Search results for ""author elizabeth walcott-hackshaw""

In Trinidad, oil wealth supported the growth of probably the most prosperous and conspicuously consuming middle-class in the Caribbean. But there was a price to pay for the deepened social inequalities that resulted: a deep paranoia rooted in the fear of crime and social upheaval.The recent plunge in world oil prices has left these people in a double bind. Travel and education overseas have given them tastes that weaken their attachment to Trinidad, yet they know that their privileges of race and class would disappear in North America. As one narrator acknowledges, in the US she’s the only black girl in most of her classes, “though at home no one would call me black.”Four Taxis Facing North presents us with an intimate, human face to what it is like to be one of those middle class Trinidadians. These stories focus on characters from both sides of the social divide – and their infrequent and often uncomfortable interactions. Even as they are beset by fears about the future, the Walcott-Hackshaw’s women are also busy with their responsibilities, their relationships with husbands, partners, children, friends and foes. They deal with absent, unfaithful or abusive husbands and display differing degrees of self and social awareness.Four Taxis Facing North offers few comforting illusions. Hackshaw explores characters who are not always sympathetic – and the title story imagines a Trinidad after a great social upheaval in which survival means life of the bleakest kind. But the twelve stories in this collection offer great clarity and a deeply satisfying exactness of language in the creation of characters across the divisions of Trinidadian society.This collection presents us with a moral vision that is both necessary and bracing, prophetic but not preachy.With an introduction by Lawrence Scott.

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This novel, loosely inspired by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, focuses on the life of an upper middle class family in modern day Trinidad.The island, independent since 1962, still struggles with its multiethnic and multicultural complexities, and is fraught with corruption and violence. The heroine, Mrs. B (Marie Elena Butcher), is fast approaching 50. In her mid-life she is forced to admit that neither Ruthie, her daughter, nor her marriage to Charles Butcher, has met her expectations of being both a mother and a wife. Haunted by an affair with her husband's best friend, above all Mrs. B knows that she has disappointed herself.Much like Flaubert's heroine, Mrs. B's life is based on longing for what can never be realized and by an inability to adapt to the pressures of her own bourgeois society.Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Literatures, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She has published various academic titles and her first collection of short stories was published in 2007.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

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Writing both of imagined characters and as "I", Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw's stories deal with the experiences of loss, disappointment and the attempt to be self-truthful. In the sequence of stories that chart childhood family memory and the break-up of those connections through deaths and the passage of time, there is a fine balance between recording the feelings of desolation and the pleasures of reconstructing the joys of the past through art and memory. There is, too, in the collection as a whole, a richly consoling passage towards a sense of continuance and human resilience,

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