This month’s reading selections from the Caribbean, with reviews of The Dreaming by Andre Bagoo; Oblivion Island by Jasmine Sealy; What A Mother’s Love Doesn’t Teach You by Sharma Taylor; and What Noise Against the Cane by Desiree C Bailey
The dream
by Andre Bagoo (Peepal Tree Press, 168 pp., ISBN 9781845235369)
Gay desire is not new in the Caribbean, and these short stories don’t pretend otherwise. By contrast, in Bagoo’s debut fiction, the lives of Trinidadian gay men—closeted, out, positive, negative—are presented with a fully human experience. Using the precision of a satirist, the warmth of a humorist, and the passion of a bacchanalist, the author guides us through one-night stands and symbolic haircuts, through narrative alleyways littered with Family Planning condoms, polyamorous negotiations, and Nina Simone singing in luxury cafes of Port of Spain. There are men in these stories you’ll want to know, men in these pages you’ll wish you could be: Bagoo’s bittersweet prose is full of the familiar, but as inventively told as revelations are hidden and forgotten at every plot twist. T&T’s urban grid is an equally impressive character The dream: the city features queer crowds.
Island of Oblivion
by Jasmine Sealy (The Borough Press, 336 pp., ISBN 9780008532895)
What happens when local drama meets a reinvention of the classics? Jasmine Sealy’s first novel carries the cautionary rum-soaked answer: don’t expect an island to be paradise. Mastering the Greek myths of fabled heroes with virtuosity, Barbadian-Canadian Sealy casts waves of generations of trauma, cognitive dissociation, community building, and strong bonds into the tides of her narrative. In shifting protagonist worldviews, four generations of a haunted family pursue happiness at an unaffordable cost, confronting the specters of race hatred, homosexuality, substance abuse, colorism, and the price of silence about these and other insidious oppressions. Just as atmospheric as Tiphanie Yanique’s The land of love and drowningwith a charged fury reminiscent of Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here comes the sun, Island of Oblivion is a saga and a witch.
What a mother’s love does not teach you
by Sharma Taylor (Virago, 432 pp., ISBN 9780349015538)
Dinah knows her son will have a better life the moment he is no longer hers. Giving up her only child feels like a stark inevitability: Lazarus Gardens, in all its bullet-riddled criminality, is no place for her future, let alone her baby’s. As Sharma Taylor’s debut proves with feverish intensity, some threads remain unbreakable despite the cruel vicissitudes of fate. Guiding her novel with a strained economy, Taylor provides a prismatic cast of figures that revolve around Dina and her estranged son. In the voices of gang leaders and snake-tongued statesmen, dodgy matriarchs and tooth-kissing gossips, the many worlds of 1980s Jamaica come to life, vividly and dramatically realized. What a mother’s love does not teach you joins a formidable contemporary canon that refuses to portray the Caribbean as idyllic pastiche. It’s a gentle triumph.
What a noise against the cane
by Desiree C Bailey (Yale University Press, 96 pp, ISBN 9780300256536)
Ocean, air, and land: all forms of nature are called upon to bear witness to the black woman’s journey to freedom in What a noise against the cane, a first collection of poems that thrive on ventriloquist power. In the traditions of Lorde and NourbeSe Philip, but using a probing lyricism all her own, the Trinidadian-American Bailey forges emblems of resistance and rebellion on the page, including “Voice of the Sea,” a speaker’s song that runs along the bottom edge of the whole book. Carnival rhythms abound here, as does the accumulation of sugarcane blowing in the wind: the poet is a conductor of these multi-layered frequencies, turning her ear to the sounds that generate and animate life itself. As a leading poem exclaims, may our dead / not forget the song beneath our skin.
