Fortunate travellers

F.S.J. Ledgister on Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge, by John Gimlette, and The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica, by Ian Thomson:

“The twenty-first–century travellers I’m examining here both look back to one nineteenth-century travel writer, Trollope. Fortunately, without Trollope’s racism . . . Both of them deal with history and violence, the two being intertwined in the inescapable fact of slavery. Both are concerned with the British presence in the region, Thomson with how Jamaica has become more American than British in the decades since independence, both in his eyes and in those of Jamaican returnees, and Gimlette with the many ways that Britain affected the three Guianas over the past four-plus centuries.”

Image above: at the Easter Rodeo, Lethem, Guyana, 2008. Photograph by Nicholas Laughlin, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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Good like cook food

Stephen Narain on Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose, and Essays, ed. Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Aza Weir-Soley:

“Academics have spent many pages tracing the unbridled homophobia in Guyanese legal codes and Jamaican dancehall lyrics to the emasculation of Caribbean men during slavery and indentureship. Yet Donna Aza Weir-Soley and Opal Palmer Adisa are keenly sensitive to the reality that, in the “changing-same terrain of human sexual expressivity,” these linear connections prove incomplete. In Caribbean Erotic the editors do not advance any particular agenda, nor do they limit themselves to any one style or aesthetic.”

Image above: from the Photobooth (2009) series, by Rodell Warner. Courtesy the artist

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From the ashes

Toni Pressley-Sanon on Haiti Noir, ed. Edwidge Danticat:

“The novelist Walter Mosley once wrote that science fiction may have special allure for African-Americans. After reading the stories in this collection, I would argue that the noir genre has special allure for Haitians. In a land where the living and the dead are in constant communication, where there is often the sense that Haiti is a world all its own, and where one never knows what the next minute will bring, let alone the next morning, the noir genre, infused with science fiction, or rather speculative fiction, is most appropriate.”

Image above: outside the cemetery in Pétionville, Haiti, 29 January, 2010. Photograph by Georgia Popplewell, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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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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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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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.