Also noted
Other new and recent books
Zong!, by M. NourbeSe Philip (Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 978-0-8195-6876-2, 240 pp), a harrowing book-length poem inspired by the murder by drowning of nearly one hundred and fifty enslaved Africans in 1781. The captain of the British slave ship Zong, faced with an outbreak of disease and malnutrition, chose to throw this “cargo” overboard so the ship’s owners could collect insurance. Philip’s poem, beginning with the records of the subsequent legal case, “mutilates” the text of the narrative, as she puts it in her afterword: “castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns.” Phrases, words, syllables trail across the pages like memories jettisoned into the ocean of history. Zong! both questions and defies the idea that there are events and experiences too immensely horrific for poetry to address.
Snapshots from Istanbul, by Jacqueline Bishop (Peepal Tree Press, ISBN 978-184-523-1149, 70 pp), both the story of a particular woman’s sojourn in the Turkish city and a meditation on the romance between art and exile, via Ovid and Gauguin (or “Gaugin”, as Bishop consistently spells his name). In the early years of the first millennium, the Roman poet writes letters from the shores of the Black Sea; two thousand years later, his Jamaican successor recalls a failed romance in Istanbul in admirably unsentimental verse: “We should put some distance between us. / Tonight you are going out with friends. // ‘Are their names Aisha, Fatima, Dara?’ / Yes, I know I am sarcastic.”
Guanahani, My Love, by Marion Bethel (House of Nehesi, ISBN 978-0-913441-96-1, 55 pp), a second edition of an influential collection of poems by the Bahamian writer, winner of a Casa de las Américas Prize in 1994. Kamau Brathwaite describes these poems as “entries into Caribbean magical realism.” “We are more water than land,” Bethel writes. Drawing on close observation of the landscape of the Bahamas, she offers private meditations on a place caught between the Caribbean and America, between the presences of history and the realities of now, “a prize / luxurious since the adventurers’ day.”
Absolute Equality: An Early Feminist Perspective/Influencias de las ideas modernas, by Luisa Capetillo, trans. Lara Walker (Arte Público Press, ISBN 978-1-55885-522-9, 360 pp), a new translation of a “genre-defying” book by a pioneering Puerto Rican feminist and political activist. Born in 1879 in Arecibo, home-schooled by her liberal parents, Capetillo was a labour activist, suffragist, and anarchist, and author of several volumes of essays. Influencias de las ideas modernas, published in 1916, collects several short plays exploring political themes together with essays, aphorisms, and letters. This volume reproduces the original Spanish edition with a new translation by Walker, whose introduction outlines its political and literary context. “‘Soy una equivocada’ or ‘I’m a woman out of place, a woman misunderstood’ seems to be something that Capetillo never stopped struggling with or negotiating, no matter where her artistic and activist migrations took her.”
Against the Grain: A 1950s Memoir, by E.A. Markham (Peepal Tree Press, ISBN 978-184-523-0302, 192 pp), a narrative of childhood, family, migration, memory, and homecoming by the late Montserratian writer, who died in 2008. (An excerpt from the then-unpublished book appeared in the May 2008 CRB.) Born in the village of Harris’ in 1939, “Archie” Markham moved to London with his family in 1956. The future, he recalls, seemed like “something unknown but not unappealing.” Inevitably, the reality included social dislocation, misunderstanding, racism — but also the birth and growth of a literary vocation. Markham’s memoir displays the distinctive wry wisdom and jaunty style that made him one of the crucial Caribbean writers of his generation.
Caribbean Visionary: A.R.F. Webber and the Making of the Guyanese Nation, by Selwyn R. Cudjoe (University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 978-1-60473-106-4, 278 pp), a biography of the Tobago-born Guyanese writer, editor, and politician (1880–1932), barely remembered today for his 1917 novel Those That Be in Bondage. Cudjoe, a Trinidadian scholar based at Wellesley College in the Unites States, is a passionate advocate for his subject; he describes Webber’s “intellectual production” as “the most sustained intellectual work by any West Indian during the period” from 1915 to the early 1930s. Cudjoe offers exhaustive close readings of Webber’s political activity and writings, arguing that Webber’s political career prefigured Marcus Garvey’s; his historical writings anticipated C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins; and his contributions to Caribbean nationhood have been shamefully overlooked. “No one knows why his voice was silenced,” Cudjoe writes, but he suggests that later generations of Guyanese politicians have found it expedient to ignore Webber and his achievements.
Trinidad’s Doctor’s Office: The Amusing Diary of a Scottish Physician in Trinidad in the 1920s, by Vincent Tothill (Paria Publishing, ISBN 978-976-8054-76-0, 208 pp), a reprint of a 1939 memoir giving a frank perspective on Trinidad between the First and Second World Wars. In 1922 Tothill accepted a post with an oil company in Trinidad simply to escape to a hotter climate. Trinidad did its best to surprise him, but Tothill was both unflappable and possessed of a wickedly dry sense of humour. His opening chapter, describing a typical morning at his practice in San Fernando, is a survey of every stratum of Trinidadian society told via a series of pitch-perfect comic vignettes. Tothill is a shrewd observer of ethnic and social differences and prejudices, and, true to his time, is not without a prejudice or two of his own. But his narrative is a largely broadminded and forward-thinking analysis of the then-colony forty years before Independence.
Reggaeton, ed. Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez (Duke University Press, ISBN 978-0-8223-4383-7, 392 pp), an anthology of essays and interviews exploring and defining the musical phenomenon with roots in numerous genres — reggae, bomba, salsa, hip-hop — and numerous locations across the circum-Caribbean — Panama, Jamaica, Puerto Rico. Reggaeton, sociologist Juan Flores writes in his foreword, is “an eminently popular form of music without any single specifiable place of origin . . . it seems to be a style brewed in a multilocal, transnational cauldron from the beginning.” He goes on to argue: “it’s almost like a kind of Latino revenge against the doggedly Anglophone nature and official narrative of early hip-hop . . . And it’s an in-your-face at the nervous gatekeepers of ‘Hispanic’ culture.” Nineteen contributors offer historical, ethnographic, political, linguistic, gender, visual, and aesthetic perspectives.
Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora in the Wider Caribbean, ed. Phillipe Zacaïr (University Press of Florida, ISBN 978-0-8130-3461-4, 207 pp), a collection of essays by nine scholars exploring the widespread prejudice faced by Haitian migrants in the rest of the Caribbean. “Understanding the complex expressions of anti-Haitianism from a comparative perspective is a matter of urgency not only for human rights advocates but also for social scientists,” Zacaïr writes. The volume ranges from “Medical Humanitarianism and Health as a Human Right on the Haitian-Dominican Border” to “Literary Confrontations between Haitians and Guadeloupeans”, and ends with interviews documenting the Haitian immigrant experience in French Guiana.
Havana Forever: A Pictorial and Cultural History of an Unforgettable City, by Kenneth Treister, Felipe J. Préstamo, and Raul B. Garcia (University Press of Florida, ISBN 978-0-8130-3396-9, 288 pp), a collection of photographs taken by Treister in 1997, documenting hundreds of buildings both great and humble, and the urban texture of the Cuban capital. Treister, an architect, first visited Havana in 1947. Fifty years later, he tried to capture with his camera the city’s famous crumbling grandeur. A decade and a half on, these photos are already a vision of the past. The accompanying text, co-written with architects Préstamo and Garcia, gives a comprehensive topographical and architectural history of Havana, and an afterword by Jaime Suchlicki imagines the city’s possible futures.
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