Search results for ""Author Jennifer Rahim""

Comparing herself to a douen, a mythical being from the Trinidadian forests whose head and feet face in different directions, Jennifer Rahim's poems explore states of uncertainty both as sources of discomfort and of creative possibility.The poems explore a Trinidad finely balanced between the forces of rapid urbanisation and the constantly encroaching green chaos of tropical bush, whose turbulence regularly threatens a fragile social order, and whose people, as the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers, are acutely resistant to any threat to clip their wings and fence them in.In her own life, Rahim explores the contrary urges to a neat security and to an unfettered sense of freedom and her attraction to the forest 'where tallness is not the neighbour's fences/ and bigness is not the swollen houses/ that swallow us all'. It is, though, a place where the bushplanter 'seeing me grow branches/ draws out his cutting steel and slashes my feet/ since girls can never become trees'.Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. She also writes short fiction and criticism. She is currently Senior Lecturer at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.

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It is 1963, one year after Independence, and Trinidadians are beginning to wonder what they can expect. Anna takes a temporary post at a remote post office in a small coastal town, hoping to escape a failed relationship, and the drama, pressures and politics of her city life. But neither time or space is granted, as the life of Macaima passes through the post office, and Anna reluctantly begins to take on the villagers' stories - which prove to be just as complicated and enmeshed in the social, cultural and political issues that divide the nation as her own. Long before the year is up, Anna has been immersed in an intense seasoning in Macaima that will change her for ever. Macaima is a magical place of intense and unforgettable characters, which Jennifer Rahim draws with exceptional psychological subtlety. And Anna herself - flawed, a little prickly and sometimes too ready to jump to conclusions - is a complex narrator whom we ultimately trust and care for. As an historical novel it asks probing questions about the nature of the means and ends of the project of Independence and its failures with respect to race, class, gender and sexuality. Goodbye Bay is simply one of the very best Caribbean novels to have been written, and not just in recent years. Written in a seamless mix of sharply observed realism with moments of rich humour, and of numinous poetic intensity, it tells a gripping story with room for surprise, humour, tragedy and redemption.

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In the year of Covid-19, lockdowns, and in Trinidad a state of emergency, it’s not surprising that thoughts turn to the nature of time, place and the not quite accidental arrival of pandemics of mass death. For Jennifer Rahim, time is both the history that has shaped the present and the now of social and geographic constriction. At the beginning of the collection, “A Tale of the Orbis Spike, 1610” (the recorded dip in carbon dioxide levels when around fifty million native peoples of the New World were exterminated as the result of European settler invasion), reminds that pandemics have their own history, though never without human triggers. At the end of the collection, “No /Language is a Virus” records the viral power of language for both good and ill, the latter not least in the era of Trump and the resurgence of racist white nationalism in Trinidad’s big neighbour to the north. But Rahim also reminds us how much solace we have derived from poetry this last year, because “Words fly the grave, steal/ the only thunder a virus can claim,/ and, alive,/ witness to goodness that quietly thrives.” Between those two points, the collection expands out of the restrictions of home, that place where “We’re strategizing for survival/ strip-searching every sneeze/ for an invisible assassin suited in capsid” – though sanctuaries of invention can be found in the smallest spaces – to map the wider worlds of memory and desire – in a vivid series of poems (“mapping home”) that chart journeys from Valencia, through Salybia, Balandra, Rampanalgas, Cumana, Toco and L’Anse Noir – places that Rahim’s poems bring to sensuous geographic, human and historical life and make you want to visit,.With the celebration of heroes who range from the fighting women of Greek myth, to poetic inspirations from Marian Moore to Eric Roach, Jennifer Rahim urges that “Hope/ must always be bold/ and sharpened for tomorrows”.

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In 2011, the Trinidad government declared a state of emergency and an overnight curfew. The SoE, brought in to combat the crime and killings associated with the drugs trade, was meant to last 15 days but lasted four months. This is the background to these chronicles, but not their substance. They are an imaginative response to the undertones of those days. Taking place over 24 hours, Curfew Chronicles brings together, like a Joyce’s Ulysses in miniature, the lives of two dozen characters (including a father and son searching for each other) whose lives intersect in mostly fortuitous but sometimes quite deliberate ways.From the Minister and his wife, to those targeted by the state; from those in regular jobs, to those who scuffle for a living on or over the edge of the law; from those who speak out, to the hidden hands prepared to silence them: no one is unaffected by the SoE. What makes these stories individually rich (as well as collectively ingenious) is the depth of characterisation. There is Scholar the street-corner prophet, Ragga with his vision of better days, Keeper tempted into crime to the distress of his redoubtable partner Maureen, Sumintra, the Pentecostal convert struck dumb in prayer, Marcus the assassin whose life is a movie, Amber the security guard and poet and her policeman lover Calvin, eager to retire from clearing up little matters like the “weed” found in the PM’s residence, and many more. Each has a resonant backstory; each is caught at a moment of decision or revelation.

