This month’s reading selections from the Caribbean, with commentary by Shivanee Ramlochan of Son of Grace by Vaneisa Baksh; A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias S Buckell; You were looking through the sand by Juliana Lamy; and Bath of Herbs by Emily Zobel Marshall
Son of Grace
by Vaneisa Baksh (Fairfield Books, 348 p., ISBN 9781915237309)
Sports stalwarts across the Caribbean know that our legends have long been forged on the cricket field. In her biography of Sir Frank Worrell, the former Jamaican senator and the first black cricketer to lead the West Indies for a permanent season, Vaneisa Baksh spares no praise but no nonsense about the statesman and sportsman. extraordinary born in Barbados. Baksh’s prose pays attention to Worrell’s connection between different gates and areas of life. A staunch denier of rank individualism, Worrell’s focus was often and strongly on regional unity through the old-timey game of gentlemen’s rounders. There could be no keener chronicler than Baksh to reveal and remind us of this, in a narrative that privileges Worrell’s voice, clinging to his vision and holding himself to his exacting standards. Son of Grace hits us for six, unsparing in presenting the technical portrait of a true icon.
A stranger in the castle
by Tobias S Buckell (Tachyon Publications, 256 p., ISBN 9781616963989)
What happens when librarians, armed with books, stand at the direct point of a cultural revolution? Caribbean-born, Grenada-raised Tobias S Buckell contemplates, in this new offering of speculative fiction, the insurgencies that stand at the crossroads of post-apocalyptic chaos and righteous justice through restorative acts of reading. The novel’s protagonist, the warrior Lilith of Ninetha, carries an unwavering streak of reassurance around the walled world. Lilith’s awakening is an explosion of shocks, explorations and dangers. Buckell describes them all with compulsive, driving energy, reminding us of the knowledge-based nature of these actions. After all, a world devoid of learning becomes brutality in itself. In this light, A stranger in the castle ripples of warnings we’d do well to heed and spells of protection that remind us of our inexhaustible capacity to learn.
You were looking through the sand
by Juliana Lamy (Red Hen Press, 176 p., ISBN 9781636281056)
Shortlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Fiction), Haitian Juliana Lamy’s debut collection of short stories crackles with an electric and irresistible urgency. In these fictions, characters navigate their queerness, their states of temporary displacement and internal brokenness, often shockingly in the maps they make and then tear apart, in relation to violence. One narrator, dealing with the rift of domestic abuse in her family, states: “My daughter is not made of loud, loud things that catch the light wrong. I can’t beat him any softer and I won’t try.” An irresistible promise follows the center and peripheral speakers You were looking through the sand: each, however small it may seem, is a ringing voice, disturbing the waters of complacency. These stories contain such an enviable danger at their core.
Herbal bath
by Emily Zobel Marshall (Peepal Tree Press, 72 p., ISBN 9781845235574)
Softness and grace, compressed by steely convictions, structure and pattern echo throughout the poems of Emily Zobel Marshall’s first collection. Of Martinican and British heritage, her identities are allowed vulnerability and persistence in the chorus of experiences that abound here: meditations on sensuality; basking in the unbridled natural splendor of Snowdonia in North Wales; the loss of a mother transforming the internal architecture of a daughter’s relationships. Herbal bath it is a manifesto for the abundantly living and the honored dead, affirming in its convictions about the great beauty, the untouched heart of the world around us. The unfolding of wisdom and the verve of boundless appreciation guide the poem’s registers, which move from the wide-eyed exploratory zeal of children at play to the fine-toothed passions and fears of a working mother. The enduring emotion that fuels these poems is a verdant and enduring wonder.
