This month’s reading selections from the Caribbean, with commentary on Habitus by Radna Fabias; A Considered Self: Caribbean Woman and the Ethics of Disordered Being by Kaiama L. Glover; One Day, One Day, Kongotay by Merle Hodge; and Josephine Against the Sea by Shakirah Bourne
Habitus
by Radna Fabias, translated by David Colmer (Deep Vellum Publishing, 128 pp., ISBN 9781646050987)
Radna Fabia’s poems own the site. The Curaçao-born writer, who moved to the Netherlands as a teenager to study performance-based writing, makes the physical form of the book a living amphitheater – flooding it with movement, light, technical mastery over the elements of sound and taste. Yes, these are poems you think you might enjoy, as instantly identifiable as Caribbean constructions as they are astral, temporal floaters to less tangible realms. In “the darkness of the hole,” the poet widens her orbit toward cataclysm, using an amorphous narrator to tell us “we believe in the black hole because the black hole makes things that matter because the black hole makes things / to the stars “. In its original Dutch, Habitus swept the awards circuit to critical acclaim: it should do no less in the English translation.
A Considered Self: Caribbean Woman and the Ethics of Disordered Being
by Kaiama L. Glover (Duke University Press, 296 pp., ISBN 9781478011248)
We need narratives about Caribbean feminism that travel beyond the mad woman in the attic, an anchor as powerful as that image in Jean Rhys The vast Sargasso Sea maybe. Sign in A Considered Self, Glover’s scholarly inquiry that not only updates canonical responses to the literary female self, but expands the boundaries of their characterization with wit and generosity. Studying the main female characters from the novels of Maryse Condé, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, René Depestre, Jamaica Kincaid, and Marlon James, Glover’s explorations take two paths in each chapter: analysis of how each character functions in the text and external study of this . extratextual embedding of the heroine (or anti-heroine). This is therefore a scholarly work, as committed to its source material as it is to enlivening discussions of Caribbean freedom, autonomy and dissent.
One day, one day, Kongotai
by Merle Hodge (Peepal Tree Press, 498 pp., ISBN 9781845235246)
Cayeri, the setting of Merle Hodge’s third novel, is a conventional place. The sums on a hard board, not the percussive strains of the steel pan or tambu bamboo, are meant to keep the children in their preconceived roles. Gwynneth Cuffie, a teacher caught at the crossroads of the rigid customs of education and the African rhythms of a musical future, is determined to fight for some kind of real change. If Cayeri, steeped in self-loathing, born of the specters of colonialism, is a direct reflection of Trinidad’s toxic conflicted past, Merle Hodge’s new fiction shows us that the way forward is always in the bitter confrontation of ghosts ours. This fierce feminist novel, a necessary antidote to the complacency, child abuse and tyrannical hegemonies in our region, is also beautifully written: in nearly 500 pages, there is not a single line that feels uncomfortable.
Josephine against the sea
by Shakirah Bourne (Scholastic, 304 pp., ISBN 9781338642087)
Long before this Barbadian writer and filmmaker made her large-scale international publishing debut, those lucky enough to read her 2014 self-published collection, In times of needknew she had a knack for telling stories in children’s voices. Josephine against the seaan expanded edition of her CODE Burt Prize for Caribbean Literature finalist My fish stepmother, plunges young readers straight into the furnace of daring girlhood. Cricket-loving, opinionated Josephine bucks the patriarchy of her elders, preferring her father’s company to the company of any grown-up—including those who might intervene for her father’s hand. When Jozefina confronts her father’s fatal wife, Maris, a lady with a serpentine secret, a salty bacchanal ensues! Although marketed towards the American middle grade reading system, this book will fly into the library of any curious and culture-focused adventurer, flying fish style.