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In 2011 the Government of Trinidad & Tobago declared a state of emergency to counter the violent crime associated with the drugs trade. Ground Level confronts the roots of the madness and chaos seething under the surface of this "crude season of curfew from ourselves" when the state becomes a jail. For Rahim, her country is a place "blind to what is going on, hooked on carnival and hedonism/ trivia in the press", where "No-one hears the measure of shadow in any rhythm". It is a place where the air is "made less fresh each year/as forests disappear". It is a place where "poets hurt enough to die". In this dread season, Rahim finds hope and consolation in the word and in those places where it is possible to find salvation in "this landscape of ever-opening doorways", such as Grand Riviere, the subject of a long, twelve-part reflection on the values that can still be found in rural Trinidad. Elsewhere she engages in dialogue with those writers who confronted the Janus face of Caribbean creativity and nihilism: poets such as Eric Roach, Victor Questel, Walcott, Brathwaite and Martin Carter, praying of the last "let his words drop on the conscience of a nation". To the late Jamaican poet Tony McNeill she confides that "The Ungod of things has not changed". This is an ambitious collection that speaks in both a prophetic and a highly literary, intertextual voice, which combines the personal and the public in mutually enriching ways. Rahim knows that it is "craft keeps every story true", that "language playing dead only/ to ambush change." This is Jennifer Rahim's fourth collection of poetry; it shows the assurance of a poet who has constantly worked at her craft, but who also takes formal risks to capture the reality of desperate times.

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Winner of a Casa de las Américas Prize 2010, one of Latin America's oldest and most prestigious literary awards.The jury said the collection "captures a sense of the complexities of historical, social and cultural aspects of contemporary Caribbean".Jennifer Rahim's poems move seamlessly between the inwardly confessional, an acute sensitivity to the distinctive subjectivities of an immediate circle of family, friends and neighbours, and a powerful sense of Trinidadian place and history. Few have written more movingly or perceptively of what can vex the relationship between daughters and mothers, or with such a mixture of compassion and baffled rage about a daughter's relationship to her father. If Sylvia Plath comes to mind, acknowledged in the poem 'Lady Lazarus in the Sun', the comparison does Rahim no disfavours; Rahim's voice and world is entirely her own. There is in her work a near perfect balance between the disciplined craft of the poems, and their capacity to deal with the most traumatic of experiences in a cool, reflective way. Equally, she has the capacity to make of the ordinary something special and memorable.Here is no self-indulgent misery memoir, not least in its compassion and involvement with other lives. The threat and reality of fragmentation – of psyche's, of lives, of a nation – is ever present, but the shape and order of the poems provide a saving frame of wholeness. Poem after poem offers phrases of a satisfying weight and appositeness, like the description of the killers of a boy as 'mere children,/ but twisted like neglected fields of cane'.Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. She also writes short fiction and criticism. She is currently Senior Lecturer at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.

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Rahim's stories move between the present and the past to make sense of the tensions between image and reality in contemporary Trinidad. The contemporary stories show the traditional, communal world in retreat before the forces of local and global capitalism. A popular local fisherman is gunned down when he challenges the closure of the beach for a private club catering to white visitors and the new elite; an Internet chat room becomes a rare safe place for AIDs sufferers to make contact; cocaine has become the scourge even of the rural communities. But the stories set thirty years earlier in the narrating 'I's' childhood reveal that the 'old-time' Trinidad was already breaking up. The old pieties about nature symbolised by belief in the presence of the folk-figure of 'Papa Bois' are powerless to prevent the ruthless plunder of the forests; communal stability has already been uprooted by the pulls towards emigration, and any sense that Trinidad was ever edenic is undermined by images of the destructive power of alcohol and the casual presence of paedophilic sexual abuse. Rahim's Trinidad, is though, as her final story makes clear, the creation of a writer who has chosen to stay, and she is highly conscious that her perspective is very different from those who have taken home away in a suitcase, or who visit once a year. Her Trinidad is 'not a world in my head like a fantasy', but the island that 'lives and moves in the bloodstream'. Her reflection on the nature of small island life is as fierce and perceptive as Jamaica Kincaid's 'A Small Place', but comes from and arrives at a quite opposite place. What Rahim finds in her island is a certain existential insouciance and the capacity of its people, whatever their material circumstance, to commit to life in the knowledge of its bitter-sweetness.

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