Search results for ""author hazel campbell""

Realistic and magical, sombre and deeply comic, heroic and full of ironies, these stories explore the complexities of Caribbean reality through a variety of voices and forms. In 'Jacob Bubbles', a short novella, Campbell connects the contemporary Jamaica of political gang warfare to the past of slavery through the characters of Jacob, a runaway slave and his descendant, Jacob Bubbles, the fearsome leader of the Suckdust Posse. When Jacob Bubbles meets a violent death, a memory path opens in his head which carries him back to his slave ancestor. The contrast between the two stories raises uncomfortable questions about what progress there has been for the most oppressed sections of Jamaican society. Yet if there is in these stories an acute perception of the ways in which poverty, racism and sexism can maim the spirit, there is an overarching vision of the redemptive power of hope and love and the people's capacity to rise out of enslavements old and new. In bringing us, amongst others, Singerman, the Calypsonian, Quincey, the business man who turns into a bird, Jocelyn who cannot tell a lie and the inseparable Mr Fargo and Mr Lawson, Hazel Campbell shows herself to be one of the Caribbean's finest writers of short fiction.Hazel Campbell is Jamaican. Before publishing Singerman with Peepal Tree, she published The Rag Doll and Woman's Tongue. She works as a media consultant.

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“The all-seeing eye and the all-listening ear, roving all over the island, stopping here and there to listen in on conversations.” This, as Jacqueline Bishop writes in her introduction, is what Hazel Campbell has been doing for almost fifty years – and there are few writers with such a sharp ear for how Jamaican people speak. But Hazel Campbell is much more than just a recorder. This is a writer who never tells the reader what to think, but challenges them to come to their own conclusions, but it is also clear enough that Campbell’s is a radical vision of Caribbean possibility combined with an apprehension of how reality so often falls short. Sharply observant of the inequalities of Jamaican society, her writing is also wholly unsentimental or judgemental over the way her characters so often make the wrong choices. In the space between desire and outcomes, there is often the deepest and most painful kind of comedy. And for a writer who recognises how much of the Jamaican soul is rooted in the nation’s churches, what could be more natural than that the devil makes several appearances throughout the collection? But even Lucifer is no match for the sheer cussedness of Jamaican politics. In “Jacob Bubbles”, Hazel Campbell weaves a double narrative criss-crossing from the days of slavery to the years of political warfare between rival communities. As ever, there is no telling the reader what to think. She tells a story and leaves you to ponder. Which of the two Jacob’s is in truth most free? In what respects have the lives of Jamaica’s poorest black people really been emancipated? This work is drawn from earlier published collections The Rag Doll and Other Stories, Women’s Tongue and Singerman and eight new stories. Across their range Jamaica emerges from colonialism to the present, years of struggle, violence but also of continuing hope in the people’s capacity for both endurance and re-invention.

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