This month’s reading selections from the Caribbean, with reviews of Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein; Adventures of a Black Edwardian Intellectual by Pamela Roberts; The Animated Universe by Samantha Thornhill; and Where Dogs with Tails Bark by Estelle-Sarah Bulle
Hungry ghosts
by Kevin Jared Hosein (Bloomsbury, 352 pp., ISBN 9781526644480)
In the brutal and unforgiving world of Kevin Jared Hosein’s second novel for adults, images of biological punishment abound. A disturbing metaphor for the violent twins compares them to carrion, feeding on the scraps of the overseers’ flesh. 1940s Trinidad jumps uncompromisingly from the pages of Hosein’s hammered prose; this is a tale of two origins with no easy victories and no peaceful deaths. The author, winner of the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, has taken narrative pains to present an emotional ecosystem that not only feeds on loss but thrives on grief. When the stalks of the cane fields rustle Hungry ghosts, the reader can feel the threat rippling in the air; The heart of this novel bleeds. The struggle for power and position between two Indo-Trinidadian families, the Changoors and the Saroops, reads magnificently like salty Chekhov in Caroni puncheon rum.
The Adventures of a Black Edwardian Intellectual
by Pamela Roberts (Signal Books, 316 pp., ISBN 9781838463069)
Born in Antigua in 1873, James Arthur Harley left those shores driven by the clarion call of that great social redeemer: education. A scholar at Howard, Harvard, Yale, and Oxford universities, an ambitious polymath, Harley’s accomplishments are all the more earned because they were earned during one of racism’s most productive eras. In this first full-length study of Harley’s life, her Antiguan biographer and friend Pamela Roberts builds a complex, illuminating architecture, never worshipful in its focus. Exploring the intersections of Harley’s mixed-race Caribbean with his intellectual prowess, Roberts notes the acute pressures facing black excellence in Jim Crow America and institutionally racist Oxford. About 80 years after the death of James Arthur Harley, this book it is the chronicle not only of an extraordinary life, but of a movement of undisputed black scholarship.
The animated universe
by Samantha Thornhill (Peepal Tree Press, 72 pp., ISBN 9781845235383)
Today I cast my prayers, double my spiral knots into Bantu knots / and tighten the laces on my Tims with wings preparing to lift them up. In prophetic urban odes, Samantha Thornhill’s first book of poetry gathers hurricanes, rebellions, and the heartbeats of strangers bound for home. Trinidadian Thornhill’s years of songwriting experience shine through in these spiritually uplifting offerings. Drawing from the deep wells of Black American and Caribbean heritage, The animated universe it is both cosmic and community-oriented in scope. Here the voices of departed ancestors are given as much ceremony as the concerns of the living. Elegies for comrades destined to be remembered are matched by a poem in the imagined voice of Kunta Kinte, addressing the imprisoned whale Shamu in sad solidarity. The poet’s gestures are comprehensive in every verse, redemptive and triumphant.
Where dogs with tails bark
by Estelle-Sarah Bulle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., ISBN 9780374289096)
Said by the superimposed tongues of the Ezechiel tribe, Where dogs with tails bark it is a prismatic commodity for the homeland of Guadeloupe and the small green village of Morne-Galant. Translated from the French by Julia Grawemeyer, the central figure of the novel is the island: the Ezechiels circle it like restless moths, with repulsive turns and relentlessly drawn by its daily mysteries. Bulle, of Guadalupe and Franco-Belgian descent, brings to mind narrative passages in all four narrators’ narratives in which to explore Creole. Each member of the family, from the brilliant matriarch Antoine to her Paris-born successor, “the niece,” struggles with the emotional implications of their mixed-race identity; the acts of relaxation and restoration of the novel go by fire. A contemplative tale of dynasty, this marks an eagerly welcomed addition to French Caribbean literature in translation.
