funny to the tragic, these stories are full of poetry, tension and sometimes terror. Cyril Dabydeen involves the reader creatively in a world of shifting grounds.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

Read more less

Ian McDonald's poetry embraces Caribbean possibility with a romantic fervour which still acknowledges what is harsh and painful in the region. He has both the gift to see 'the ibis-bird in pigeons' and an ironical consciousness of the poet's gilding eye. There are love poems of lyric grace and stunning simplicity; exuberant paeans to nature in all its beauty, fierceness and cruelty; narratives which grip and characters who are powerfully memorable. Here is a celebration of life which is made all the more intense by the consciousness of mortality which lurks behind every vivid occasion.Readers who have enjoyed Ian McDonald's recent work in the much praised collections Mercy Ward and Essequibo will be delighted by these earlier poems, only a few of which have been available to date in anthologies and Caribbean literary journals.Ian McDonald is Trinidadian by birth and Guyanese by long residence and adoption. He is the author of the recently filmed The Hummingbird Tree, four collections of poetry and a play. He edits Kyk-over-Al.

Read more less

Percival Veer has risen to the tenth floor of the Federal Bank of Charouga, has acquired a large and imposing house and a young and attentive wife. But satisfaction eludes him. Guilt over a past wrong begins to trouble him and a recurrent dream of caves disturbs his sleep. As Percy's inner world crumbles, he is gripped by an obsessive desire to explore the deep limestone caves of his island, dimly remembered from his boyhood. This gripping, poetic novel charts Percy's meeting with his spiritual guide, Cane Arrow and his hallucinatory descent into the cave's depths.Percival Veer's journey through the caves is not only a journey to truths that lie within him, but a journey to a vision of 'Creole magic': 'worlds of possibilities, coalescing visions and revisions of races and their juxtapositions.' This vision contrasts sharply with the cynical and pragmatic world of ethnic politics which has been his corrupting environment as a career bureaucrat."Realistic and dreamlike, explicit and mysterious... The descriptions are evocative and sensual. A compelling read." Carole Klein"A realistic and convincing portrait of self-loathing." Wilson HarrisAnthony Kellman was born in Barbados. He currently teaches at Augusta College, Georgia.

Read more less

The Chase is a mature reflection on the passions of a full life. Through its four sections, The Chase, Utopia, Ars Longa and Vita Brevis, five decades of poetry are brought together to form a dramatic journey through Figueroa's preoccupations. Inspiring the complex architecture of the whole is the powerful desire to hold together the spirit and the flesh, the Caribbean and Europe in one vision.Figueroa has been described as 'the most classical' of Caribbean poets, but he is unquestionably a poet of the Caribbean, with an idiosyncratic vision of the region, whose images and diction are nurtured by its sights and sounds.John Figueroa was born in Jamaica; he has held chairs in English, Education and Humanities at Universities in Africa, Puerto Rico and the West Indies. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry. He died in 1999.

Read more less

'Thanks be that we and some things are.' Kevyn Arthur's poems celebrate the provisionality of life of a 'precarious people', 'ducking from hurricanes on little lumps of rock.' His poems, the work of 'this altered dolphin', begin with an acute awareness of time and history as the distinctive difference in humankind's relationships to nature. His sense of the Caribbean is diverse, embracing the multiformity of its traditions. He uses a pithy and provocative humour to demolish views which are partial or narrow. Here is a voice which is lively and musical, sometimes classical in form, but always energetically demotic in using a diversity of language registers.In several poems, but most explicitly in 'Excerpt from The Whole Caboodle', Kevyn Arthur opposes the cultural politics of skin for a humanism which does not think: 'Cogito, ergo sum Aethiops' and where his grievance against colonialism is that it 'made me take too long to understand / that identity is a rudimentary fiction: that England and Barbados are Nowhere /... and we each are the Makers of the song we all sing' ('England and Nowhere')."Arthur's observations open up new vistas in the re-exploration of human possibilities... exciting." Mario Relich, Lines Review"Uses... great rolling, roaring tirades of slang, anger, lust, irony to powerful effect."Iron MagazineNovelist and poet Kevyn Arthur was born in Barbados in 1942. He has worked as a journalist and as a philosophy lecturer, and currently lives in Virginia.

