Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Photograph courtesy Papillote Press

The 2010 Nature Island Literary Festival, which opened in Dominica on Friday, closes this evening, and one of today’s events is a tribute to three of Dominica’s literary pioneers, featuring readings from the work of Jean Rhys, J.R. Ralph Casimir, and Phyllis Shand Allfrey. So today’s excursion into the CRB archive, all the way back to our August 2004 issue, is “O stay and hear”, a short story by Allfrey, published with an introduction by her biographer, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert.

“The name of Phyllis Shand Allfrey evokes contradictory images,” Paravisini-Gebert writes.

Born in 1908 into a family of white colonial officials in the colony of Dominica, she built a political career through an alliance with the labour unions and peasantry that threatened the interests of her own class and race. A promising writer whose first novel, The Orchid House (1953), opened bright prospects for a successful literary career in England, she renounced all expectations in order to return to the Caribbean in 1954 to found the Dominica Labour Party. A committed Fabian Socialist who worked indefatigably to uphold voting rights and safeguard the peasantry’s participation in Dominican politics, she found herself expelled from the party she had founded and excluded from island politics when the demands of black nationalism made it expedient. She found a place for herself in Dominican society, nonetheless, as a newspaper editor and spokesperson for the political opposition, roles that allowed her a lasting public life and through which she eked out a meagre living.

Towards the end of her life, Allfrey attempted to collect a number of her short stories, some published in various British journals in the 1940s and 50s, into a book, “but illness, poverty, and eventually death conspired against her efforts to claim her position as a pioneer among women writers in the Caribbean.” Nearly twenty years after her death, a selection of this short fiction was published by Papillote Press under the title It Falls Into Place.

Paravisini-Gebert comments:

Like her published and unpublished novels, these stories have a strong autobiographical foundation. Allfrey wrote best about what she knew well — that which she had experienced herself or come to know first hand — and her subjects follow the trajectory of her peripatetic career. Writing from a profound sense of her own West Indian identity, Allfrey centres her plots on the epiphanies that result from chance encounters between characters of different cultures, classes, outlooks, and — above all — races. As a writer, she was endlessly fascinated by the transformations brought about by juxtaposing perspectives that clashed — and occasionally crashed.

“O stay and hear” is an upstairs-downstairs story about the English wife of an estate owner in Dominica and her maid and cook, and the small secrets, evasions, curiosities, and revelations that characterise their relationship. The tone is whimsical and teasing, but not far off — as near as the forest that one imagines fringes Madame-là’s rose garden — lurk the shades of history that were Allfrey’s subject, those clashing and crashing perspectives.

They are walking in the flower garden, and what are they singing? Something rather merry and mocking; the veering breeze blows up a few words now and then to the ears of a lady behind green bathroom blinds. Now the lady raises a long pale arm and applies a little soap to it, at the same time peeping through the slats without raising from her cool bath water.

Samedi après-midi,
Madame-là tombait malade:
Voyez, cherchait l’Abbé . . .

Three editions of the Jamaica Times from 1905. Images from the Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida

Some weeks back, Antilles’ “In hand” series cast a glance at Belinda Edmondson’s Caribbean Middlebrow, which examines — as her subtitle has it — “leisure culture and the middle class” in the Caribbean, with a focus on Jamaica and Trinidad. This week the CRB publishes a full review by Brendan de Caires — as well as Vanessa Spence’s review of Pauline Melville’s novel Eating Air.

Caribbean Middlebrow covers a broad range of cultural phenomena, including “mid-nineteenth-century novels, fin-de-siècle newspapers, the gentrification of dialect poetry, the social politics of beauty pageants and jazz festivals, and transnational markets for popular fiction.” Edmondson has clearly put in some time in the archives, and readers who might like to follow her — investigating, say, how a nascent West Indian literary culture was charted in late-nineteeth- and early-twentieth-century newspapers — could do worse than browse the virtual stacks of the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or dLOC, a project of the University of Florida. This is a searchable library of digitised documents and publications — maps, photographs, books, journals, pamphlets, newspaper clippings and whole newspapers — all freely accessible to scholars, students, and ordinary readers. The Jamaica Times thumbnails above come from dLOC, where you can read entire editions of the paper from c. 1905. So does this film poster by the Cuban artist Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, designed for the 1975 Italian version of Zorro starring Alain Delon — which I’m reproducing here simply because I like it (three cheers for archives!):

Zorro poster (1976), by Eduardo Muñoz Bachs. Image from the Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida

Dustjacket of the first edition of Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun, from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library

Does the physical format of a book — its size, shape, weight, the design of its cover and pages, the texture and smell of the binding — influence the experience of its reader? Of course. You don’t have to be a hardcore bibliophile to enjoy an attractively (or even eccentrically) designed volume, or a literary historian to understand how the original format of a book’s publication could have affected its reception by critics and readers.

Dustjacket of the first edition of Geoffrey Drayton’s Christopher, from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library

The University of Illinois at Chicago’s library is home to the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, about a thousand books collected over a fifty-year period by the late Jamaican poet (known to his friends as “Dossie”). Most of these books are now-rare first editions. The UIC library has digitised about six hundred dust jackets from these volumes and made the images available online via a searchable database — an admirable resource for anyone interested in Caribbean literature. Your Antilles blogger has just spent a pleasing half-hour browsing the collection.

Dustjacket of the first edition of Derek Walcott’s The Gulf, from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library

View of St Lucia from the sea. Photograph by Mike Werner, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

While the CRB publishes new reviews and other material (almost) every week, we’re also slowly transferring the contents of all our back issues to our new online archive. (It’s going to take us a few months longer — we’re talking about several hundred reviews, essays, poems, stories, interviews, etc.) This is a rich resource for anyone interested in recent Caribbean literature and culture, and we’re quite proud of it. Starting today, Antilles will feature a regular Sunday series looking back at some of our favourite pieces from the CRB archive.

In our May 2005 issue we published two poems — “St Joseph at the Music School” and “A Turtle Like Zeus” — by the St Lucian poet Jane King. Both are meditations on mortality (human and reptile), delicately playing the whimsical against the wistful:

The wind sussurating the shak-shak trees
almost drowning the sounds of the sea
and the children performing for teachers
in the building behind me.
My small son suffers his lesson
silently . . .

You can read both poems here, and find more poems from the CRB archive via our subject index.