This month’s reading selections from the Caribbean, with reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan on Boysie Singh’s Lost Love Songs by Ingrid Persaud; Let Me Set You Free by Andie Davis; The Bad Seed by Gabriel Carle, translated by Heather Houde; and School of Guidance by Ishion Hutchinson
Boysie Singh Lost Love Songs
by Ingrid Persaud (Faber & Faber, 544 p., ISBN 9780571386499)
If a gangster is only as good as his fellow gunmen in his possession, what about the leading ladies who inhabit, inform and shape his inner life? It’s a probing and provocative question that Trinidad & Tobago-born Ingrid Persaud seeks to answer in her second novel, Boysie Singh Lost Love Songs. Taking the charismatic real-life career criminal who terrorized Trinidad from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, Persaud looks at four women whose fates were dangerously, dramatically intertwined with that of Boysie. Jealousy, scheming and quite a bit of bacchanal inform the shared dynamic between this lively quartet: Popo, Mana Lala, Doris, Rosie. They love it, they hate it, they hate to love it – in the author’s loud and lively use of Trinidadian English Creole, this story of obsession, rage and more than a handful of bullets climbs to its rampant conclusion.
Let me set you free
by Andy Davis (Small A, 268 p., ISBN 9781662515644)
What happens when home—the island refuge you run to after an identity crisis—becomes as fraught with complicated politics as the diaspora you’ve fled? In the debut novel by Montserrat-born Andie Davis, protagonist Saber Cumberbatch listens to Barbados, desperate for a capitalist art scene abroad in which she has found fame but little real recognition. Saber soon learns that Barbados is not an uncomplicated monolith, as the class inequalities she encounters spark an island-wide campaign for social justice. Spicy in tone, this novel earns immediate comparisons of the story to that of Mackenzie An ugly year and Mc Ivor’s God of good looks, while revealing the Barbadian sociocultural realities embedded in the very limestone of the land. Sabre’s flaws and shortcomings feel entirely human, and the reader will root for her as she works to find her true connections to a place as beautiful as it is difficult to simplify.
What a shame
by Gabriel Carle, translated by Heather Houde (The Feminist Press, 120 p., ISBN 9781558613201)
“I don’t care about a cure because I tested positive at 20 and I already know I’m not going to find love – the only cure I need, the only reason to go on living.” The non-heteronormative Puerto Rican youth that populates, with throbbing anxiety, Gabriel Carle’s short stories in What a shame are not interested in your reader approval. Othered and mistreated by those who claim to care for them, they wander, lie down, and enjoy themselves as much as possible in bathrooms, bathroom stalls, and mall parking lots. Translated from the Spanish, these are implosive fictions—their narrative punches against gentrification and queer hatred. In Devilwork, pornography intersects and collides with indescribable loneliness. The main character of “Helium” sees love rise and fall, swell and collapse, to the rhythms of Valentine’s Day celebrations in their fractured home lives.
School of Instruction
by Ishion Hutchinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 112 pp., ISBN 9780374610272)
Shortlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, this book-length poem guides its reader through a non-linear timeline in which a boy’s youth in rural Jamaica in the 1990s is woven through the experiences of the Regiment British West Indies in the First World War. A finalist for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize, School of Instruction increases the polyphonic density frequencies Hutchinson’s readers have come to expect and desire from his works. In the language of the defiant Godspeed, Jamaican youth swell seas of history and survival. In the trenches of the regiment, the clay acquires a million states of dispossession and banal cruelty. “Look for me in the whirlwind!” shouts Godspeed, running away from an oppressor. It commits itself to a multisensory survival in which every part of being endures—regardless of institutional provocations, regardless of the harms of colonial overlords.