Read more less

Bibhu Padhi's poems take place within the framework of home, the ancient Orissan town of Cuttack and the round of births and deaths within the circle of family and friends. The poems bring this world alive with an extraordinary intensity, investing the everyday with visionary depth. James Merrill praised Padhi's first collection, Going to the Temple, as "lucid, engaging" and these qualities are shown to even greater extent in this collection. To be part of Padhi's world is to share a pure, rich treasure.Bibhu Padhi was born in 1951 in the ancient town of Cuttack in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. His first collection, Going to the Temple was published in 1988.

Read more less

Delia Mohammed gives Mr. Ni Win two bags for safe keeping. In them he finds her story of escape from the suffocations of her father and Caribbean island life into the nightmarish world of an illegal immigrant in America. Abandoned at customs by her lover, Trinidad, who turns out to be not at all what he seems, Delia is forced to fend for herself. She brings to the task both an acute intelligence and a naievety born of her greater familiarity with literature than with life. But if literature is no guide to the hazards of migrant life, it provides Delia with meaning and psychic protection, and the resonances, with King Lear for instance, give the novel a wholly convincing depth.When Delia fails to return for her bags, Mr Ni Win becomes the editor of her story. As editor he is moved by her refusal to be a victim and her determination to recreate herself in a hazardous and unfamiliar environment. Stalled in his own life, he is re-energised by her intense involvement with life and with literature, and his reflections on his role create a further important dimension with relation to the connections between writing and gender.N.D. Williams is Guyanese and lives in New York. In 1976 his novel Ikael Torass won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize.

Read more less

In response to Anthony Kellman's first collection of poems, In Depths of Burning Light, Kamau Brathwaite wrote of being "startled and excited by his original vision." Of Watercourse, the celebrated Martiniquan poet and novelist Edouard Glissant wrote: "Watercourse is more than a collection of poems. It is the continual amazement evoked by Caribbean landscape: a single dialogue between the sea and the land... a song whose dazzling waves foam among the islands... Anthony Kellman's poetry has the strength and sweetness of vegetation with the power of progressively revealing to us the nature of the earth in which it grows.""His enchantment is that dangerous, double-edged power of a Prospero, a magician who has visioned life in all its complexity..."Joseph BruchacThe collection is illustrated by the poet's brother, Winston Kellman.Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados. He currently teaches at Augusta College, Georgia.

Read more less

Data and Big-Bye begin their arranged marriage as strangers, sexually ignorant and under the eagle eye of Big-Bye's domineering mooma. She wants Data to be a proper Hindu doolahin, a modest, obedient daughter-in-law. He, still under his mooma's apron strings, regards Data as his sexual plaything. Data has other ideas and her struggle for independence sets off janjhat in the house. The couple's hesitant steps towards understanding are set at the heart of an acute portrayal of a community in deep cultural crisis. Monar gives us unique access to the lives of Indo-Caribbean workers: their hopes and despairs, their religiosity, their poetry, their bawdiness, their sense of cultural continuity and their awareness that their world has changed. Rich and energetic in language, this is a novel which speaks from the midst of the world it describes.Rooplall Monar was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.

Read more less

Crown Point is the first collection of poems by one of the Caribbean's foremost woman poets. Velma Pollard's poems range from affectionate and observant family portraits to the righteous anger of an Afro-Caribbean woman's truth telling. Crown Point closes with a moving series of poems that meditate on death, mourning and their meaning for the living. They speak both of the deaths of parents and grandparents and of 'deaths falling early' and hear always Anancy's susu susu whispering words, 'tiday fi mi / tumaro fi yu'. These are poems which have a quiet, consoling truthfulness, no answers, just the unvarnished reminder that this is the way of life and that the dead remain with us: 'No one philosophy can answer all / each man is an island / each mind is a muffin tin / and so we sit with our invisible pencils / working out strategies to cope with brevity / to cope with our adieux / to love - too sweet to forget / to life - too intense to leave...' These tender elegiac poems of loss and remembrance have an eloquent stillness at their heart. All share a common depth of reflection and concern with poetic craft."Reading... Velma Pollard is to encounter an acutely sensitive consciousness grappling, even in apparently lighter moments, with the complexity of experience." Evelyn O'Callaghan, Jamaica JournalVelma Pollard writes poetry, fiction and studies of language. She was born in Jamaica and works at the University of the West Indies where she is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

