Search results for ""Author Barbara Jenkins""

Indira Gabriel, recently abandoned by her lover, Solomon, embarks on a project to reinvigorate a dilapidated bar into something special. In this funny, sexy, sometimes painful and bittersweet novel, Barbara Jenkins draws together a richly-drawn cast of characters, like a Trinidadian Cheers.Meet Bostic, Solomon’s boyhood friend, who is determined to keep the bar as a shrine; I Cynthia, the tale-telling Belmont maco ; KarlLee, the painter with a very complicated love-life; fatherless Jah-Son; and Fritzie, single mum and Indira’s loyal right-hand woman. At the book’s centre is the unforgettable Indira, with her ebullience and sadness, her sharpness and honesty, obsession with the daily horoscope and addiction to increasingly absurd self-help books. In this warm, funny, sexy, and bittersweet novel, Barbara Jenkins hears, like Sam Selvon, the melancholy behind “the kiff-kiff laughter”, as darkness from Indira’s past threatens her drive to make a new beginning.

Read more less

Barbara Jenkins writes about the experiences of a personal and family-centred life in Trinidad with great psychological acuteness, expanding on the personal with a deep awareness of the economic, social and cultural contexts of that experience. She writes about a childhood and youth located in the colonial era and an adult life that began at the very point of Trinidad’s independent nationhood, a life begun in poverty in a colonial city going through rapid change. It is about a life that expanded in possibility through an access to an education not usually available to girls from such an economic background. This schooling gave the young Barbara Jenkins the intense experience of being an outsider to Trinidad’s hierarchies of race and class. She writes about a life that has gender conflict at its heart, a household where her mother was subject to beatings and misogynist control, but also about strong matriarchal women. As for so many Caribbean people, opportunity appeared to exist only via migration, in her case to Wales in the 1960s. But there was a catch in the arrangement that the years in Wales had put to the back of her mind: the legally enforceable promise to the Trinidadian government that in return for their scholarship, she had to return. She did, and has lived the rest of her life to date in Trinidad, an experience that gives her writing an insider/outsider sharpness of perception.'From her childhood in colonial Port of Spain, to becoming a migrant student and young mother in Wales and then returning to Trinidad post-Independence, Jenkins tells her own life story with the emotional sensitivity of a natural storyteller, the insight of a philosopher, the scope of a historian and the good humour of a Trini. This beautifully written and moving memoir will feel achingly familiar to anyone who knows what it is like to navigate race, class and girlhood while growing up in the West Indies, anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.’ Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, author of When We Were Birds.

Read more less

The stories in Sic Transit Wagon bring together a rich, evocative and authentic tapestry of Trinidad life, from the 1940s to the present day. We move from the all-seeing naivety of a child narrator trying to make sense of the adult world, through the consciousness of the child-become-mother, to the mature perceptions of the older woman taking stock on all that has gone before.In the title story – a playful pun on the Latin phrase on the glory of worldly things coming to an end – the need to part with a beloved station wagon becomes a moving and humorous image for other kinds of loss.Barbara Jenkins was born in Trinidad. She studied at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the University College, Cardiff. She married a fellow student, and they continued to live in Wales through the whole decade of the 1960s, before returning to Trinidad. Her stories have won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Caribbean Region) in 2010 and 2011, for 'Something for Nothing' and 'Head Not Made for Hat Alone' respectively; the Wasafiri New Writing Prize; the Canute Brodhurst Prize for short fiction from the Caribbean Writer; the Small Axe short story competition, 2011; and the Romance Category, My African Diaspora Short Story Contest.

Read more less