This month’s reading selections from the Caribbean, with reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan for The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey; Naniki by Oonya Kempadoo; Black Light Void: Dark Visions of the Caribbean edited by Marsha Pearce; and The Hurricane Book: A Lyrical Story by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones
The Ferguson Report: A Deletion
by Nicole Sealey (Knopf, 144 p., ISBN 9780593535998)
Winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, The Ferguson Report it’s an edit written on fire. Inspired by the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown (unarmed) in Ferguson, Missouri, US Virgin Islands-born Sealey creates a takedown of the official Justice Department report released in the wake of murder. The poet rehouses what he says – rendering a poem lifted from the text seething with rage while, in the same breath, reckoning with the uncomfortable calm that often follows such man-made horrors. Accusing further witnesses from an original document already examining the brutality, The Ferguson Report it is a volume of precision and destruction, summoning centuries of galloping horses, black hands raised in protest and defense, deer whose skin stiffens from hard running under pressure. To say that this project in poetry is visionary feels simple, feels intuitive.
Small
by Oonya Kempadoo (Rare Cars, 200 p., ISBN 9781459751491)
Written in kaleidoscopic, rippling prose, Small is a spiritual quest of a novel, depicting an archipelagic journey by twin spirit beings Amana and Skelele through a Caribbean devastated by climate catastrophe. Hailing from Guyanese, Kempadoo infuses myth with magical realism, coming-of-age with compelling eco-fiction, creating a complex genre humming with its own radical frequencies. As the animist duo of protagonists traverse time and space, they encounter signs of a crumbling Anthropocene—but also the antidote to such environmental wounds. Afro-indigenous stories are vital to this transformative narrative, which unites all living souls in its story in a kind of bold and shimmering hope. Small asks, “How can we stand on this earth that we have so bruised?” The novel answers itself, saying that our common redemption lies in love, ready to unfold.
The Void of Black Light: Dark Visions of the Caribbean
edited by Marsha Pearce (Hansib Publications, 108 p., ISBN 9781739321109)
“In the void of black light you will meet yourself.” So declares the final paragraph of cultural studies scholar and curator Marsha Pearce’s introduction to this bleak, grandly imagined anthology. The Void of Black Light is interdisciplinary, bringing together six writers from Trinidad & Tobago – Kevin Jared Hosein, Barbara Jenkins, Sharon Millar, Amílcar Sanatan, Portia Subran, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw – to respond to the paintings of contemporary Caribbean artist Edward Bowen. The results – ranging from parasitic rafflesia plants to sex crimes committed under the constraints of the rules – certainly invoke the rigor intended by Pearce’s presentation. In dialogue with Bowen’s large-scale abstract compositions, this T&T sextet goes deeper than the darkness that is easy to imagine. This is the strength of the anthology, its animus: that we not only fear the darkness within, but embrace the abyss it conjures up.
The Hurricane Book: A Lyrical Story
by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones (Rose Metal Press, 160 p., ISBN 9781941628317)
Puerto Rican Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones’ debut is based on lyrical, anecdotal, and reportage writing in a swirling epicenter of creative nonfiction, tracing six hurricanes that tore through the island from 1928 to 2017. The Hurricane Book it’s as much a map as it is a family tree, a book of collected memories, domestic memories, and secrets revealed—a rich and extraordinary patina on top of the cartography of an entire society governed by US superstructural neglect and environmental crises. As an autobiography limited by the poem and possibilities not always circumscribed by the substantively verifiable, this is a work that more confronts and does not escape authorial unreliability. An archive, too, can be as capricious as a storm—as difficult to plot faithfully as the path of a devastating storm. This hybrid ode to ancestry, sanctuary, and crisis thrives on the undeniable rhythms of the ocean that surrounds us all.