Read more less

These scholarly essays break new ground in the study of Indian indentured labour, the role of labour migration in economic development, and the history of Natal.The collection includes Daniel North-Coombes' pioneering comparison of the role of indentured labour in the sugar industries of Natal and Mauritius, Maureen Swan's study of worker accommodation and resistance, Jo Beall's investigation of the double oppression of women, and Surendra and Arvinkumar Bhana's exploration of the very high rates of suicide amongst indentured workers. Accounts of individual stories in several essays ensure that the workers are never seen as faceless victims, and Rajend Mesthrie's study of language contact and J.B. Brain's essay on religion give further reminders that these migrants brought not only their labour but their culture.Surendra Bhana was formerly Professor of History at the University of Durban-Westville and visiting professor at the University of Kansas.

Read more less

The poems in this collection ask how meaning and creative sustenance can be found in the tensions between a broken Indian heritage, the harsh history of labour on the sugar estates and the native tradition of an Indo-Guyanese 'bung coolie' culture. They attempt to find a way forward from a state of limbo - which is both a state of placelessness between ancestral Indian memories (which can no longer sustain) and repulsion from the harsh history of oppression in the canefields of Guyana, and also a place of liminal possibility rooted in the hesitant native tradition. What is seen as reactionary in the Indian heritage is subjected to iconoclastic questioning, what is democratically alive is celebrated. Written during the Burnham years of economic collapse and political and racial oppression, there are poems of sharp anger against all that has made life spirit-sapping and hazardous, but an anger which is inverted love, because Monar's poetry is Guyanese to the bone.This collection was given a special award in the 1987 Guyana Literary Prize awards.Rooplall Monar was born on the Lusignan sugar estate in Guyana in 1945. Apart from brief overseas visits he has lived in Guyana all his life, in Annandale village, East Coast Demerara.

Read more less

The beginnings of the anti-colonial struggle in Jamaica coincided with the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the motivation for this, the first phase of her important body of work. The essays and articles collected here go beyond making an argument against colonialism, but set out to decolonize the nature of the discourse that legitimated the imperial order. At the time of their writing, Wynter was a practicing novelist, an innovative playwright, a scholar of Spanish Caribbean history, and an incisive literary critic with a gift for the liveliest kind of polemics. This intellectual virtuosity is evident in these wide-ranging essays that include an exploration of C.L.R. James's writings on cricket, Bob Marley and the counter-cosmogony of the Rastafari, and the Spanish epoch of Jamaican history (including a pioneering examination of Bernado de Balbuena, epic poet and Abbot of Jamaica 1562-1627).Across this varied range of topics, a coherent thread of argument emerges. In the vein of C. L. R. James, the imperative of her work has always been to reconceptualize the history of the region, and therefore of the modern world, from a world-systemic perspective; that is, no longer from the normative European perspective, but rather more inclusively, from the "gaze from below" of the neo-serf (i.e. Indian) and the ex-slave (i.e. Negro), which is "the ultimate underside of modernity."Strongly influenced by Marx, together with Black thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Jean Price-Mars, W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and with an appreciation of the insights brought by the New Studies of the Sixties (including that of Black feminism), Wynter's work has sought, from its beginnings, to find a comprehensive explanatory system able to integrate these knowledges born of struggle.

Read more less

Part of Peepal Tree's Caribbean Modern Classics series, Black Lightning is the third and final novel by Roger Mais, originally published in 1955, the year of his death.Set in the Jamaican countryside, it follows the story of Jack, a sculptor and blacksmith who idolises the biblical Samson as a figure of man's independence. Setting out to carve a tribute to Samson in mahogany, Jack is soon beset by the break-up of his marriage, and a lightning strike that leaves him blind. What follows is a heart-rending tale of humanity, of finding one's way, and of friendship in adversity.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica. His 1944 critique of Churchill's imperialist ideology, Now We Know, saw him sentenced to six months in prison for sedition. His other novels are The Hills Were Joyful Together (1951), brought back into print by Peepal Tree in 2012, and Brother Man (1954), published by Macmillan Caribbean Writers in 2004. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Jamaica in 1978.

