Search results for ""Author Brenda Flanagan""

In this collection of short stories, meditations and prose poems, Brenda Flanagan celebrates the capacity of women to endure with resilience, stoicism and, frequently, humour. The stories give a vivid picture of an island very like Trinidad, across the past fifty years, touching on women of many ages and ethnicities, of women in town or country, or in flight from the hard circumstances of island life and in search of material security in the USA.Above all, Brenda Flanagan penetrates to the heart of Trinidad's picong (satirical) culture, and the way that playing with the word sustains a sense of self and community relationship."What the best musicians do with wood and brass and air, Brenda Flanagan does with words – she gives them voice and life... And there you are, on the island, in the midst of it all." Janet Kauffman"Brenda Flanagan joins Marshall, Danticat ... Caribbean American women who've done so much to add new colors and rhythms to an American prose that can often be dull and gray..." Ishmael ReedTrinidad born Brenda Flanagan teaches creative writing, Caribbean and African American Literatures at Davidson College, North Carolina. She is also a United States cultural ambassador, and has served in Kazakstan, Chad and Panama.

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The novel returns to the aftermath of the trial of Beatrice Salandy and the villagers of Rosehill on the island of Santabella first met in Flanagan's novel You Alone Are Dancing. Though Beatrice is acquitted to the joy of the village, it is clear that nothing has changed. Though Santabella has been independent for several decades, only the new Black ruling class has benefited. Most Santabellans struggle to scratch a living, find adequate schools, healthcare or even reliable basic services. Cynical corruption flourishes and the queues to get visas to escape to America grow ever longer and more desperate. For Beatrice there is the recognition that Sonny, the man she loved, has wholly abandoned her, settled in the USA with a white American wife.But there is one new element: a rapidly growing radical Muslim movement with a growing appeal to the poor Black people of Santabella with their welfare schemes, grass-roots campaigning and air of incorruptibility. And there is the Haji, the charismatic leader of movement who combines a media-savvy native wit, a well-developed mystique and a steely control over his group. Even Beatrice is impressed. Between the Mosque, regularly raided for arms by the police and army and Rosehill is Abdul, whose aunt lives in the village and who is the Haji's second in command. It is Abdul, decent serious Abdul, who is one of the main narrative voices in the novel. But does his sincerity go with honesty about the violent coup that the Haji plans? Abdul's becomes a fascinatingly unreliable voice, part revealer, part concealer of the truth.Trinidad born Brenda Flanagan teaches creative writing, Caribbean and African American Literatures at Davidson College, North Carolina. She is also a United States cultural ambassador, and has served in Kazakstan, Chad and Panama.

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Threatened by land speculators and ignored by a corrupt and uncaring government, the people of Roseville begin a fight for survival. In the midst of this struggle, Sonny Allen and Beatrice Salandy, burdened by the community's expectations and their own ambitions, have to work out their commitments to each other. Set on the fictional island of Santabella, You Alone are Dancing is a lyrical ballad woven from the villager's collective voices, though when a grievous wrong is done to Beatrice, she discovers the harsh truth of the novel's title.Two kinds of crime are contrasted in this novel: the crimes of the wealthy and powerful and those of the poor. The first, the theft of village land by land speculators and a rape, go unpunished, until Beatrice takes the law into her own hands.Brenda Flanagan's novel takes place in a calypso world of bobol and tricksterish deceptions and when the villagers of Roseville can take no more and pelt the visiting PM, Melda makes up an instant calypso to celebrate the occasion. It is a good one, not surprisingly when the author, by the age of thirteen, was singing calypsos and earning money for it."Every character lives and breathes... a captivating novel."Roberta MockTrinidad-born Brenda Flanagan teaches Creative Writing, Caribbean and African American Literatures at Davidson College, North Carolina. She is also a United States cultural ambassador, and has served in Kazakstan, Chad and Panama.

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