This month’s reading selections from the Caribbean, with reviews of The Stranger Who Was Myself by Barbara Jenkins; A Scream in the Shadows by Mac Donald Dixon; Nice view by Celeste Mohammed; and Cane, Corn & Gully by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
The stranger that I was myself
by Barbara Jenkins (Peepal Tree Press, 278 pp., ISBN 9781845235345)
In the first nonfiction offering from Trinidadian novelist and short story writer Barbara Jenkins, the past is held to account—specifically, her past. The stranger that I was myself, which takes its title from Derek Walcott’s poem “Love After Love,” does what so many memoirs aim for but few achieve: tell the truth. Generously, honored with all the wit and insight that characterizes her fiction, Jenkins lets us in—showing us her childhood and coming of age, treating the scars of colorism as she interrogates the labyrinthine vaults of memory. This will be an almost impossible book to put down. Long after it has been read, the images and impressions remain with the reader, transforming him indelibly. From the sticky green of Upper Belmont Valley Road to the windy decks of ships crossing the Atlantic, every landscape in this story feels exquisitely yet intensely personal.
A scream in the shadows
by Mac Donald Dixon (Papilote Press, 200 pp., ISBN 9781838041533)
St. Lucian author Mac Donald Dixon’s third novel creates a dizzying concoction of justice and redemption in the crime fiction genre. Determined to clear his father’s name for the murder of his older sister Laurette, a young man discovers that the villagers and townspeople are far more likely to spread cryptic whispers than offer helpful solutions. Superstitions – steeped in the island’s patriarchal mores – fuel rumors of Laurette’s violent end, and our protagonist struggles to separate illusion from concrete evidence. A scream in the shadows assumes a moral responsibility to raze the systemic failures of police and judicial due process to the ground. That he does this without tendentious handwriting is to the credit of the author. The conflicts feel sharp in their gravity, the suffering palpable, the road to emotional closure a difficult journey.
Nice view
by Celeste Mohammed (Ig Publishing, 208 pp., ISBN 9781632462022)
Winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Celeste Mohammed’s win makes her the third woman from Trinidad & Tobago to claim the overall prize. The realities of the islands it presents are visionary, poignant in their intimations, brilliant in the intensity of their transmissions. This is a completely identifiable landscape – carved by corruptions big and small, prison escapes, colorful adulteries, repressed lesbian desires, winning carnival sessions. Possessing reasonable narrative control, Muhammad teases the threads of Nice view‘s stories intertwined in a deeply satisfying tangle. In a key scene, without words between a couple, one sees in the other’s eyes “love, shame, the truth he couldn’t tell.” It’s a fitting microcosm for the subterranean experiences lurking in the multitude of interactions between the many bitter lovers and sworn enemies we encounter in these pages. This is irresistible writing, rippling with ferocious certainty.
Cane, Maize and Gully
by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa (Out-Spoken Press, 100 p., ISBN 978-1739902124)
Every poem has at least one heartbeat. Nowhere is this more evident than in the stunning debut collection of British-born, Barbados-raised Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa. Cane, Maize and Gully uses Labanotation—an illustrative system that describes human movement—to invoke and converse with the Afro-diasporic movements of Black Barbadian women throughout history. Retrieving their stories from the edges of the archives, Kinshasa’s poems move fluidly—with formal play and experimentation, confronting the superstructures of racism and neocolonialism. The poet’s diction does not go with the expected rhythms; he revels in kinesis and generates startling meaning from bold lyricism and invention. Even the cane fields of Barbados in “I salted the mud with my palms, but more ah grew with me” offer their stirring resistance: And tell me no, if you keep sitting / and keep growing yuh mussie mean something.