Read more less

Delores is losing parts of herself, her typing speed, her ability to say 'hi' to work colleagues, until she is no longer Delores at all, but bare-footed Queen Mapusa, child of Africa, proud mother of modern civilization. Etheline Elvira Ransom is lying in bed, with a pair of scissors under her behind, waiting to teach her bullying, errant man a lesson. Odetta is a 54-year-old wife and mother talking her way through the day of her secret abortion. The Burning Bush women are smoking cigars and weaving each other's wild blood-red hair into tight plaits, but the plaits won't hold: somewhere, the hair says, a Bush woman is dying.In these sometimes strange, funny, tragic and truthful stories, Cherie Jones weaves paths through the joys and suffering of women's lives. The writing occupies an in-between space between the magical and the realistic, exploring the tensions between the African folk wisdom Nanan passes on from the ancestors to her grand-daughter, and the colonised dictums that the mother in 'The Bride' offers her daughter about how a respectable woman lives. ('Remember how nappy you can look if you let yourself go.')The Burning Bush Women tells so many stories, so much life, in a rich variety of voices that stay with you long after closing the book. The talented short story writer can tell a lifetime in a few pages, and in this Cherie Jones ranks with the best.Cherie Jones lives and works in Barbados. She was the winner of the first prize in the 1999 Commonwealth Short Story Competition and a prize of £2,000.

Read more less

Selected by Bernardine Evaristo as an Observer Best Books 2021Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England’s links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company.Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. It also explores the links between rural poverty, particularly enclosure, and colonial figures, such as plantation-owners and East India Company nabobs. Fowler, who herself comes from a family of slave-owners, argues that Britain’s cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. This is a shared history: Britons’ ancestors either profited from empire or were impoverished by it. Green Unpleasant Land argues that, in response to recent advances in British imperial history, contemporary authors have reshaped the pastoral writing to break the powerful association between the countryside and Englishness.

Read more less

Azúcar is a novel about belonging in a world where all things are on the move: people, ideas, foods and not least music. Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr, henceforth Yunior, leaves his family in Accra to travel to the mythical Caribbean island of Fumaz where the revolutionary philosophy of peopleism just about keeps its flame alive against the forces of an old-style command centre political bureaucracy and a stifling trade blockade from the big imperialist neighbour to the North. Yunior brings the knowledge of the scientist, the skills of a farmer and the heart and invention of a musician to his life in Fumaz. As scientist, he must find some way of rescuing the island’s famed sweet rice industry from collapse; as a farmer, he sees how much of his West African food has journeyed across the Atlantic to make the island’s unique cuisine; as musician he becomes part of the spirit that puts the island on the world stage, out of all proportion to its size. This is a novel of ideas – how much is accidental in the world? How much can be planned? It has much to say about the impact of colonialism on the fragile ecology of the island – but it is the pursuit of love and the tragedy of death, the interweaving of moments of harmony and moments of conflict and the motives of vividly drawn characters that are the drivers of this sometimes zany narrative. And there is always the texture of the language to enjoy in a book whose prose is as flowing, elegant and heartfelt as the music that moves freely back and forth across the seas between Africa and the Caribbean.

