The kindness of strangers

Brendan de Caires on The Sly Company of People Who Care, by Rahul Bhattacharya:

“The Sly Company of People Who Care is that very rare thing: a great local fiction written by an outsider . . . Unburdened by our history, Rahul Bhattacharya travels light and sees further, noticing nearly everything with a charmingly self-deprecating comic sympathy. If the young Vidia Naipaul hadn’t taken himself so seriously when Eric Williams dispatched him to write up the Caribbean, he might have produced a novel like this.”

Image above: Rahul Bhattacharya. Photograph courtesy the author

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Happy families

Bridget Brereton on The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies, by Matthew Parker:

“The Sugar Barons is old-fashioned in the sense that it deals with the settlement of the English colonies in the Caribbean, the wars and British military or naval campaigns, the misdeeds of the buccaneers and their fraternity, the politics of the white settlers, the building of fortunes by the sugar planters. All these are perfectly legitimate topics for historical enquiry, but none is likely to be chosen by most of today’s generation of Caribbean historians — perhaps to their and our loss.”

Image above: Codrington College, Barbados. Photograph by jcantroot, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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Cuba libre

David Iaconangelo on The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, by Todd F. Tietchen:

“These writers’ political concerns were inseparable from their aesthetic concerns. They seem to have had a clear sense that their duty as intellectuals in the United States was to the revolutionising of their culture’s dominant ethics, and the aesthetics which expressed them. And because they believed themselves to share certain aesthetic sensibilities with the Cuban Revolution, these writers felt comfortable getting fully behind it during those first few years, and to varying extents afterwards.”

Image above: cover of Album de la Revolución Cubana, a trading card album published in Havana in the early 1960s. Image by Jeremy Richardson, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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From the November 2011 issue

Freshly remembered

Daniel Whittall on Una Marson’s Selected Poems, edited by Alison Donnell:

“When remembered at all today, Una Marson is most often recalled as a leading figure in the development of the BBC’s Calling the West Indies radio programme, which went on to publicise the work of many prominent post-war Caribbean writers under the name of Caribbean Voices . . . Yet Marson was herself a writer and poet of not inconsiderable talent and diversity. Combined with her role in various campaigns for women’s rights and against racism, Marson’s writings mark her out as an essential voice in Caribbean history, a figure whose neglect can no longer be justified.”

Image above: Una Marson. Photograph courtesy Erika Waters

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Reggae trinity

F.S.J. Ledgister on I & I: The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer, by Colin Grant:

“One of Grant’s sources bellows at him, ‘If we can’t get the history right we can’t get the diagnosis right.’ Grant labours to get right both the lives of Marley, Tosh, and Bunny Wailer, and the context — that is, the history, politics, and sociology of Jamaica . . . I & I isn’t a definitive work, but it does point the way to what a definitive history of the Wailers, and what definitive biographies of its headliners, ought to be.”

Image above: in Trench Town, Kingston. Photograph by YardEdge, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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Zombie occupation

Andrea E. Shaw on Occupy Wall Street’s incursion of the “undead,” and the place of the Haitian supernatural in the American imagination:

“In a massive demonstration in Manhattan on 3 October, 2011, activists dressed as corporate zombies lumbered through the city, fake blood oozing down their chins against ashen faces, with mouths stuffed full of fake money
. . . These images, merging death and money, economics and the supernatural, are an intriguing appropriation of elements associated with a Caribbean spiritual practice as part of a trope for analysing US fiscal policies.”

Image above: Occupy Wall Street protester in zombie costume, 3 October, 2011. Photograph by Timothy Krause, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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Also in the November 2011 issue

Anu Lakhan on The Scent of the Past: Stories and Remembrances and On the Coast and Other Poems, by Wayne Brown ; Jane King on This Strange Land, by Shara McCallum; Ifeona Fulani on Lorna Goodison’s short fiction collection By Love Possessed; Dylan Kerrigan on Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonisation, by Anne Spry Rush; Kelly Baker Josephs on Conversations with Paule Marshall, ed. James C. Hall and Heather Hathaway; Jonathan Ali on Festival of Lights, a film directed by Shundell Prasad; and more.

See the full contents of the November 2011 issue here.

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From the September 2011 issue

Nicolette Bethel on Running the Dusk, by Christian Campbell; A Light Song of Light, by Kei Miller; and Far District, by Ishion Hutchinson; Vahni Capildeo on Christine Craig’s Poems: All Things Bright & Quadrille for Tigers; Lisa Allen-Agostini on The Loneliness of Angels, by Myriam J.A. Chancy; F.S.J. Ledgister on Cuban Fiestas, by Roberto González Echevarría; Brendan de Caires on Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom, by Anthony Bogues; Georgia Popplewell on Fire in Babylon, directed by Stevan Riley; poems by Andre Bagoo; and more.

See the full contents of the September 2011 issue here.

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The CRB’s new online archive includes the full contents of every issue since 2009, and selections from older editions. (You can still access the CRB’s entire back archive at our old website.) In the coming months, we will add the full contents of every past issue to the new archive and subject index.