Read more less

Kendel Hippolyte’s poetry moves easily, boldly between the worlds of public engagement and the intimacies of domesticity. What unites this movement are the distinctive sounds and rhythms of his voice, and whilst some poems have a named recipient, and some are addressed to himself, all engage the reader in an implicit dialogue. His is an art of sound, of the rhythms of the long, supple line, of form that sometimes disguises itself as no form, of the beauty of the crooked basket. He wants the poem to draw us in rather than hold us outside in admiration at its skill – and skill and craft are what his poems display in spades. His is a vision that extends outwards in illimitable ways in space and time, but where the scale is always the human body, the human mind.The challenge comes in the way his poems address the dread reality of a Caribbean world of disappointed dreams, of sovereignty swamped by the new economic and cultural imperialism that masquerades under the mask of globalisation, of waking “one morning and the Caribbean was gone”, of continuing environmental degradation. The questioning comes from looking inwards to wonder why this has happened, what failures of vision, what empty sloganizing, what dishonesties, arrogance and failures of mutual respect led to the defeats so that “the rivers of Babylon clog into vomit…” The comfort comes from both the small loving kindnesses of the domestic – the rituals of coffee-brewing, of bed-making – but also the refusal to retreat, to look to the moment when flint and iron can “flare into the hot bright moment of a spark”.

Read more less

Discover some of the best in speculative short fiction from the Caribbean's up and coming voices. Edited by writer Karen Lord, New Worlds, Old Ways encompasses science fiction, fantasy and more. It is the third publication of Peekash Press, an imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, and as part of CaribLit project.Do not be misled by the ‘speculative’ in the title. Although there may be robots and fantastical creatures, these common symbols are tools to frame the familiar from fresh perspectives.Here you will find the recent past and ongoing present of government and society with curfews, crime and corruption; the universal themes of family with parents and children, growth and death, love and hate; the struggle to thrive when power is capricious and revenge too bittersweet. Here too is the passage of everything – old ways, places, peoples, and ourselves – leaving nothing behind but memories, histories, stories.This anthology speaks to the fragility of our Caribbean home, but reminds the reader that although home may be vulnerable, it is also beautifully resilient. The voice of our literature declares that in spite of disasters, this people and this place shall not be wholly destroyed.Read for delight, then read for depth, and you will not be disappointed.Edited by Karen Lord, with stories by Tammi-Browne Bannister, Summer Edward, Portia Subran, Brandon O’Brien, Kevin Jared Hosein, Richard B. Lynch, Elizabeth J. Jones, Damion Wilson, Brian Franklin, Ararimeh Aiyejina and H.K. Williams.

Read more less

Edgar Mittelholzer’s autobiography, first published in 1963, which covers the first eighteen years of his life, was his first return in writing to about his native Guyana, of memory and imagination, for a good many years. Born into a household that regarded itself as European, in Guyana’s second town of New Amsterdam on the edge of orentyne, Mittelholzer writes with vivid feeling about what it was like to be a boy whose “swarthiness” was anathema to his bigoted father. But what most distinguishes his account of this painful experience is his empathetic attempt to understand the tensions that drove his father’s attitudes. In the process, Mittelholzer gives an account of his family that is frank and searching and an account of the role of race, class and gender in small-town colonial life that is unrivalled in its perception. He writes memorably, for instance, of the ambivalence expressed by family members towards their neighbouring and very successful Indo-Guyanese family, the Luckhoos, and the tortured sensibility of the “coloured” middle class strung out between Black and White. A Swarthy Boy is also an attempt to trace the origins of the man Mittelholzer thought he had become, the division he felt within himself between the sensitive soul and the militant fighter, the Idyll and the Warrior – a division that he portrays in a good many of his most intimately observed characters. Despite being written only a couple of years before his fiery suicide, A Swarthy Boy was written with zest, not a little humour and some affection for the world he left to become a professional writer in Britain. This new edition has an introduction by Juanita Cox and an afterword by Jacqueline Ward, Edgar Mittelholzer’s second wife, who was with him at the time of writing A Swarthy Boy.

Read more less

From the first poem to the last, Smartt's new chapbook collection advocates a revolutionary decampment from the madhouse of desires "reigned in" to protect a precarious and often incoherent code of Caribbean respectability. This is Smartt at her sensual and lyrical best. These poems sing, and dance and love passionately 'til morning cum. From the hazardous terrain of same-sex loving in Jamaica for some couples, to the manipulation of heterosexual marriage conventions in Barbados in the name of love, to the freedom of sexual abandon and the fulfilment of desire in Amsterdam, this small body of work is subversive, radical, and surprisingly panoramic. Smartt's cartography renders new the old directive that we love each other, that we build and sustain community, that we protect and care for each other's needs, desires and dreams. Ultimately, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings On is about Black diasporic love at its most radical and life-affirming.

Read more less

Una Marson is widely recognised as 'the earliest female poet of significance to emerge in West Indian literature', but whilst her role as an early feminist and a 'first woman' publisher, broadcaster, pan-Africanist and anti-racist features on many web pages, her poetry has received less considered critical attention.This may be because her work is very diverse, even seemingly contradictory. She is a Jamaican poet who pioneered the articulation of gender and racial oppression, brought Jamaican vernacular voices alongside a Wordsworthian passion for nature, and ventured to give subjectivity to the powerless and marginalised. Author of Afro-blues that draw on both African-American and Jamaican speech, and of folk monologues, she also wrote devotional sonnets and love lyrics within a distinctly un-modernist tradition. Marson's work as presented here is a complex subject, striving to answer the questions of how to write as a woman; as a black, modern, diasporic subject; for the poor and powerless. As Donnell's extensive selection shows, and her introduction argues, Marson's is a significant poetic achievement.Una Marson is widely recognised as the earliest female poet of significance to emerge in West Indian literature

Read more less

Exploring the complicated landscape of human interaction within the walls of the offices of Essential Products Ltd., this serious yet comedic novel offers a glimpse into 1940s Trinidad. Against the backdrop of the often hierarchical and always complex office space, characters negotiate issues of sexual attraction and repulsion, their attitude to colonial rule, racial tensions, and the changing labor market of contemporary society. Filled with rich characters and an acute but sympathetic portrayal of a microcosm of middle- and lower-middle-class Trinidad, this satire turns a careful eye to the disparities between the world of the office and wider society.

Read more less

Teeton lives multiple lives in England. One is with a bohemian group of artist exiles, like his friend Derek the actor who has sunk to playing a corpse on state, and his rival Roger Capildeo, a Naipaulian figure who denies the point of any kind of political involvement. There is also Teeton's curiously intimate relationship with his English landlady, who he calls the Dowager. Finally, as a secret revolutionary from the Caribbean island of San Cristobal, Teeton is enmeshed in conspiracy. Thus far, Teeton has kept each aspect of his life separate from one another, but when he actively plans to return home and joins an incipient revolt, his once separate worlds begin to fuse together with disastrous results. This novel is a powerful study of the impossibility of disentangling British and Caribbean lives, the unacknowledged power of history, the nature of misogyny, and the conflict between the calls of art and revolution. In a narrative that is both deeply political and poetic, Water with Berries shows why George Lamming has been recognised as one of Caribbean writing's most original figures.

Read more less

Aron Smart is orphaned early and brought up by his grandparents who impress on him the virtues of education. When they too die, his only support comes from an anonymous benefactor who turns out to be a white man who was an associate of Aron's father, a famous pork-knocker (gold and diamond prospector) who supports Aron out of guilt from his responsibility for Aron's father's death. But Aron's education is never completed and while he is always more educated than his working class companions, he remains less educated than the educated middle class and this contributes to his sense of division. After a period working for an Indian doctor and having an unsatisfactory affair with the daughter, Indra, for whom he is always inferior as a black man, Aron follows in his father's footsteps as a pork-knocker. He is immensely successful and becomes the legendary 'Shark', in a wild, untamed world of drinkers, get-rich-quick and lose-it-quick prospectors and the whores who haunt the diamond fields. With one, Belle, there is a relationship of a kind, but his attempt to use his wealth to buy into the middle-class and take Belle with him fails disastrously. Cheated of his fortune, he returns to the interior, mining with a reckless madness that ends in his maiming. He cannot find himself, though he dreams of returning to the life of his grandfather in the solidity of land and farming. Black Midas can be read as Carew's warning of what might happen in the postcolonial era. The house that Shark buys in Georgetown is so filled for him with the ghosts of its former white occupants that he can never really take possession of it and is condemned to mimic the ways of the former rulers. Though Shark's Eldoradean quest ends in grief, on the way there is energy, outrageous sensuality and deeply felt engagement with the Guyanese landscape, particularly of the interior.Jan Carew was born in the village of Agricola in Berbice, Guyana in 1920

Read more less